Market Yourself 10

Marriage 13

Friends 15

Enemies 15

The Internet 16

Goals 18

Communication 19

Romance 29

Impact 48

Arguing 86

Positioning 93

Social Media 102

Helping Others 105

Communication 107

This chapter is better called “Respect” if you’re used to being subordinate (as in giving respect to another), and better called “Influence” if you’re in a position of having more power than those around you (as in having influence). Basically the chapter is, for better or worse, named based on the situation you find yourself in. In order to be respected, other conscious actors need to be aware of you. However, you can be influential and anonymous, or even influential and hated and disdained. It’s a rather hard chapter to name universally.

The winners of the world aren’t known for going out there saying the same stuff over and over again to people and optimizing for their response, because these people shouldn’t be optimized for. These might not be the best people of the world. You’d much rather be in an environment where people are preselected to like you because they knew who you really were, were proud of what you really did, and wanted to be around you—not for your act, not what you wish you were, or what you convince people what you are, but what you actually are. The thing that took effort that didn’t have anything to do with them, and the more time you spend on yourself improving the world and improving your impact, the less time you spend on others. It’s the difference between product development and sales.

You could scam someone into buying nearly anything, and in the end, you’d be a scammer. Or, you could build the best product that anyone has ever seen and it would sell itself without you saying a single word. You could beg them not to buy it and they’ll beg to pay you double because you’ve built the best product that they could find. That’s a choice you have to make. Do you want the short-term success of actually hurting a product and perhaps the people that spent their hard earned money on it? Do you think going out, staying out late, and drinking alcohol while doing silly stuff and risking bar fights and all that, helps to develop your product? No. As a matter of fact, anyone who knows that your lifestyle is composed primarily of those things will look down upon you as someone that is less valuable, more risky, and a waste of time.

Popularity (friend count) for a proxy measurement of beauty until the machine learning can properly identify it. It could be difficult to detect if someone is soon to be single, more machine learning is needed perhaps.

Find beautiful people who don’t go out (search old yearbooks, where’d they go?).

There’s power in admitting you’re wrong, and it’s so rare these days that it’s very notable. Displaying weakness is rare unless you’re baiting.

It is a random function with lots of noise as to whether being nice works out better than being not nice. The Neanderthals and dodo birds didn’t seem to fare well. Hell, there’s all kinds of things which aren’t around anymore. Sometimes there can be only one survivor, and sometimes you can have lots, and because chance exists, you can’t really know which path is right with absolute certainty.

When taking photos for social media, do what the underwear ads and other ads do, if you can execute it well. Don’t look into the camera, have the right lighting, perhaps a good sunset, etc. Make sure you have a wide-open aperture. You could do it in the teenage style and throw some friends in who are having fun and smiling. Influence is only as good as the objectives of its use.

If you have a great body, dancing makes you hotter, and if you wear different or crazy clothes, it makes you cooler. If you are captain of the football team and great looking, and you stalk a girl with binoculars through her window, you’re cute. If you’re fat or ugly or both, any of these odd behaviors will amplify the degree that people dislike you. Imagine what a fat person looks like walking down the catwalk at a fashion show. Now imagine what the models looks like. How often do you see fat people on the cover of magazines not called, “Fat Persons Weekly”? Great fashion on bad bodies if prevalent enough will cease to be fashionable. That’s why clothing brands are sometimes paying certain people to stop wearing their clothes.

Popped collars and spiky hair provide for your body a texture that you would look individually at a material to find. So, popped collars and spiky hair and the three-dimensionality that comes from it look good at the scale of a human. Adding a little bit, of extra volume in different directions makes for a more definable image and sharper edges, things that are attractive.

On the smaller scale, that’s what you do to a material to make it more beautiful, you texture it.

Starch your collars to give a shape to your upper body, which can really get any other way if you’re human.

If a person’s hair smells bad and sweaty, imagine how the rest of them smells. Don’t be that person.

Black creates contrast and makes eyes whiter.

In order to impart emotion, you really have primarily your eyes, eyebrows, mouth, lips and the angle of your head. This is why eyebrow trimming can be so useful to your face. It’s always expressing your emotions on your behalf. You get the most bank per inch of hair trimmed here. For a small amount of time and discomfort, you can have a more open, appealing and emotional look. Maybe you’re lucky and you have a uni-brow across the top. You get super bang for the buck by making two eyebrows out of that thing. You’ll have to spring for a replacement for your caveman costume at Halloween though. For you gentlemen out there, if you remove too much hair, you’re going to first look too girly, then like the Mona Lisa.

The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows; however, she sure does have some dark shadows where those eyebrows would be if she had.

Funny, the pubic lice don’t have anywhere to live these days.

Don’t make jokes too good at your expense.

If you’re funny and creative and you make too much fun of yourself, the dumb-dumbs around you will just chant your once original joke over and over till you wish you didn’t make it.

People that don’t have prenuptial agreements, get divorces. And the reason is if you give someone a million dollar reward for thinking you’re not funny or cool to hang out with anymore. Scivive will tell you, for a million dollars it’s very easy for people to fall out of love with you, for a million dollars it’s very easy for people to think that you’re just not that cool anymore. You could be the funniest guy in the world. And if there’s a million-dollar payoff for not laughing at your jokes that million dollars are going to get paid. Don’t structure the underlying agreements and mutual beliefs in a way where the parties have a reason to have sex.

Marriage is a way to amplify enjoyment in life. Some marriages are wonderful, some are deadly. To be clear in one’s objectives is to hit the mark much easier. Many the married person would be better off finding a new person to enjoy marriage with, than fight desperately to not be in something new. Thus it’s not the staying in a situation that’s important, that’s but a means to an end. That being said, flexibility is nice, and if you have more paths to happiness and fewer paths to sorrow, you are likely to be happier. Don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff the saying goes.

What’s right for the future of the word is often is wrong for us individually, and what’s wrong for the future is right for us from a short term, mid term personal development. Do you care about money, and do you care about excellence in areas that are not producing kids? If you do, producing kids is going eat up a lot of your time, and yes, it’s going to give you fulfillment that you couldn’t otherwise get, and yes, mid to long term it’s going to pay off great (hopefully), but it is still a trade.

Girls are born with all the eggs they’ll ever drop. Men make sperm all the time. Thus it’s likely that changing your lifestyle has a larger effect on the man’s half of the DNA donated to the baby than the woman’s. At best Mom could choose to drop a different egg, assuming some accurate inventory was kept as to which eggs were where. So likely if you think the status of your own body in fitness affects the DNA you give your kids, it’s probably more important for the man than the woman to have the status they think will positively influence the baby. Now, after the kid is already growing, it’s all mom; dad’s pretty much out of the game except for making sure mom has good nutrition, rest, and mindset. Good luck with that...dads!

Getting a DNA test on your kid is like making sure your data doesn’t have bit rot, you’re literally checking the data in the kid to make sure it matches your own and what you think it should. So a DNA test for kids are actually a raid data check for your genes. If you want to know if your photos aren’t corrupted, you verify them. If you want to make sure your genes will go on into the future, you have to check your kid.

The art of winning friends and influencing people is only as good as your influencing is positive instead of evil. Maybe you’re an asshole? Then maybe the world would prefer you not be good an influencing others. Good societies prefer that evil people remain powerless.

You’re better off re-borrowing money owed to you, than getting it paid back, because they think they can borrow some more, cause now you owe them, because you borrowed back money they took from you in the first place.

Clarity.fm, who do you think is going to give you better advice, your buddy Warren from down the street or someone with good reviews on clarity.fm that charges 15 dollars a minute? That’s 900 dollars an hour. Well, unless all the reviews are fake, it’s very likely the clarity.fm person; unless of course your neighbor is Warren Buffett.

Half the people you think you are friends with might not actually be your friends, and in reality, you may be overlooking the obvious signs.

Is a person who they really say they are? Check their old, real, printed yearbook (that you got from someone they couldn’t get to give you a doctored one).

Replace trust with verification. Since verification is cheap, make people prove stuff. You want to take significance with stories, and verify the significance check you’ve written with evidence that is randomly requested and generated. This is why timestamps work; because editing video and graphics takes too long to do well to make it happen in a short amount of time. You must avoid pre-playing attack; if they guess what you want then your request isn’t actually urgent at all. It can be rainbow tabled and pre-computed.

 Is it better to trick myself that I’m doing great things, when really I’m sitting uselessly on my ass leeching the resources and productivity out of the other people in the world that actually keep me safe, and develop the music and literature I might enjoy? And fix my teeth when they’re rotting out of my head, only to give little to nothing back in return? Perhaps except for the warning I leave that live truly can be wasted. And this is one way to do it, enhance the likelihood that you do it until the day you die. Because you’ve found a way to like sucking.

Utilize magnetism or gravity if you don’t want to lose small parts while working on something. If you’re building a computer case and you don’t want to lose your screws into it, use magnetic tools and ferrous screws, or turn it all upside down. Then, when something falls off, it falls out instead of in. Just watch your eyes and don’t get crushed.

Is it a trap? Has your enemy predicted your response? Scivivors may suggest that the likelihood that a person is using advanced tactics against you gets exponentially less with every iteration. Some made up numbers to explore the idea: 50 percent chance they’re tricking you. 12.5 percent chance they’re guessing you’ve detected the trick and will screw you on your response. 6.25 percent chance they’re guessing you’ll know they’re deceiving you on response, and are going to counter your counter to their counter to the original trickery. So basically you just run a counter. Every time you run a “He knows I know” loop, the counter goes one higher, and the likelihood that it’s actually occurring is less and less.

Look at it like this, in the universe of all things happening, what portion of that set is people just trying to scam or deceive people? Let’s call it 10 percent for fun. Now of that 10 percent, what portion of those scammers are actually relying on a successful program to counter those who won’t be easily deceived for them to win? (A second-tier tactic, like blowing up the paramedics and firemen that show up after a bombing)? Well, the answer is quite few, because most fools fall for the original scam just fine. Thus, maybe 10 percent of the 10 percent of the world running scams is waiting for your response. Thus only 1 percent of scammers are relying on your successful counter to their trap, to counter your counter.

Scammers have a thing they call reloading, where you call everyone that has been taken by a scam, and tell them you’re going to help them get their money back. In reality, you’re just going to scrape whatever morsels of meat might be left on their bones, and you know you’re likely to get them a second time because they’ve already proven themselves fools for falling for the first scam.

What kind of photo did they include of the person they’re speaking about? If they chose a terrible, or angry photo, when more neutral photos were available, you will know tons of the article before you even read it. The images used to show a person can be more influencing than the words.

Do you know that person that can put out a video or be on television and doesn’t get trash talked and insulted in comments? Not likely. Everyone gets trash talked and insulted, and I do mean everyone, even mister Rogers. Therefore, don’t worry so much about being insulted, it’s unavoidable.

Influence, rhetoric, relationships, interacting with others, giving and taking direction, getting compliance, being a leader, finding and being worthy of passionate love.

One may watch their loved ones stop breathing over and over again while snoring, without knowing it is hurting their health. Ignorance of this can cost someone years of life. How many health problems do you or your loved ones have that no one has ever noticed? Ever have a girlfriend that had interstitial cystitis, and every doctor had her taking cranberry juice and making it worse? Doctors are human, you are human, if you’ve got anything other than totally perfect health, Google it. Just don’t be a hypochondriac.

Taking advice from a risky person is like taking risky advice from a knife juggler. Yeah, they might be able to give you good advice, or maybe they’re already doing some bad decisions with their knife juggling in the first place.

Avoid one-to-one conversations; speak at scale, pay for the scale, whatever it takes. Big words are signaling mechanism, to indicate that you might be smart or you might like big words too much. Maybe you’re overreaching if it’s so important to you that you use twenty-dollar words.

Effective communication: Over-complicating things to look smart is the opposite of smart. Use the cheaper word. It’s hard enough to get people do anything in this world, especially if one has to Google what you have said.

Saying “thank you” and not saying “please” is a better, more effective, more efficient way to interact with people. If your friends and people you interact with and people that you might be asking to, or telling to, do things are so concerned that they might get fucked out of gratitude upon completing their task they need to preemptively, contractually look at you funny and make sure that you say “please” beforehand – they’re petty and you don’t have real trust and you don’t care about timing or effectiveness.

The artful implementation of vulnerability where you’re not going to get the stuffing cock block out of you, probably generates some power that can’t be had any other way.

If you don’t speak the language that you must speak in order to understand a text, if authors and speakers are using words that you can’t define and don’t know what they specifically mean in this esoteric branch of understanding a science, you’re not going to get anywhere. You have to stop at every sentence and go look up the meaning of the word and hope to memorize it before you go on. You don’t get two more words until you’re hit with another word that you have no idea what it means. The very specific meaning is the difference between understanding it or having a chance to and completely getting it wrong and keeping it wrong because you don’t have someone else there to show you how you got it wrong.

The point is, the same things that make a movie or story interesting, the same things that make you click a link, the same things that make a picture that you have the picture that you saved instead of all the other pictures that you’ve seen, if you’re not speaking in those terms which human beings are interested by, then nearly tautologically whatever you’re doing is uninteresting. Unless you got lucky to have become interesting by accident through achieving a result you didn’t set out to achieve, you really should be speaking the language, the emotional, motivational, moving, addictive, and worthy of telling your friends about language that human beings care about. Not that they should, not that they will, but that they do care about. Whenever you read, touch or interact with something that Scivive discusses, please make sure that you’re speaking the language that people care to notice, care to spread and care to speak and are moved by. Not the clinical, logical, cerebral, alien textbook style stuff that people have selected against every single time they’ve had the ability to.

If you want to say great things, you need to read and hear great things. If you want to transmit wonderfully, you must absorb wonderfully. The language and literature and the music you absorb will color you and literally be the content you process and retransmit into the world. If you desire happiness, observe joyous things. If you want to excel at powerful communication, absorb powerful communication.

Powerful and effective speakers rarely end their sentences with upward intonation. Why would they? He-he. See what was done there? The text used a couple questions and upward intonation to make a nice refrain from the chorus of commands.

Downwards intonation is how people know you mean business. How you say things, often with tone, is more important than what you say. Say it like you mean it. Your subconscious is listening to you when you speak as well, and if it hears you speak something forcefully enough, often enough, your very identity itself will tend to merge with the speech.

“Work” should be retitled to “production,” or another results word instead of the work word. Effort isn’t what you should be focused on, this isn’t the gym, we’re not trying to stress our system; we’re trying to effect the world, and if it comes effortlessly, then ten times better.

“Virality” is the adjective Scivive will use for the ability of an idea or context to be spread massively and rapidly. An analysis of images and videos with virality shows they have things in common.

We’re built to deal with other thinking creatures, thus we’re likely to see thinking actors in all things. Why not harness that common mental misconception of programming for something good?

Don’t use the same word twice in the same sentence, or in near proximity unless there’s a really compelling reason to do so.

Alliteration is the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.

Rhyming is the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the end of adjacent or closely connected words.

We like when two words right after each other have the same sound. Some people get mislead when they’re creating these because how you describe something is usually more important than what it is. Much of the great idea has been lost, because it was never described properly. What seems like falling on deaf ears is often just a poorly delivered story. If you already have a wonderful idea, and you can state it in a way that people understand it, then the only things you can do to improve that idea are the artistry and feeling of the idea. If the facts are all wonderful, then you should find the right words, packaging, analogies, similes, to make it compelling. Which of these two true statements do you like more?

A. Eating fruit is better for your health than eating candy.

B. An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

Because of the rhyme, one of these is a famous and memorable saying. The other… not so much.

• Great reading makes for great writing.

• Read the greats to write like the greats.

• Don’t use complicated language.

Most people understand what a million is; it’s a lot. However, they do not understand properly what a billion is. They don’t really understand that it’s 1,000 million. A billionaire is a millionaire x 1,000. So Scivive is going to use the term 1,000 million instead of billion because it has superior emotional effect.

Memes, as you know them on the internet at least, are funny, interesting, addictive ways to see the world. Meme power is a thing, and certain groups of people try to make good memes to spread ideas that aren’t so popular. For instance, primarily racist, bigoted, or misogynistic, ideas that are detrimental to the world can still gain popularity this way. 4chan/pol uses “meme magic” to try and get their ultraconservative ideas more traction, and it works. The memes can be hilarious, and thus become viral.

Agism: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-do-you-do-fellow-kids

Turn everything you generate that’s a graph or text into an infographic. This can be found for low prices and with fast turnaround time on fiver. Perhaps there’s an open source and free way to do it as well, but for five bucks, why would you bother looking for it?

The sooner you can identify which arguments are which, the sooner you can throw the useless ones away, or educate the proponents that they spent time supporting X, and would serve themselves and the world better supporting Y instead. Not all of the conversational vectors have the same benefits or payoffs.

Changing how people feel about a thing doesn’t help them address the underlying cause. For example, if you say to a group of people, “Someone stole my wallet.” The replies you receive could include, “You should’ve had a chain on it, you shouldn’t have carried it, you should have known about that neighborhood, stuff happens.” These are all not helpful. But then one actually useful person says, “Oh yeah I saw that happen, I know that guy, he got arrested right after that, you should go check at the police station; they probably have it.” All the other commenters were pretty much useless dickheads compared to that last guy.

Something bad happened

Exception finder

You should have known

You shouldn’t be upset

You deserved it

You could have done xyz

This happens all the time

Why didn’t you do xyz

This is why we must do Q thing

This is starting to look like R site

Did you even read the article

Watch your tone

Puns

Remember xyz

Topic related to username post

Paywall

Discussion about ethics of paywall, plight of publishers

Mis-quote original article

This isn’t the right place for this post

Someone is getting called Hitler

Saving face.

Say “and” instead of “but,” even if it feels weird. It will feel better to them, and they’ll understand what your meaning without the distrust of all words following “but.”

Feel how these sound:

“Breakfast was great, but the toast was burnt.”

Or,

“Breakfast was great, and the toast was burnt.”

Most people get upset a bit the moment they hear the word “but” because over a lifetime of conversations, we’ve been trained that everything after the word “but” is no fun to hear.

You could play with the converse and ruin good compliments by inserting “but” in them instead of “and.” Just to see how powerful the words are.

“You looked great tonight and I liked your perfume.” Or,

“You looked great tonight but I liked your perfume.”

Do: Remove personality. Replace “why” with “for what reasons” and don’t use the word “I.”

No one wants to be thought a fool, thus people are often slow to admit wrong doing or thought. The less social cost and more social profit you can attach to what you’re trying to sell, the easier a pill it will be for people to swallow. This is why it’s great to remove identity from the issue, because then people don’t have to save face.

If you give someone the option to hide their true belief and appear smart, or be truthful and appear stupid, it’s often more profitable for them to appear smart. Many the job and lover has been lost over speaking the truth. Thus the truth is often less profitable than the lie, and this is the profit you are working against, or to replace, as a truth spreader.

The more the person needs an intervention, the less likely the intervention is to work.

It’s hard to reason people out of ideas they didn’t reason themselves into. The more logical your idea, the easier it is for logic to sway you back to straight. It’s like triage on the battlefield—it’s much easier to repair people who are less damaged. The exceptions are beliefs that people have, that they never really thought much about.

IWBH is Scivive’s acronym for “It will be hard,” and it’s the summary of all the bullshit people waste your time with after you give them a good idea.

WAT means “What about this?” — endless distraction.

Know it alls. Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

Put the blinders on them.

When you say something, you set the frame. All the smart trolling repliers accept the frame and dive right in, excluding all the better, greater ideas they could have been talking about. They think they’re smart, but they’re not, they went for the bait.

In order to execute better marketing, or better understand the world, analyze each comment in a forum thread or Reddit thread, and write the essence and the motive of each comment down next to the post. Then you will have a rough idea or menu of the stuff you will see and need to deal with anytime a similar topic shows up again.

Keep in mind that you usually get some Tithonous errors, and aesthetics keep the world what they considered pretty comments, this one had an unusually amount of “Life sucks I want to die” comments. It’s funny how obvious everything becomes when you give things a name. This is like all the crap that people talk when you come up with a good idea and they just tell you how hard it is, and why it won’t work, etc. Yeah, people know it’s hard, you don’t have to explain it. Surprisingly to some, many of the things that people are told to do that are hard, when they’re done, and they often are, turned out to not be too difficult after all.

Word breakers, these people mess up the meaning of words instead of choosing better words.

Coined by software developer Layne Thomas, Layne's law of debate states that:

A) Every debate is over the definition of a word.

B) Every debate eventually degenerates into debating the definition of a word, or

C) Once a debate degenerates into debating the definition of a word, the debate is debatably over. A notable example of this law may include the arguments over the definition of “assault weapon” in the gun control debate.

Rhetorical tactics

Heads I win, tails you lose.

Truth finding.

Beat the truth out of people, tactically speaking.

If you want people to actually tell you the bad news, you need to presuppose there is some, or they’ll just avoid it; e.g., “So what is wrong with the plane today, Captain?” Or more specifically, “Name three things wrong with the plane today.” This is like asking for the first four digits a of a credit card number, instead of the entire thing at once. Small hoop. Small hoop, big hoop.

Going out to eat—the 5-2-1 restaurant game.

If you and a friend are trying to decide where to go to dinner, there is a fun way to assist in the decision making process. You name five restaurants, they pick two, and you choose between them. (5-2-1 game) You can move the numbers around a bit; the key idea is that you trade choosing back and forth from a set.

Divide a cake. One person cuts, one person chooses.

Two partners write down in secret what they would pay to buy the other one out. Whichever one picks the higher number gets to keep the business.

You can’t always punish bad behavior; you have to randomly make things good. Intermittent reward is more addictive and interesting than being steadfast in your ways. You have to prime the pump of good behavior.

Any time someone attempts to screw you over, or anytime a company uses advanced sales tactics, it means they’re more likely to deceive you somewhere else. If they don’t care about you in the small things, it’s unlikely they will care about you in the big things. Just like attempted murder, you must punish or penalize people for attempted deceit.

For the same reason that we get frustrated so easily, because the solution is much more likely to be just trying something else instead of doing the same thing for harder and longer, the environment that we live in has never been more suited by replacing instead of fixing people. When you have a problem or a bunch of problems with someone, you can try and fix them, and what you will discover is that people rarely, if ever, change for the better, yet quite commonly change for the worse. Now this might just be because you don’t care to value all of the things that they have to change for the better, and it’s a form of confirmation bias, however in this case that bias would be considered having high standards for what you should give a stuff about in another person’s behavior. An employer doesn’t care if you stopped killing innocent animals in a video game to be a nicer guy, while you are double clocking out for lunch and double clocking back in, so that you are actually getting paid to eat lunch while everyone else you work with is not. That’s why there is a clock on the wall there, so you only get paid for the hours you actually work.

Thus, because of social media, the internet, and job hunting sites, etc., it’s never been easier to find someone good and amazing to work with, that you had no idea such a person even existed. Just like relationships. Back in the old days, everyone would get married to someone that lived less than 15 minutes from where they grew up, because the world was literally a quite smaller place back then. Nowadays, we have so much exposure to the entire rest of the planet that you would think everyone in the world had 6-pack abs, because that’s all you see on magazines and Instagram.

The key to firing instead of fixing workers is that you must have a constant lead flow, or ability to replace in a timely manner. The fewer options you have, the stuffier your life will be, because when people know you have no or few options, they treat you worse. When you fire over fix as policy, the people you interact with will treat you better than they would if you didn’t. It gives them a real tangible profit to treating you well that unconditional lovers can’t offer. Unconditional love makes people feel like they’re not getting paid for their work. People hate not getting paid for their work.

Internet trolls (thought vandals). Verbal bullies.

Significance driven people who are happy to create pain. Usually those who wish to harm others are executing a strategy with the subconscious motive that they wish to be treated better, whether they deserve it or not. It’s like mental extortion. If they don’t get treated the way they want, they’ll hurt you. “That’s a real nice mood you have there, it would be a shame if something were to... happen to it.... Right?”

[XYZ country you’re in] girls know how to treat their boyfriends right; they never break up. “How long have you been with your boyfriend?” This gives them a compliment if they admit they have a boyfriend. You want to presuppose the worst case and give them a benefit for admitting it. They’re smart. They know that the second someone detects that they’re not in the market for some afterhours loving, the conversation is over. When the only thing you have to offer is your body, and it’s not on offer, people get out of there real quick. So they avoid letting you know that your only use to them is to entertain them while they burn some time before they go home to lay with their boyfriend. Get your tap dance shoes on!

Are you looking for?

• New relationships.

• Better sex.

• Lots and lots of sex.

Lonely? Be amazing and see how long you can stay lonely.

On a long enough time scale, nothing escapes the odds. If you’re a giant loser, make it a mission to see how worthy you can become, without still getting a woman, and you’ll find the world isn’t stupid, and if you’re attractive, people will be attracted to you. This goes almost without saying, but some people are so far demoralized that they can’t see the obvious truth of it.

There is no giant conscious 3rd person eyeballing your relationships to make sure they meet their needs for what they want to see happen in the world, and thus fulfill the “destiny” they have created for you. In fact, there’s not a single entity out there trying to achieve to some state of the universe that has you with a single other person. In fact your destiny is created by two people, you and your lover. You both create each other’s destiny through will and practice, and there need not be any third voyeur whose objectives are more important than your own.

Your vision of the future and your ability to create it with the people you love is the highest and best destiny this world will know.

If you analyze the lives of successful pickup artists, you won’t find a whole lot of happiness. The problem with getting addicted to a time consuming game, where 90 percent of the time you’re not having fun, or at least complaining quite a bit, is that you create a hole in your life, where no matter how may lovers you get, it’s never enough.

In the hunt to be with others, you may never feel more alone. When you put yourself out there, and expose yourself to the world, you’re going to suffer many insults. That is the barrier to entry that will allow you to do what others only dream of. If everyone else had the balls that you do to say hello to people you find interesting, and improve yourself relentlessly, then there would be little profit in it, for everyone was doing it. You would need to do all those things just to break even. Lucky for you, you live in a world full of people living below their potential. Lucky for this book too, for if everyone was already perfect, there would be little need for a book of excellence.

IOI: Indicators of interest

EC: Eye contact

BFF: Big fat friend

Set: Group of people

In set: gaming in a group of people

Bounce: go to next club

Eject: leave the set

Neg: calibrated indicator of non-interest

Alpha: Leader of the pack

Spin Plates: Have a few girls you are romantically involved with at once.

Cougar: 30+ year old woman who is sexually active / predatory

Mixed set: group with guys and girls in it

AMOG: Alpha male other guy

Bitch shield: Acting unsocial by default

One-itis: Being overly concerned with a single romantic interest

3-second rule: If you see something you want to open, go now and do it.

Hired guns: waitresses, promoters, strippers, models.

LMR: Last minute resistance. You’re in bed naked, but she doesn’t want to play. Hide the salami.

AA: approach anxiety

Blow out: fail out of set with low value

Stall out: run out of material

Genpop: general population, not the VIP area

Humble brag: Displaying value without looking like that is your intent.

If you are out with a wing, you’re going to be calling out positions quite a bit, so you should have a communication strategy, like “Check your 6,” = “Look behind you.”

Stop eye-balling everyone

They can’t look at you when you’re staring at them. They can’t absorb your style and become attracted, when they’re too scared to look, because if they even come close to looking your direction, you’ll lock eyes with them and make them feel weird.

You’re supposed to be the path to value, not the path to suffering. No health problems, weird issues, no problems of any kind should be discussed, unless you’re humble bragging.

We’ve evolved to be private, so that people see the best sides of us. No one posts their worse selfies, for everyone’s idea of who you are, is actually only what they’ve seen of you. Thus, control their image of you, and you change who you are to them in their reality. Their reality is the most important thing they know.

Fakeness and privacy don’t seem that important to anyone until they are stripped of them. Imagine a world where hiding your body is illegal. Imagine a world where there can be no private conversations. No more makeup, no more clothing, and all phone logs, emails, and mail are to be made public and tied to your identity. Ok, so now what does the world look like? Girls all of the sudden look quite odd. Less red in the cheeks, more little red dots. Makeup, fashion and social media are like professional wrestling on television, they’re fun to watch, and not real.

Some of the principles here aren’t applicable outside cold approach. If you’re in a big group that went to the VIP together and you’re already interested in one of the girls with you there, then you are already warm, you’re not doing cold approach.

What does great look like?

Drama queens might not be able to find significance by being prettier or smarter, but they can hurt your feelings, and through being able to cause you that pain, become quite important to you, and themselves. For only they could be begged to stop hurting you right?

The crazier the hair and face piercings, the crazier drama you’re likely to get. If you’re willing to do more adventurous things to your body, you’re probably more likely to do more adventurous things with your behavior. What could be more adventurous than taking a bunch of dangerous pills and calling your boyfriend to tell them about it, or hurt themselves and tell people their boyfriend did it, or even perhaps poison you or otherwise exact revenge over something prematurely?

Can you still find your fair share of drama from normal looking people? Yep, you’re just playing the odds. If you like kinky sex, weirder piercings tattoos and hair also increase the chances they’re down for that too. Adventurous people rarely restrict the boundary breaking to a single domain.

If you’re the only white guy at a black club, and you happen to meet a few of the only white girls at the black club, you’re likely to discover they’re there because they prefer dating black people, which is why they’re at the black club. The same goes for most other heavily minority clubs. People go where the music and crowd is what they like, and if you’re not similar to the people in that crowd, you’re likely to be shunned. If you’re the guy wearing a 3 piece suit at a nude beach, it’s likely to be frowned upon. Respect people’s preferences and put the odds in your favor.

Reduce your transition time. Moving sets don’t work well and if you’re in the streets moving sets are all that’s there.

When you are attractive, people want to say yes to you before they even know what the question is.

If you look at what you’re talking about, instead of the listener’s face, it lends authenticity to your comment being genuine, and not just an excuse to talk to her. If you don’t face her like your dinner, then she might think you’re making a funny passing comment, and not trying to hook up with her. Guys that try to hook up with her are lower value than the guys that she can only admire from a distance, because they don’t care about her.

When you give away your liking of someone without effort, you rob them the opportunity of earning it and being proud of the achievement.

If you’re interesting and fun, who wouldn’t want to talk with you? Thus, once your game is on point, you need to make sure that the people who you are gracing with your presence are worthy. Worthy could be defined as Brain, Money, Pussy, Giggles. What else matters? The brain and money is only as useful as it leads to the Pussy and Giggles. You could even call the pussy a subset of giggles. Here’s how you separate the worthwhile from the time wasters.

It’s very difficult if not impossible to unburn toast. It may be equally difficult to reliably defeat the heavyset overprotective friend or the “Mother Hen.”

Do not pull your phone out in order to look cool or appear busier than you are, it never works. Showing someone cool photos that have nothing to do with you doesn’t work either. Sharing funny YouTube videos with people while you’re in the club is not the way to be attractive. Leave the phone in your pocket, and just be yourself.

One hard thing, two easy things. This is similar to 2 steps forward, one step back. It’s why prices end in 9’s. They’re harder to add up and see how far you’ve come.

Don’t ask for compliance you’re not going to get, or you’ll get a “State break.” If you get a compliance failure, it’s bad, really bad. Once people are used to saying no, you’re screwed. Positive momentum relies on getting no rejections.

Avoid hunting in the VIP section in case the VIP area is actually strict about entry. Girls don’t buy bottles or have tables at the VIP, it is only the guys. Since the only girls in the VIP were invited there by other guys, you’re much better off working in general population because you’re more likely to find a girl or two that isn’t already locked into set with an army of bros willing to waste money and attention on them.

While in the club, girls in the loudest area in the middle of the dance floor don’t want to chat. Girls at the end of the bar looking down it long ways are usually interested in the staff, and won’t burn that dream to hook up with anyone that’s not staff there.

Dancing amplifies your body. If you are dancing and your body is in bad shape, now you look worse. If your body is good, and you dance well, now you look better. Most people that have problems with girls don’t have good bodies. Off the dance floor game is a safer bet than on the dance floor, as far as opening goes.

You’re going to have things stolen. Sometimes on accident, sometimes on purpose. Glasses are going to break, people are going to bleed on your furniture, and random underwear will appear in places they obviously don’t belong.

Depending on how much you drank, the person you’re with might look quite different from what you remember. The light of morning can make someone look very different from the lights in the club, especially now that you’re semi-sober.

If you like saving money on your taxes, maybe getting married is an option for you. Get a prenuptial agreement. Good paper makes good friends. If someone has a million-dollar reason to not think you’re funny anymore, you’ll discover that you get a lot less laughs. Aligning incentives works great. If you want to blow up your marriage, just keep stacking rewards for it to end. If you want your marriage to last, then stack rewards that make lasting profitable.

Do you like wasting your time? Then definitely think phone numbers are useful. The only thing that is useful is attraction and thus compliance. If you don’t have compliance, your phone call will be unanswered. If she’s not attracted, and answers anyway, you’re just going to be wasting your time.

Stop. It does not work. It has never worked. You are raising the woman’s shields and ruining the peacefulness of public places everywhere. When the inevitable happens, and whatever you hollered doesn’t have any positive effect, do you yell out something like “BIIIIITCH” or “LESBIANS”? Go home, beat yourself with a stick for a while, and never do that again. What if every store you visited yelled some expletive insult at you when you left without buying something?

If you neg too hard, they don’t care to buy value back from you with good behavior. Negs are only as useful as they change your targets’ behavior. The neg strength needs to match the target.

If you know a girl that is learning Spanish, and likes to vacation in Spain, she probably loves Spanish men. If you know a Dutch girl, and she loves vacationing in Curacao, she probably prefers black lovers. Girls aren’t stupid, they like boys and prefer to be around the ones they find more attractive rather than less.

If you froze time, took all the girls in the club, lined them up in a row in front of you, and then started separating them out by their objectives with sex as your filter, here’s what you might see:

Out of 100 girls, let’s just take the 90 ugly ones, make a giant clothed human centipede with them for giggles for when they wake.

Now you’ve got 10 girls left. Let’s look at their motives first.

Let’s remove the ones who have boyfriends. Ok, now you’ve got four left. Now let’s remove the ones on their period, girls spend about 25 percent of their life on their periods, so now you’ve got 3 girls left. Now with the three girls that are left, you get to see which one isn’t locked into set with 7 friends that are like crabs and grab her arm as soon as you try to take her to the bar.

Then you’ve got the other dudes that have solid game already working to do the same thing you are, assuming she didn’t already get to the club with them. Then there’s the ones locked into the middle of the dance floor, all facing each other. It is not recommended that you try and dance in the middle of a group of strangers for an unknown amount of time, at some point you’ll be told to leave the area, non-verbally.

Or you could wait by the ladies room, or at the bar, etc., basically the game is hard, and out of 100 girls, you might not get a single actually down to lay with you.

We didn’t even actually filter out all the other bullshit, such as doesn’t like whatever color you are, has too many face tattoos and piercings, or actually wants to spend time with a friend from out of town, etc. Now you begin to see how hard the numbers game is, so if 100 girls won’t do the trick, and the bar only seats 50, I guess you’re going to have to go to lots and lots of clubs.

You ever notice no pretty girl goes to a bar or club alone? If by chance you do run into it, you are so lucky! Easiest fun you will ever have! They’re perhaps less than 1 out of 20 of the girls you’ll hook up with. If you prefer cougars, you might have a higher ratio.

The heavyset, overprotective friend, unless turned, is definitely your enemy.

The arm yanking person whose only mission is to make sure your conversation ends, is your enemy.

The dumb guys yelling dumb stuff at girls, raising their shields are usually the enemy as well.

There are really only a couple useful people in the club. Your wingmen, the staff that likes you, your target, and girls who find you interesting, and are down to do more than waste your time. You only have a few hours to get the job done. You don’t have time to go milling about.

Many of the good sets have been lost to over drinking. If you’ve got it in the bag, slow down with the drinks. Just like getting a yes to a sale, shut the heck up. No more talking. You can’t get any more sold, but you can mess it up quite fast. You lose way more points with a single misstep than you gain with several good plays.

The clubs are there to make money, so spend money, unless you like being barred entry.

Unless you happen to be queueing directly next to a hot fun girl, it’s a giant waste of time. If you don’t need to queue for drinks, don’t. If you don’t need to queue for entry, don’t. Waiting in queue next to non-targets is a giant waste of time you could be spending opening, or getting on the next club.

If you’re going out early, go to the stuffier clubs first. It’s better to save your best hunting ground for when it’s the busiest than go too early and then have to move on to crappier clubs because if you’re not in set, you keep moving! You don’t gain any value staring and scanning the club like a predator, you lose it. So get in and open, it works well or it don’t, usually it don’t, keep moving! When it works, stay!

This is similar to the world where girls don’t care what they look like. Girls that you think don’t care, do care; and guys that you think don’t game, game. They may not know what they’re doing, but upon closer analysis you’ll see they’re doing lots of things right they might not notice, but you do.

Don’t lean in, don’t turn towards the set, be body rocking out. If it seems sensible, you might have some place to go.

Depending on how you define “difficult.” If you go out 10 times and get laid one time, and getting laid is pretty much all you care about, then it could be said that 90 percent of the time is you saying the same things over and over again to people you wouldn’t call friends or associate with, except for the fact that having sex with them might be fun.

The most popular last name in your country, if only given by true parents, means that family tree has the high score for having sex and surviving. To some degree you could say you’re more likely to have kids with someone with that last name than others because they have proven to have more than most. In some countries like Vietnam everyone just changed their name, which is why there are so many Nguyens. But in many other countries, it’s more accurate.

We care a lot about love, or at least lust.

You ever notice how many movies have a love interest in them? How about in songs? Why is it, that even war movies shove some romance into their plots? It may come as no surprise to you that we really care about love a lot. You see, without love, your parents wouldn’t exist. You wouldn’t exist. Your kids wouldn’t exist either. If we didn’t take this stuff really seriously, we’d be out of the game for good, replaced by those that did. We come into this world weak and weary, and if we as babies weren’t supplied a breast to feed from and someone to protect us for years, we wouldn’t survive. Few animals stay so weak for so long as we humans. Everyone is really sensitive regarding matters of the heart.

Life and ideas have been fighting against disorder forever. Their order is how you can tell them from the background noise of their surroundings. Their order is their identity. Think about it.

In a thousand years, what could you build that would still be here? Two things. An idea, or life itself. Only life has the power to maintain order and fight off the decay and entropy that is the normal order of the world we live in. If you throw a banana in your yard, and watch it over time, you’ll see that one day it’s not there anymore. The process of dissolving and ceasing to be is what only life can prevent. Ideas themselves are but the inhabitants of life, for if no living thing carries the idea, does it truly exist?

Life is a funny thing, for not only is it the only good place for ideas to live, but it is an idea itself. Life is data. From when you were a cell in your mother and a cell in your father, to a single combined cell, and now billions of cells. Those cells did only what they were programmed to do, by the very long and magical strings of data inside them. You are the physical execution of the good programming in your DNA. Ideas are carried by life, and life itself is an executed idea.

If you want to live forever, you have to create ideas or life that are strong enough to stand the test of time. On the ideas side, you can create them solo, if you must. For the having kids though, it’s much more fun with a partner or two. Maybe you don’t care so much about kids as a creation, but love for its own sake. That’s great too. Let’s find you some fun partners to roll around with!

Play in the league you qualify for. The 10s get the 10s; The 9s get the 9s. On it goes. You get the idea. Are you a 10? Nope. A 9? Nope. Ok, so what are you? Well that depends on who’s looking. Everyone likes different things at different times. Girls when they’re growing up might love six packs and pretty faces. Then when they’re in their late 20s, they might like guys with more money and class. Then when they’re in their 30s, they may go cougar mode and prefer the young meat again. You can’t be all things to all people, and you shouldn’t want to be. You should want to be the best you that gets what you want while still enjoying the process. You should choose your identity, not the sea of random women you’re interested in.

Would you like to make love to 10s? Yeah, me too. As a matter of fact, who wouldn’t? Ok, so how many 10s have you seen in person? Now you know why barely anyone gets to be with 10s. They’re hard enough to even find in the real world, let alone outcompete the thousands of men waiting in line or wishing to.

Like all things we understand well, we can put some numbers on it. This is the Scivivor’s Love Interest Theorem (SLIT). The equation is simply how hot you are, times how many people can see and respond to it, divided by your standards. That’s it.

SLIT

(Hotness x tactics) / standards = relationships

So if you increase your hotness, and you do better tactics, does that mean you will have good relationships? Nope. Lasting relationships? Nope. Quality and durability are some of the standards that fight against the work you did in hotness and tactics. Thus, you can only do three things. Become hotter, make the hotness you have do better work, or lower your standards. And one of those things sucks.

Just like discipline beats motivation, so too does personal development win over tactics. When you are waking up next to the person you made love to the night before, the hype has faded away, and all the cards have been laid bare on the table. What is left? What’s left is everything that wasn’t the hype. The real you. Is this real you something you took years to refine and be proud of? Is this real you someone others are envious of? Or is this real you a normal Joe that used advanced tactics and effort to achieve what prettier men achieve by accident?

They both work, but one stops working when you go to sleep. The other keeps radiating. If you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, you are so at rest and in motion. If your attractiveness needs you to be telling the next cool story, or showing off what you have, what happens when they’ve heard all you have to say? Where is your cool stuff when you’re at the beach? Being an attractive man, whether it’s through looks or personality, pays for a lifetime. It is your true identity. Spitting game and manipulating circumstance wears off quite quickly. If you could trade all the hours you’ve spent trying to find love, for hours spent making yourself stronger, prettier, richer, which one would have higher and more lasting value?

When you’re done hard selling, the work you did with that one person doesn’t carry over to the next person, you start from scratch. When you’re done hard working on yourself, that effort lasts forever, this person or the next. You will bring you to your next relationship. Being the best you is the strategy that makes all the tricks and tactics of conquest seem small. Now, what if you are already deep into personal development? Well, checking SLIT since you’ve already got a big “hotness,” you’ll get the most gains by increasing your tactics. Or, lowering your standards, but seriously. Low standards are the father of regret.

You could lower your standards. If that sounds good to you, put this book down, right now, and hand it to someone worthy. This book is about getting what you want, not getting what you don’t want.

What are these tactics of which you speak?

This is the fun stuff. As in sports, the tactical win may not last a lifetime, but damn it feels good to be a winner.

At a distance, your face isn’t visible, but your clothes are. The saying, the clothes make the man, is pretty accurate at midrange. Posture and whom you’re with matter as well.

PUAs are tigers, and tigers don’t do well in packs. PUAs invite you to meet other PUAs. Normal people invite you to meet women. Two can be ok, three is a crowd.

When women approach you, after you’ve got significance and rapport, or if you started off with it, try and move them away from the crowd they came from, instead of back into it. Since they were already there, and they walked away from it, they obviously prefer not to be there, and maybe there’s a guy she likes, or girl she hates, or too much smoke or the music is too loud, etc. You don’t want to waste your influence points pushing them back upstream, you’ve got better things to use those precious points for.

A common mistake that people make is that they want to go out and meet new people on holidays, like St. Patrick’s Day. What they don’t realize is that people start drinking early on that day, which means they stop drinking early and it is not likely that banging random dudes is most women’s primary goal in that day. Also, that’s when people are most likely to have set groups that they want to hang out with and they’re not most open to meeting new people. Therefore, the best time to meet new people is when those people are actively looking to meet new people. If you’re trying to interject yourself amongst tight-knit groups of people who pride themselves on excluding others, you’re going to get excluded.

Know your wing rules before you head out with your wing. A wing that blocks you is not a wing. Introduce your wing last to the girl you want him to wing, and then his conversation with her will be uninterrupted.

Whoever opens chooses. (They almost always choose the prettier one.)

Considering going down a point in hotness for a higher percentage chance of fun. Clawing for every inch isn’t a great time.

What that really means is, give other people initial power over you so that you can have later power over them. Their taste decides how you will dress and act, and once you meet their subconscious desires, executing their subconscious will in the real world, you then get to have power over them. There’s an order of operations, you don’t get to lead until you can follow. As mentioned earlier, the best leaders are great followers, you just rarely get to see it.

Well boys, if you’ve been paying attention to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, and all the very successful short dudes out there—if girls want height and you want more height, well, you better put on them boots. Thank Nicolas Sarkozy as well. Boots look cooler and they make you taller, how can you lose?

If you dress different, get your value spike in there, so they think that you’re better instead of worse. Unless they’re fearful, and then they’ll just not like anything different at all. It helps to mention that there’s only texture, color, shape and pattern in regards to what you can wear. If you don’t like it, be covered in black, preferably a flat black that’s not shiny.

It’s easy to dismiss others’ problems when you haven’t walked a mile in their shoes. When you see the Goth kids at school, and you see that one of them is sad because they didn’t get to attend this concert for a band they really like, a band you’d pay to never hear, it’s hard to relate. The same way it might be hard for that Goth kid to relate to a jock’s problem of fumbling the balls, or handoff in a football play or striking out in baseball. Each of these easily recognizable stereotypes appears to us as they do because of how they look to us, and what they appear to do with their time. It is those very differences that cause us to group them into different categories that are the reasons that there will be differences in meaning and respect between them. Guess what? When people look at you, they judge you and fit you into a stereotype as well.

The great news is that you can massively influence what other people think of you, solely by how you dress. I’ve found that it truly doesn’t cost much more to dress very, very well as it does to dress very poorly. What great news! If you care what people think, as you very well should, then you have power over them you may never have realized, solely by choosing the clothes that get the job done. Buy what’s on the mannequin.

The best part of any outfit is the person wearing it.

Have you ever noticed that animals never display weakness as a strategy? Very rarely does displaying weakness as a strategy ever happen. One can probably think of some prey animals that have a bait hook hanging from their head in the deep sea, like crazy anglerfish and there are probably a couple other examples, but this is nowhere near as common as faking strength.

Mystery is power. Jesus Christ is such a powerful a figure because you don’t know what music he liked, or what his favorite food was, or how much he slept in a night, or if he woke up feeling quite crappy before having morning coffee.

It would be great to not dilute your social media image with mediocre content than to spam it up and lose value. The best photographers don’t show you their “ok” pictures, so you think they’re better than they are. If you saw all the bad photos all photographers take, you wouldn’t think as well of them. Let what people don’t know about you speak on your behalf through what they imagine of you based on your value spikes!

People go out to have a good time, and they like to meet other interesting and fun people. In our best moments we can all be interesting and fun. Let your best side show and don’t emphasize your worse sides. Let people figure out what and why you lack skill at something on their own; no reason to shove it down their throat.

Get your value spikes in once you have presented your most attractive side, relax and let it sink in. The more you speak to things that aren’t your best stories or points, the more likely you are to hit a trap. You only get one point for the great things you say that they love, and you lose 5-10 points for everything you say that you don’t like. Because it is easier to lose points than to win them, it’s better for them to fill in their curiosity with their own imagination based on the couple of value spikes you’ve gotten into the conversation than it is for you to say the wrong thing and cancel out or more all the work you did to show your best side.

Attractive people get away with a lot. The amount of points that you lose for saying the wrong thing is tied to how much the person already likes you. If they don’t like you that much to being with, you will lose a lot, if they are already like you a lot, you’ll lose nothing and they’ll make up a rational reason to support you saying something that would have bothered a person who liked you less. For instance if you love dogs, and the person you’re talking to hates dogs, if they’re not so pretty, it’s a deal breaker, but if they are quite pretty you might say, “I understand what you mean, yeah, dogs aren’t for everyone.” You automatically downplay the negative response to a degree. The take away being, mistakes don’t have equal cost for prettier people. The uglier you are, the more your mistakes cost you. Thus, if you’re not so pretty, be aware that you get one point for saying the right thing, and lose 10 points for saying the wrong thing, so speak wisely.

Adaptability is a good trait to have when combined with knowing your audience; but be careful not to over-adapt to the point of being insincere. If you can act different ways, sing different songs, make funny faces and voices, then you can act as you wish with whom you wish, because you’ve got so many outfits you can wear. If however you’ve never imitated another person’s voice or way of speaking, never made cool facial expressions, never done anything exciting with your body, well then, you’re not really free, you have only one outfit to wear. If you’re really smart, you can always pretend you’re stupider, and basically use your extra brain horsepower to properly emulate the stupider existence. If however you are stupider, you won’t have the option to passably act as something greater, at least not with people that can detect how full of stuff you are.

Silence speaks louder than yammering.

This can cost you your real relationships, because you’re putting your mental energy into understanding people who don’t matter. The only value is the local value, so communicate with local peers.

You need to self-adjust your expectations for the impact that you’re going to make in regards to the people that you’re speaking to. Not based on how smart and badass you are, because your smartness and your badass line of arguments and your correctness means nothing in the eyes of a person that can’t see that wavelength. How right and amazing you are, and all these great points you have, literally just means the opposite to those people that look at you like an outsider, like an alien, who are measuring who you are to them instead of what you’re saying.

There are people in this world that will see you as a threat to their importance and their significance. These people don’t give a crap about the validity or accuracy of what you’re saying because the entirety of your existence to them is as an outsider, as a competitor for resources. They are engaging in the practice of trying to make you seem less important to their group by making you seem wrong. Whatever they can say and whatever they can do to seem more important to their group, they will do. This will happen regardless of whatever fanciful, advanced adhesion to logic that you have because you care about logic a lot, you’ve memorized all these fallacies and spent all these years learning. Whereas these guys, they care that the people that they live and work with like them and that’s the end of their caring. He doesn’t really care so much about epistemological truth, and the hunting of it, and ultimate knowledge.

If you’ve been looking for a better peer group, and you should always be, Scivive would suggest that you do not try Mensa, the “the high IQ society.” What you will find in Mensa is people that are entirely wrong about things, but wrong about them in a slightly more sophisticated way. That is not that useful. It’s better to find people who are actually right, particularly those who are right about things most people are wrong about. In this case, the accurate people are often powerful and often wealthy, because when everyone else is wrong and you’re right, you get exponentially rewarded. Conversely, when everyone else is right and you’re right, there’s no reward whatsoever. Value is in indirect proportion to availability. When rightness is easily available from all kinds of places, no one will pay you for it, but when you’re the only one that knows a thing that everyone else has got wrong, they will pay you dearly, and often times not even because they want to. If you’re on the right side, and everyone else is on the wrong side, you’re going to be paid a multiple for the privilege of being right when everyone else is wrong; that’s great!

I’ve only tried it a couple of times, I don’t have a large enough sample set to say it realistically, so I’ll just reiterate what I’ve said previously; if you’re so deprived of a social group to cohere with, and to be effective in the world through mission and shared desire and shared interest, then you have defaulted to pretending that a high score on a dubious test is somehow magically an interest on its own. I assure you that it is not. Your ability to understand things speaks nothing to the application of that ability. If you have the ability to learn a new language, and you never learn it, then when some other guy joins Mensa and wants to speak to you in that language, you aren’t going to understand it. You’re but in the club, you both passed the test. One guy learned another language, the other guy didn’t.

Now they can’t communicate with each other in that cool language. By the way, English is awesome. Learn it. It’s really cool. English contains the most words! And the most papers, the best music, and the best songs. Mensa. I’ve never had good luck with it. I find that you are able to remain stupider for longer by having a more advanced strategy and tactic to avoiding compelling argument, which is weird, because you would think that only the acceptance of compelling argument may cause someone to be smart in the first place.

Take a guy like Ben Stein. Ben Stein, really smart guy; really wrong about almost everything. How does that happen?

Trust is weakness, verification is strength.

It would be great to do real fact verification on people that are commonly full of stuff. In a world where it’s never been cheaper or easier to actually verify things, when someone talks stuff about what they’ve done, or who they know, or otherwise attempt to steal significance for themselves from you with fancy statements, it’s nice to verify them on the spot or let them know that without verification, you don’t believe a word people say.

The professions in which you can create massive impact to the world without the help of others are pretty limited in quantity. Writers, inventors, scientists, authors, artists, musicians, mathematicians, programmers, biologists. Now of those professions, which are truly solitary in nature? Perhaps the most solitary in order would be author, mathematician, artist, and inventor. Musicians, scientists, programmers, they often work in groups. Even in the case of the author, artist, musician, what use is your work if it’s never seen or heard? Who will carry your work to the masses? You see, to make an impact on this world, you’re almost always going to need some other people’s help.

Thus, there is an optimal order of operations. The goal is to take advantage of the things which can make massive and important impact in this world, which all involve people that aren’t you. The sooner you can enlist those people into your efforts, the sooner you can start marking a difference.

People who offer courses on “Personal development will make you rich!” when the first money they ever made in their entire life was the money they made telling you that they would make you rich, are thieves of the worst kind. They should know that you can easily look in their history and see they have no business experience whatsoever and no success anywhere else. It would be interesting to see what percentage of successful self-help authors were ever considered successful before their book on success.

So-called thought leaders are able to be thought leaders for the most part because they failed so hard, so long and were content with having no standards, and making no money to stay in the game with a very low rate of success. While all the “winners” are out there seducing the prom queen and driving around their Ferraris, and somebody needs a comment on something, the “low standard” guys are able to answer the phone and say “Oh yeah, I can give you an opinion on that,” because they’re just sitting with their thumb up their ass with nothing better to do. That’s why some believe we have such a low quality of thought leaders in America; it’s because you got to have low standards to be around to answer the call to get the job.

Maybe that concept of not everyone being able to do a thing is like the Nash Equilibrium:

“A stable state of a system involving the interaction of different participants, in which no participant can gain by a unilateral change of strategy if the strategies of the others remain unchanged.”

You make your destiny.

There is no giant conscious third person scrutinizing your relationships to make sure they meet their needs for what they want to see happen in the world, and thus fulfill the “destiny” they have created for you. In fact, there’s not a single entity out there trying to achieve to some state of the universe that has you with a single other person. In fact, your destiny is created by two people, you and your lover. You both create each other’s destiny through will and practice, and there need not be any third voyeur whose objectives are more important than your own. Your vision of the future and your ability to create it with the people you love is the highest and best destiny this world will know.

Don’t open moving sets.

For those of you out there that are doing street game, day game, night game, nightclub game etc., if you followed the advice of Scivive, you wouldn’t be opening moving sets, because they are terrible. Thus, if you’re not opening moving sets then there’s no reason for you to spend a lot of time in transition. Get on your bicycle, or jog, or whatever your thing is, get the out of transition and get into the club.

Getting dates after good texting.

“I would never invite a strange blonde girl from the Internet to such an awesome event, but I think I might make an exception for you. I’m not even going to tell you what it is unless the timing works out. When exactly can you be free this week?”

Tips: change the hair color on an emoji to match the girl. Use two dots to create a feeling of incompleteness they want to fix by responding.

If you’re ever looking for some game theory strategy to burn all of your personal value, and give it to someone else—let’s say some girl really likes you, but you’re already occupied. You want to try and shift that girl’s interest to your friend, who’s worthy of it, and she just needs to switch, because it works out better for everybody. You could say “Hey, come over to my friend’s house, it’s really important that you act cool though, don’t mess this up for me.” That phrase, “Don’t mess this up for me,” one hundred percent burns all of your value, and gives it to that other person, so it’s an interesting tactic.

People hate from a distance, but love if they think they can align with you. There’s nothing as cringe worthy as losers who are arrogant. I once saw a fat, balding man in a pickup class go up to a hot bartender, ask for a pen, then tell her to write her phone number down. People that lie to sew, I’d see how they can get away with it.

On the Internet, they call it being dragged down to someone else’s level, and getting beat with experience; that’s the reason why you don’t argue with trolls on the Internet. They will drag you down to their level and they will beat you with experience. It’s like wrestling a pig in the mud. You don’t like it, but the pig thinks of it as fun.

In summary, if you want to have a better time of life, try not to always seem right. Nobody likes it, nobody will pay you for it, and there’s a very small subset of people in this world that are actually able to make money on being right. The less arrogant you are about it, the more of a positive impact that you’re going to make in the world. This is because other people take the other side of the equation, even if they’re wrong, just to not be on your side because you may have a personality, which is so off-putting.

Everyone likes to feel important and intelligent. One path to obtaining this goal is to find unique or novel opinions or angles that others haven’t expressed, and express them yourself. If you are amongst good company, and they notice, you should derive benefit. There is a common and unfortunate side effect to this behavior of being novel, as some people in their hunt for importance become nit pickers. Nit pickers don’t bring meaningful contribution to a conversation, as they’re too busy pointing out the obvious exceptions that everyone else already knows about and purposely didn’t mention; they were under the assumption that everyone else already knew those exceptions existed without needing mention.

For instance, “But Richard, surely some nit pickers bring meaningful contributions...”

“Surely you don’t mean all the nit pickers...”

A wonderful discovery—when people say “everyone,” what they almost always mean is “almost everyone.” Exception hunting is the weakest and most time wasting way to try to add to a conversation. Unless the exception you’ve pointed out is hard to see, please don’t insult the intellect of those you are speaking with by pointing out the obvious.

The reason people hate vanity and hate conceited people is because it’s harder to extract significance from them, and harder to extract love from them. It is because of their heightened effort and status on themselves that they care much less about you, and therefore it’s harder to find synergy with them.

People tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. Delay forever, if possible, what it is that you do for a living or as a hobby, for no matter how great your reality is it won’t match up to their imagination.

Women test for strength. The man who can actually save them is the man who can actually hurt them. It’s good for them to sense that strength, maybe through lifting them up, maybe through them conquering another man in front of them. Check out the covers of all the romance novels; jacked dudes with pants half unzipped, towering above the woman they are carrying. All the covers are identical - long hair, glistening body, stronger and taller than the woman, with a mountainous background, the hero staring into the woman’s eyes, or sometimes not appearing to care too much, and other times, obviously in love. If you are optimizing your identity for people with this type of taste, one can imagine you’re doing yourself harm.

Do you see the romance cover where the man is smart, or funny, or doing something useful like building something, or is leading other men? Nope. Is there ever modernity? Why are they set somewhere that is surely not the world we live in?

Mind you, not all women like these books, however, you may find it odd that there is literally no male version of this. Can you imagine if there was a male version of a romance novel with half naked, beautiful women on the front on their knees, linked by a chain? Society would quickly outcast such a distasteful work. Maybe pornography magazines are the one exception. Pornographic magazines could be the male version of romance novels. Maybe they’re worse. The problem with them is that the women are often objectified as having no traits at all except attractiveness and nudity.

Guys who focus on getting women instead of becoming more powerful, shirk their responsibility and the very thing that the women are selecting for. If you spend your time not focusing on a woman and developing the traits that they select for, then against your best efforts, they’re going to hunt you out, find you, and choose you over other people. But if you’re a man who’s always searching and hunting and turning through leads, that activity makes you less valuable, less useful to the other party, and if it’s not easy enough to visualize, then you could invert it and see it from their perspective. What would a woman appear to be to you, if all they did was sacrifice what you were selecting for? What if they got uglier and uglier the more they went out from lack of sleep and consuming too much alcohol? Then you would look at them like they were idiots, because they sacrificed what you were selecting for, which was beauty.

“If attraction isn’t a choice, then vanity is love.” When you are at the gym, you are actually having sex with yourself, but wait, that doesn’t make any sense. Well, it may, because whatever development you get there, some other partner will eventually notice and choose you for that, and may not have picked you if you didn’t have that progress. Therefore, when you are improving yourself and working out, mentally, physically, financially, you are actually having sex with yourself through proxy that actually hasn’t detected the improvement yet, but will when given the chance. Anytime you are improving yourself you are getting laid, but in the future.

It’s just like Bitcoin. We burn electricity to prove that we really cared to create this answer, it really took time and therefore it is not fake. If you don’t do the burning, then you don’t prove the caring. You don’t prove the effort. That’s why women want real wedding rings. They may not want the real wedding ring, because of the sparkle. What’s important is that it cost you greatly, because you can fake words, you can fake some actions, but you cannot fake a year’s worth of working salary to buy a girl a gold ring. It’s a way for her to learn that if you have a kid together, and that kid’s a crying mess, that you’re dedicated and are still going to be around. The purchase of an expensive ring is a pre-test to make sure that you’re really one-hundred percent committed.

“Don’t try to understand women, women understand women, and they hate each other” - Al Bundy

Imposter procreation strategy: cuttlefish act like other females to prevent other males from seeing them as competition. Act like you’re pro-life or e.g. act like you’re into hippy stuff.

Some women need and love drama, and if there’s not drama in their life, they are going to invent it.

You have a choice as a man. Do you want to fill your woman and give her what she desperately needs by inventing risk-free drama that is contrived and actually not that big a deal, or do you want them to experiment with bringing that drama? They’re not optimizing for risk-freeness and you’re going to have problems. Either you can bring drama to the table or you can let the woman bring it to the table. If you’re a smart guy and you know how to use your brain the right way, you’re probably going to create a much better and higher class of problem than the stuff that may be brought upon you.

Women stress-test their relationships for excellence, the same way that government stress-test banks and that factories stress-test backup generators. You need to see what things do when the shit hits the fan, so that when it actually hits the fan, you’re safe. If you’re a woman, the stuff hitting the fan for you is getting pregnant and not being able to work a job for nine months or some period thereof, having to feed and take care of this child and work on reduced sleep, and even endure pain and risk of injury. Giving birth isn’t easy, you might get injured in the deal. How would you make sure that your support network, your backup generators that are your loved ones, husband, family, would be there for you when the going gets rough?

Women have been conditioned to expect diamonds as an engagement accessory because they hit you hardest in your wallet. Women want you make a serious commitment that took you months to afford, it is how they weed out the false believers in a social system; with a transaction cost, an entry fee. Funny how that evolved.

The worst way to discover your level of security would be to just dive right in and not do any pre-testing and hope it all works out. A smarter way, a way that has evolved over time to result in these weird behaviors from women that we don’t understand, is a sort of dependency test. Pre-testing is used to measure the desire and ability for those that you interact with, your loved ones, their ability to put up with terror and horror and stuff. The more easily, and with a smile on their face, they deal with you at your worst, then the more safe and secure you should be in your belief that when you need them the most, when you are your weakest that they will be there for you.

In order for a woman to know that she had the right guy who would be there for her when she becomes pregnant, and during her weakest times, and needed someone else the most, an effective character-testing strategy is forcing an argument where none needs to be had. One of the most unique things about this understanding is that some women only appear to be happy once her partner’s ego has been destroyed.

Once you have been in a rage to the point where you can’t breathe, once your day has been ruined by whatever method they have chosen of either nagging about things you haven’t done, telling you that some other guy was better, telling you that you’re a loser, that you don’t listen and you don’t do things right and you’ll never be anything, or whatever strategy they happen to pick to want to destroy you, her testing of your response is complete.

You think that there’s a way to strategize your way out of that, you think that if you behave different they would stop doing that because you don’t realize why they’re doing it. They’re not doing it to be true to some external standard of truth regarding whether you are sufficient as a human being or not, they’re doing it to fill an unconscious drive to see you tortured and in pain, and still stay and love them. That is what they subconsciously want to see that they can torture you and you will still be there. There’s an art to allowing yourself to be tortured and love them unconditionally, while having the value that you have other options, you are a prize and she is lucky to have you. If she didn’t have you, someone would rapidly replace her and love to trade spots with her. You need both.

She needs to know that she just barely has you, because you’re close to being out of her league. You’re just in her league enough that she can act horrible and you’ll still be there for her, and to find that line is really hard, because you don’t know what she thinks her league is. You don’t know what she thinks are your best qualities, and those change over time. Sometimes they want you to be dominant. Sometimes they want you to be loving and caring and sensitive. Good luck accurately dispensing those vibes and methods of being, to end up with a higher and greater experience of love and caring in a relationship and connection between a man and a woman. It is not easy. And if it were easy, it probably wouldn’t be fun.

If you honor the intention of being terrible every once in a while as a stress test, then two things will happen. One, you’ll be happier during a stress test because you know there’s a potential positive benefit at the end; and two, if for some reason you didn’t have any stress testing, you might want to invent some on your own that are fair and balanced if you care about the volatility of relying on someone who’s not reliable, or thinking someone is there for you when they’re really not. That type of person with those kinds of options looks at you and says, “Oh! I could do better.” It’s like trying to date a girl who works at a restaurant or bar; they get hit on two hundred million times a day. You come with your normal human being game and try to game a professional who gets hit on all day long, and you realize that she doesn’t give a damn about what you’re saying because she’s heard that same thing one hundred different times, so you don’t get to use the strategy. To attract them you have to have some other thing, and those other things are harder.

What do you care about in a woman? Does she smell good? Will she be a good mom? Is she fun sensually? Is she happy? Is she flexible, does she make you feel important? Is she honest? Does she have good taste? Her taste is going to influence what your house looks like, her opinion of you, what you wear and your choice of friends. Her friend’s problems are going to be your problems. Her taste in a work environment, her problems at work are going to be your problems.

These are some of the things, maybe even most of the things that you care about in a lover and a life partner. You could add to that list a lot of things that one could mention as important, however, all it would do is reduce the number of people in the world that you could fall in love with and have an amazing time with. Most people think that this concept of a soul mate exists, that for some reason there’s just one other person out there for you and lucky you, they live near you so you’ll find them. They speak the language you speak. They have similar beliefs. However, it turns out that there are actually a lot of people that you can have a good relationship with.

If it is true that all relationships come to an end (which in the longest case is by death), then it is also true that relationships that are older have less time left in them. Therefore, the case can be made that a relationship that is nearing the average death point (7 years declared, probably 5.5 years where the fun stops) does not have much time left in it. Then if a relationship has met a certain threshold of length, say 4 months, then a 5-month-old relationship can be logically said to be worth more for keeping well-functioning than a relationship that is 4.5 years old.

The 5-month relationship is statistically more likely to last a couple more good years than the older relationship is. Sadly, our emotions aren’t programmed so strictly to optimize for happiness years. There are also other social implications to whom you relate to, and when and how relationships start and end, that are outside the optimization for gross total happiness days. The counterintuitive discovery is that you are likely better off finding a new good relationship in today’s environment than fixing a broken and aging one. This feels bad, however, it’s often what works.

Should we be with different people? Is the sex just not as good as it should be because we’re bored of it and that is normal? That happens. It’s very normal, it happens. People don’t want to eat steak seven times a week. They can eat steak intermittently over a lifetime. Maybe you need to rate limit how often you interact with the person, or maybe you need to switch people, or maybe they change so much they can do better than you now. Maybe you change so much you can do better than them now.

Better actually exists. You can actually upgrade your partner, it is actually a thing people are programmed to say and pretend that they don’t think that can happen. It’s actually a program falsehood, you want people to feel more secure than they should be and that you’ll never leave them, because you think you’ll get more performance out of them if they don’t think you’ll ever leave them. You’re scared that if they think you might leave them that they may see it as being too risky.

Scivive believes that you can leave them no matter what, and then it was too risky to have interacted with you in the first place. Scivivors believe in honesty, honesty feels great. Be honest if someone is not up to your standards any more; tell them, “You are going to up your game or we’re switching. That’s what’s up and let’s not pretend. If my game gets too bad, you’re going to do the same thing. You just find a fancy excuse for it.”

Scivive would be willing to state that the financial and social penalties that exist for risky, low reward, high potential damage things that exist in the criminal world should perhaps exist in the social world. Maybe that’s why guys and girls react so violently when they discover their partner was cheating. This might be because of the biological perspective. In the old days, there was no genetic testing. If a woman had a kid and that kid wasn’t yours but you thought it was, now you are permanently eliminated from the gene pool of the future of humanity unless you have another kid with her that just happens to be yours. Or maybe you have another partner, or you donate sperm to a sperm bank and someone actually uses it. Unless one of those three options becomes true, you are permanently eliminated from the gene pool. Therefore, we have evolved and been rewarded for being violently “pair bondish” and literally violently defensive of a pair bond between two lovers, because perhaps those people that practiced polygamy just got opted out of survival. They didn’t end up having enough kids of their own. After time passed, the people that had a more effective strategy for promoting their genes into the future by having partners that were monogamous with them are the ones who flourished.

Another strategy could be trying to be the guy that gets all the girls to cheat with you, I guess you could do that too.

Jimmy Fallon, who wears a wedding ring, fell down and nearly ripped off his finger. He said, “I tripped and fell in my kitchen on a braided rug that my wife loves. My ring got caught on the countertop when I was going down, and stuck there and pulled my finger off.” His injury was a “ring avulsion” that required emergency micro-surgery in order to save his finger.

That’s the downside to wearing rings. The upside is fitness for mating signaling. You need to choose. Keep a finger? Or keep a mate. There is a company that makes nice silicon rings that tear before your finger does.

Can you think of a stupider way to decide which girls you like, or be influenced by, such as hair color? The most commonly changed and inaccurate thing? Why choose to like things based on the fakest thing possible?

Regarding hair color, if you believe that we have sex to create kids, and you believe that we select certain traits that historically have created better kids—for instance, more caring women, more muscular dudes, or smarter or funnier dudes—then if that’s what you’ve been selected for, it’s why we see the changes that we do in areas of comedy, and areas of interests.

If you say society chooses how a kid turns out, then why is it that young gay boys like what girls like? Did society teach them that young gay kids were like that? No, because they don’t have a reference for how young gay kids are supposed to act. It’s never been advertised to them. Young gay boys do not act young and feminine because they were advertised that lifestyle. They act that way because when your body is growing up, the difference between turning out masculine and turning out feminine isn’t that big. Signaling exists to give you the only clues you can have since you can’t scan DNA yourself.

Gambling and thrill and adventure are supposed to pay you positive returns. You’re supposed to be able to find resources that other people wouldn’t find. You’re supposed to demonstrate traits of durability and power, because you have so much extra resources to spend on leisure and adventure, which potential partners recognize that and are signaled towards that instead of those mates that weren’t so bad-ass that they didn’t have the extra resources. It’s probably the reason girls have bigger breasts than they need, because they don’t need bigger breasts.

Aesthetic is so very important now, to the point where women spend literally hours a day every day reapplying the lie that is the fake hair, fake make up, fake lotion, fake tan, fake everything. Everything’s fake, because a competitive market exists, and everyone out there is fake, so you need to be fake too in order to keep up. That could amount to 25 percent of the work day lying to everybody, which is pretty funny when they complain about when guys lie to them. Guys shouldn’t lie, but at least understand that women lie too to keep up appearances; there’s not a lot of real honesty going on here.

Every night is not your prom night. “Oh look, lips that are too red. Breasts that are too big, looking they stand on their own, they basically have their own legs, great.” Men fall for all of that stuff, and Scivive would argue, they are happy doing so.

It’s not fair that half of the population of the planet spends 25 percent of their waking hours doing something that’s destroyed when they go to sleep. Guys can be more beautiful too, we can, and we’re just not willing to pay that price. It is not worth that much. If it took two hours in the morning for a guy to look 20 percent better, most of them would rather pass. Men don’t feel the need to look that much better to justify two hours of daily prep. Most men are comfortable with fifteen minutes of grooming in order to keep their appearances sharp.

Beyond that, dude! You need a better friend circle, or you need to get a soul mate and stop trying to hunt a new one. It’s called vanity overhead. What’s your vanity overhead? How much time do you waste sending out signals that no one cares about? You’re not curing cancer. You’re barely making kids, nobody knows what you’re doing with that stuff. You’re trying too hard to look too good, far too good. Maybe you also spend far too much time on social media, but you’re not making money on it. You’re not making any money on social media. Stop spending your whole life on it. Read a book instead; preferably this book…again.

Sex is a great way to create variety and select for useful stuff. Sex seems to amplify the diversity rate, which amplifies the chance that something good happens, which amplifies the rate at which robustness occurs. It also amplifies the mistakes that we get from things that didn’t work out, but it’s a small price to pay for not becoming extinct.

The rate at which you can adapt is super important. Studies have been done on how important the rate you adapt is, and it’s super important. Changing is not enough. Changing fast is more important. In a world full of fake hair, fake nails, fake eyebrows, fake eyelashes, Botox, fake breasts, fake lips, and that’s before the science kicks in. Is this a useful way to choose a partner, on how good they are at making a fake person out of themselves? How attractive is your fake person that is not you? How attractive are all the traits that you don’t have that you pretend to have? Is that good for the world, or is that destroying otherwise useful signaling mechanisms that used to be valuable in telling who was more fit, who was less fit, for reproductive activity?

If you want to know why all this trivial knowledge isn’t actually trivial, it’s because every single man and every single woman is very likely to run into this problem of not getting along with each other for reasons they don’t really understand.

A lot of people that you know love to have sensuality with multiple partners. Guys in particular, guys that want to have multiple girls as partners get pissed off when a musician or a rich person gets a lot of attraction and a lot of sensuality without seeming to put in the same work that they did. But you don’t realize that they actually put in more work for longer, at a harder task, and only through that work attained what you tried to find another way.

Guys will try and seem like they have more money than they do. As a strategy, guys will try and seem more interesting popular than they are, because it’s easier to pretend to be popular, rich and interesting than it is to actually be popular or rich or interesting. This exists in the animal kingdom too. There are animals that are actually venomous, and then there are other animals that look almost identical to them that aren’t venomous. It’s funny because they both get the result of being treated with the respect that venomous animals do.

This is something I’ve told my friends for years: people who are more willing to experiment physically at risk for an emotional gain are more willing to be sensual with you for fun. They’re more willing to risk STDs or the fact that you’re some kind of crazy psycho, but they might be able to have a fun sexual time. How might you know who these people are? Well, is their hair colored a funny color?

I don’t like that one very much, by the way, because I don’t get along so well with those types of people. They detect that I don’t actually like the same stuff that they like. I do well with people who respect power, money, goals, future, etc. Performance oriented people who usually form their family history came from a performance oriented, professional, money-style family.

A girl who’s going to love me the most is going to be a girl who wants an excellent financial future and the respect of the professional and perhaps political people of the world. For the most part, artists would vomit if they heard any of those words, because that’s gross. “Is that all you are, the stuff you have? Is that all you are, the people you control? That’s disgusting!” Scivive understands completely that mindset.)

Yes, that does sound kind of disgusting when you frame it that way.

However, when you frame it in the way that the clothes that you’re wearing were created by companies, and the house that you’re living in was created by companies, and the drugs that you take to cure sickness were created by companies; you learn that companies actually have human beings getting stuff done. You should probably quit demonizing them because without them, there’d be some warlords stepping on your neck right now and you’d be doing whatever he says. Thus, back to the ventures of women or men.

People with tattoos, or use drugs, or smoke, or do other risky painful things personally that have pleasurable emotional results are more likely to have sex with you because they’ve set the frame. “If she smokes, she pokes.” That’s funny. There are probably a lot of other sayings; “Does a girl have a kid? Ok, how’d she get that kid? Having sex.” You know who’s more likely to have sex? A girl with a kid, instead of a girl that has a chastity belt on, an allergy to relationships or doesn’t like the gender that you are.

You’re going to find a lot of that. You will meet people that do not want to have sex with anyone that is your gender. Sometimes it’s a girl, sometimes it’s a guy and it’s totally normal, you probably feel the same way. If you don’t feel that way, if you’re bisexual, multi sexual, poly sexual, whatever fancy word you use for being more open with your sexuality. Do you have sex with machines? Do you sleep with people with learning disabilities? I can keep moving this bar to some point where you find you that yes indeed, there is something you don’t want to have sex with, and therefore you shouldn’t be so hard on the rest of the world that just happens to not want to have sex with you.

You’re going to save yourself a lot of hatred, animosity and you’re going to stop punishing yourself for something that is actually healthy for the world and something that you’re doing and profiting from personally. Anytime you get rejected by somebody and you want to take it personally, because it’s probably the most personal thing that there could be, realize that you would be doing the exact same rejection to millions of other people in the world if the opportunity presented itself. It’s going to take the edge off.

There’s people who have taken the other path, where they go for developing themselves; and as a result, they get better quality women. They also put less time into doing it, because they worked on their product development instead of sales.

Love your fellow man and woman. They’re the best things you will ever find in this world, and the best thing you will ever be.

Be loved, go where you find the people beautiful, or where they find you beautiful. 

One-night stands are like trying to fill the ocean with sand. Shovel as much as you like, the sea will never fill.

If you designed male-female human relationships from scratch, you would make sure that the best looking guys got the best looking girls, and the worst looking people get the other worst looking people, more or less. It’s pretty stupid to try and achieve performance out there in the rest of the world, when there’s so much to be done at home, when you could work yourself to the top of your game, and then you could get what you deserve.

Women want diamonds because they drain your wallet. The same reason when they’re on their period they want you to suffer. It is how you weed out the false believers in a social system. With a transaction cost, an entry fee. Funny how that evolved. Pre-nup, are you million dollars funny?

If you ever want to impress a girl, pretend you’re a cat holding down its milk bowl with its V-shaped paw and trying to lick up all the milk.

If you truly want to be loved, you’ve got two options. Search harder, to find someone that loves you as you are. Or, improve who you are. Be more loveable.

Having great game means you’ll experience more flakes. If they don’t flake, you will. When your game is really tight, you’re going to end up sleeping with lots of people you wouldn’t normally get along with. This means less second dates, because when the magic wears off, you’ll get a lot more flakiness. You’ll be flaky too; everything was wonderful and you were super interested, now you really don’t care much. Or, you’ve learned to really not care much, because the glue that would normally cause continued interaction, either the workplace, or really similar outlooks on life or habits, probably isn’t there. What was there was beauty, and in a world of not too many good leads, beauty is usually enough.

Some loves are better than others. When a crazy person loves you, they might think that killing your dog is doing you a favor so you don’t have to watch them die slowly one day of old age.

It’s the same from your perspective as well, the amount of love you show someone is probably more variable than you know, based on how you think they’re treating you perhaps. Thus, when people use suitcase words such as love, it kind of leaves out the measuring of the strength, the quality; not all cheeseburgers are the same either.

People come up to me because I dress in an interesting way and I’m with beautiful people, but I wouldn’t be probably considered to be so beautiful myself. I could lose ten kilos. Anyway, when people approach, you’re always curious of what their motive is. Do you just want to meet people who dress nice or are you curious, like is it the best outcome for you to satisfy your curiosity of what is this interesting thing I’ve ever seen before? Are you looking for funding and you think that I have money? Everyone’s got an angle.

I was teaching this idea of switching your “buts” to “ands,” and you’re going to get much more compliance, you’re going to be much more friendly, you’re going to make the same points and say the same stuff, so if you’re going to make the same points except have more impact and make more friends, you should definitely do that and that’s what switching “buts” to “ands” and honoring intention does.

That whole thing was like basically about how you should use trainer tricks. You should use positively framed language to garner attention, look cool and hang out with cool people, and then out-going social people will say hello and meet you.

If you are minimalist about what you really care about in a lover, friend, an employee, or even yourself, then you’re going to find a lot more happiness in life because you’re going to greatly increase the available parties you can interact with. That brings you more joy and happiness.

If you think that no one deserves to be your friend unless they are heads of state and in charge of a country, you’re kind of screwed because it’s very hard to hang out with those people. They change every four years depending on what country you live. They have reasons to not be truthful and their friendship towards you does to trade disputes or keeping the people that vote for them happy.

Wouldn’t you be much better served by not requiring your friends to be heads of state, or have IQs over two hundred, or be world champions of some sort? The more restrictive you are about the requirements that you have to feel happiness with a person in your life, the harder it will be for you to have that. Consequently, as a side effect, not only will it be harder to attain, but it will also be harder to keep.

You see the same thing with people. The more artificially restrictive you are with what requirements must be met in order for you to find happiness in a partner, the less happiness will you have. By the way, this applies with employee that you might want, or a company that you do business with, or yourself. If you have a rule that you can only be happy with yourself when you have had snow on zero days for hundred days in a row, and achieve a body fat index of 15 percent, and you’re the strongest you’ve ever been—you’re going to have a rough time.

The more you compound that, the harder you make it. It’s like adding extra locks to a door. Now the door to happiness for you has twenty locks on it instead of one. Which is more likely for you to get into your house in a reasonable time frame, the door with twenty locks of twenty different keys, or the door with one lock and one key? How do you know how often you need to go in that door? How much overhead are you willing to have in your life to meet the standard that you and only you is responsible for in the end?

It is perhaps more accurate that lots of people are responsible for it, but you have the most influence over it. We might as well say “you and only you,” but in reality we mean that even if you happened to inherit or adopt some bad beliefs in regards to what must happen in order for you to be happy, you have the power to change, as well as the power to believe it’s totally fair to feel good if any given level gets set right.

Scivive has talked about how this pertains to relationships and how there’s a side effect of you being overly picky; not only will you never attain your dream partner, and even if you did temporarily, you won’t be able to keep the relationship because the other person has so many options. They’re harder to get, they’re harder to keep. As you lower the requirements for what you need to be happy, not only does it become easier to get what you want, but they’re going to make you happier.

Very closely related to this, by the way, is not only can you choose a standard by which you hold the other people in your life to, but also the standards you hold yourself to. You can also change the rate at which you measure whether people are meeting those standards. That rate becomes the frequency at which you determine your happiness level based on your standards and expectations of to others. Scivive hopes you have a frequency; you have to do things at least twice to have a frequency.

Things normally deteriorate over time. You might have started with a good relationship. Your relationship now might be a piece of crap, but you just never noticed because you’re busy at work or doing something else. By the way, if you didn’t notice that your relationship turned to crap, you’re a bad partner, because it means you’re not focusing on the things that are important to a relationship. If you’re not bringing joy, happiness, importance and security to your partner and that’s not on the list of things that you’re focused on, and that’s the reason that you didn’t notice those things weren’t happening for them or for you, you’re a bad partner. You play catch even though you’re not really playing catch. You’re just playing catch with yourself, that’s not the highest and best relationship to have. Maybe make it a ritual; “How’s my relationship doing? Are there some things I should be doing better?”

Don’t train negative, and don’t game imbeciles and shmucks. If you’re coming up with a list of crap to tell people you meet because the truth is too scary for them, find a better group of people. Really try to find that more empowering group instead of training to be less than your best self.

When you’re doing better than someone else, and you let them discover it to some degree, they will hate you. Only the very rare and most advanced people can actually find joy in someone else’s superiority to them, in a trait they have that they’re proud of.

Won the lottery? Before you let anyone you know you won, ask all your friends to borrow some money and help you move. Unfriend the ones who refuse.

If you’ve got real balls, never let anyone know.

Does everyone have a good trait? Most people do. If you’re creative, intelligent and sincere, you can find it and give them a truly beautiful compliment. You actually have to know them thoroughly first.

As you advance in this world, you realize that one of the quickest ways to get rid of a friend is to lend one more money than one can repay. What option does he or she have? To do something that’s very hard; get rid of free time, try and find some type of gainful employment that is comfortable to pay you back, or to imagine that you’re actually not such a nice guy; you’re actually a jerk and you don’t deserve to get paid back. Which of those two things is easier? Now you’ve lost the money and the friend. If you want to keep your friends, you can give them money. By the way, they hate that too. They grow animosity for that as well, because you’re stealing their dignity from them. Everyone wants to have pride in themselves, everyone wants to be self-sustaining, nobody wants to be a leech of a sycophant, and for you to pay for people’s things, subconsciously harms them. It literally harms them. Very few people, can genuinely appreciate a gift and not, to some degree, feel like they have to retaliate.

If you’re in a house, it’s unlikely that it was built by friends of any sort. It’s likely that it was built by employees, because employees do what you tell them to do in exchange for you giving them a lot of value in return; value that you had to earn previously as well. That exchange of value for value, or money for labor. If you pay someone to paint something and then in return you paint for someone else, then it’s like a proxy.

The reason employees always work out so well is because functionally, it’s the same as you doing it yourself, so by that token employees are more important than friends. There are some more examples as to why that’s the case. How many friends do you have that are actually good friends? Six? Eight? It depends, if you can build some relationships without communicating very much, but still maintain friend status. It’s probably not more than twenty. On the other hand, as far as employees go, you can have a lot more than 20 and you shouldn’t limit yourself to progress that only 20 people could provide for you when you could have hundreds or thousands. Wouldn’t you be surprised if there were companies out there that had hundreds of thousands? Maybe Walmart does.

Don’t spend time on learning or talking to single individuals when you can create a framework that can allow other people to do it. Write a spec, enforce it by means of an enforcer; then you’re no longer limited by your hours. You’re now only limited by your money and other people’s hours. Your ability to choose the right people and enforce that they are actually getting the things done is critical. Don’t teach, don’t absorb more info, you have done enough of that. Scale through other people’s hours. That way when balls are dropped, you aren’t left there feeling like stuff.

Let’s take a look at Bill Gates, who was once the richest person in the world. Even if he doesn’t regain that status he’s still in the top one percent of anyone that’s ever existed in the history of mankind. And if you took his wealth and compared it to the ten people close to him they would have a much higher combined wealth. Because no matter how rich you are, ten people combined that are in your peer group will be richer. Well that’s interesting. So, wouldn’t it be smarter to convince these ten people that have more than you will ever have, no matter how hard you could ever possibly work or how much luck you ever got, wouldn’t it be smarter to let those ideas that so influenced you and invigorated you influence those groups that are far greater that you could ever be? Yes! And that’s why he does it. That’s why Bill Gates doesn’t just do his own thing, Bill Gates has the giving pledge, which attracts other billionaires and multi-millionaires to give huge portions of their wealth away, sooner rather than later, to things that they believe in.

A lot of smart people think that the solutions to the problems that they have are themselves. They think if they take the right nootropics, if they work harder, if they put more hours in, that’s going to get them to where they want to be. Truth of the matter is, you yourself don’t scale; you can’t do ten times as much work. If you could do ten times as much work, you could only do it once. But when you use other people, when you use the power of the Internet, when you use the power of machines, when you have machines and other human beings helping you do things, you don’t just get a single 10x benefit. You can get it over and over and over again, because the rest of the world scales, you don’t. All those things that you do, trying to drug yourself and do uber-man method sleep experiments, when they mess up, you have down time. Find the machines, people, and systems that can scale in ways that you can’t and do things that you can’t.

That’s the same type of holistic thinking that leads you away from trying to extract performance out of yourself and towards extracting performance out of other people. How do you become less important to the organization because you’ve done such a good job hiring? How do you become less important to your unhappiness, because you’ve surrounded yourself with the right systems and habits and people? The joy is nearly effortless. No hard busting of ass on your own.

Do losers have good ideas? Yes, they can. Can you learn from losers? Yes, you can. The trick is to know whether this loser is offering you good advice through actual experience, or offering you the advice that is untested. That’s the magic. Stopped clocks are right twice a day and losers are often right too. The magic is checking to see if the loser’s advice is given intelligently elsewhere. A quorum is a fancy word for getting a few different opinions on a thing and seeing if there’s a consensus.

It seems like the best books on success are never written by the most successful people, the best books on relationships are never written by the people with the best relationships, and the best books on happiness are never written by the happiest people. It also seems that the best sports coaches are never the best players. For that reason, be willing to give some leeway.

Kids don’t forcefully receive any more money after the age of 18, but if you get a divorce, your ex gets paid forever. Not the same 18 years that kids get, but forever. Why is this?

This is one of those situations where, in a world where everyone’s playing a slightly different video game, the intuitive solutions that you have are sometimes are the worst things you can do. “Oh, my family member needs money. Let me lend it to them. He’ll pay me back. Oh, I’ve never heard from my family member again, and now they tell anyone that’ll listen that I’m a piece of stuff because they owe me money.” Oops. Scivivors didn’t get that memo; that that’s actually perhaps the wrong way to handle giving money to family.

Give it to them? Or get a collateral upfront, or don’t give it to them? Or, give it to them and make sure they pay it back? But if you’re giving and they can’t pay it back, you probably just lost a good relationship. You paid for the privilege of making them a worse person. They don’t teach you these ideas in most schools and it’s really important to learn. You could call that wisdom. Why don’t they have a class called wisdom? It would be doable. Maybe this great work of advice is that class.

Because contraceptives are effective, eventually the world will have selected through evolution for people that actually want to have kids as opposed people that inadvertently have kids through having sex. Contraceptive effectiveness makes not creating kids easier, whereas people who want to have kids actually have them. In a few hundred years from now, you’re going to see a lot of those people that wanted to have kids—or we’re just bad at using contraceptives.

If your biology affects your society, and over time, your society actually affects your biology, it’s a never-ending cycle. Guys today keep opting for big boobs. That keeps happening. People are going to bigger boobs, because heredity exists; that’s the selection pressure. We had biology that affected our society, and now our society affects our biology. If you need to take care of your child for years so he or she can survive on their own, then you can do more programming through nurture and less programming through nature because you have the time to do so.

It’s easy to discount all of the things that lead to children as things that you don’t care about and are not focused on. It’s also important to understand that the reason you get to play in this game is because it’s very likely that your parents had sex, probably more than once, and were either bad at using condoms or were told that mommy couldn’t get pregnant or they actually wanted to have a kid. One could imagine it is not the most common outcome, and that maybe most guys that have sex do it for the joy, while preferring that kids not come out of it.

What we have now is a disagreement, a misalignment of desires between the system that allowed us to exist and the future. If 10,000 years from now we compared what was left over from you assuming you were not still around (which is a pretty good bet, no one has lived that long yet so it’s unlikely that you will be the first) then what’s more likely to be around, your genes in the form of your offspring, or a building that you built? It just so happens that buildings crumble, and we don’t have any 10,000-year-old buildings around here. Out of all the things in this world that you can literally build with your own hands, energy, and time, a child is the most likely thing that will take parts of you and take it into the future.

Your offspring will look like you and operate like you, if you were there to raise them, and even if you were not. Nature matters, as does nurture, but if you didn’t have the nurture the nature would still matter. So now we live our lives trying to optimize for ourselves greedily at the cost at the future, and some people could be okay with that trade. Maybe you are almost okay with the next 10,000 years having a little more hardship if there’s a chance that you can have a better life now. Is it greedy? Yes, by definition it is, for the same reason you don’t let a bunch of strangers in your house and you don’t let them into your wallet. In this world of limited resources, that which preceded you has engrained in you the value of choosing self over others, family over others, kin over others, friends and team mates over others. Any one of you that decides that you are going to try and shift that paradigm and do a different thing, you will be selected against and you will be removed from competition. You will not have offspring and your offspring may not survive because you tried to be smarter than the system that brought you into this world.

What’s right for the future of the world is often wrong for us individually, and what’s wrong for the future is right for us from a short term or mid-term personal development standpoint.

Do you care about money? Do you care about excellence in areas that are not producing kids? If you do, producing kids is going eat up a lot of your time, and while it will give you fulfillment that you couldn’t otherwise get, and in the mid- to long term it’s going to pay off great, (hopefully), it is still a trade.

There appears to be many advertisements for diversity and quotas and report cards out there. Why are you classifying by race? Why don’t you classify by stupid? How many stupid people have you hired? Or how many rage-filled people? Or how many depressed people? Or how many people who always say the wrong thing? Why are you using race to select between people? Doesn’t that make you a racist? Isn’t there some more important categorization that you can use for humans? You’re better off dividing people by profession, or by their free time activities. Some people act one way at work and act another way when they’re not at work.

Driving tests. Do you think that everyone, when they reach sixteen years of age, should get a driver’s license? Obviously not, and that’s why we have tests. Do you think that only people that have reached the age of sixteen in the United States should be the only people that are allowed to take those tests? It’s probably true that some people aren’t ready at twenty, and some people are ready at twelve, because we don’t all develop at the same rate. We have diversity. We have the excellence, robustness and the redundancy of multiple people with multiple growth strategies. Some people are early bloomers, and some people are late bloomers. Some people are good with hand/eye coordination and driving, some people are idiot savants who can’t ever drive anything, but if you ask them when the second Tuesday of March was a couple thousand years ago, they know the date. Or vice versa, you tell them the date, they tell you which day of the week it was. There are people that have mental ability and mental capacity in great excess, in a certain area, because they have diminished capacity in another area.

Now, is that to say that it’s a zero-sum game? Is that to say that you can only have intellect in an area if you become stupid someplace else? No, definitely not. Because of the power of analogy, the more you understand about the world in one area, the more you understand about the world in all the other areas, as long as you learn how to apply the analogy and framework somewhere else. It may not increase what they call in the study of intelligence, your “Big G,” your general intelligence, how well you do on an IQ test, but you can have a high “Big G” without ever learning a language. You can have Big G in intelligence without ever learning how to do anything. If you were deprived of basically all enriching information, born on an island and didn’t have culture or have never heard a joke, or never heard a song, you would still have the Big G that you were born with. Let’s see Big G for what it is: it’s a useful metric to decide whether there are some exercises that have good fall-over usefulness.

Very few people can genuinely appreciate a gift and not, to some degree, feel like they have to reciprocate. A properly programmed person is going to reciprocate with another awesome gift, and you’ve got a self-referencing thought; i.e., “Christmas time, I love giving gifts, they love giving gifts, everyone’s happy, and it’s win for everybody.” That’s what gift giving is. It’s convincing you to do something for yourself, but the thing that you’re doing for yourself is that you’re doing it for someone else. “I’m too lazy to scratch my back, but I’ll scratch yours, and then you’ll scratch mine because we believe in reciprocity. The end result is you’ve got a scratched back and I’ve got a scratched back, but neither one of us would have scratched our own out of laziness.”

The reason that gift giving exists in the world, and the reason that credit is so powerful in the world, is because it’s the lubrication that causes human beings to get motivated and do things that their otherwise lazy, calorie-saving brain wouldn’t engage in.

We need those heroes to go out there and run three-minute miles, or whatever that crazy number is for the super-low time in which one can run a mile. Scivive can assure you, most people never come close to running such a thing. But we need those people who can excel and like to give gifts. We need those people who like to make other people happy. We need those people who are willing to take it on faith and give you credit, that they’ll do a thing for you today, or give you a thing today, because in the future they believe that you’ll pull through and do the right thing afterward.

Without those amplifiers, without those lubricants, things would grind to a halt and no one would do anything for anyone. It’s a tragedy that you see during times of depression that giant masses of intelligent, useful people with access to resources are not able to overcome the resting friction of laziness, or the difficulty of asset allocation. They’re too greedy and they don’t want to part with the thing until it’s paid for, because they’re afraid they’ll never get paid. Then if enough people do that, nobody does anything anymore. Houses don’t get built, mortgages cannot be offered, and people start sleeping in tents.

It’s funny that when you ask people for respect and gratitude, they get first-level benefit from being grateful, then they get the happiness. You get to watch the happiness, you’re one level removed. They got paid to generate it, and you had to pay to generate it. You had a cost and they had a benefit. It’s hilarious, it’s something that costs them nothing so they literally profit from the impetus. Something that benefits them directly, whereas you just get to watch them benefiting and derive some indirect benefit which has to be begged for; or has to be fought for. How did that evolve? How did those who are turning down the profit twice to direct any actual impetus cost evolve?

That concept of tipping points and thresholds is interesting, like the sayings, “Guests are like fish, they begin to stink after three days,” or “Wind to a relationship is like wind to a flame, is like distance to a relationship: a small amount makes it stronger, and too much extinguishes it.” This whole concept of thresholds existing is very interesting. There’s a saying that you shouldn’t test friends because they’ll fail. Don’t unfairly test friends, or test them for no good, wholesome reason. If you can reasonably fairly test people for something that’s important, without much overhead cost or without appearing to be manipulating, then it can be useful. One could probably write an entire separate book on how to prune your social garden to have more enjoyment and less pain from the friends, lovers, and family relationships that you have at your life; that’s a book on its own.

Should you test those around you? Yes. Not in a time consuming manner, and not unreasonably. Is it reasonable for someone to test the fire department by burning their house down? No. Is it reasonable for people to test their immune system by injecting weird diseases into their blood? No. Is it reasonable to test your blood clotting by chopping your head off? No. The amount that you can gain by testing someone is actually in direct proportion to the options you have upon a failed test. If you like to test all the girls that you’re with, what are the only possible outcomes resulting from that test? They could pass or they could fail. Or, they could get an inconclusive or detect it. You’re a testing a person, and most people don’t like that stuff because of all risk for them. If they pass, they’re still where they started, but if they fail, their life is much worse. It’s like it’s an option that’s one directional for them. When you test people, they’re mostly getting bent over on the deal. You’re actually to some small degree harming everyone that you test because you’re offering them the opportunity of getting kicked out of your life with the upside of basically nothing.

You don’t even want to tell them that it was a test because then they’ll punish you for doing that test. It’s an interesting metric to know that you harm those people that you test to some degree. In the corporate environment, when you give people tests that are time consuming, you used up the time of lots of people for a test. There’s a requisite to a job, but you’re only giving one person the job. That’s like having an artistic project, a competition to draw a logo for you and lots of people compete, but only one of the logos gets chosen. Think about how many man hours of, somewhat (but not totally) wasted time occurred because they were all doing the same work, when, perhaps you could have looked at the field of participants to see if any of their other work was good enough and only picked the ones that had a chance of winning?

Therefore, the concept is that testing is actually an attack on the other person. This could be a very interesting discovery. When you’re out there harming your loved ones and the people on your team by testing them, you better have some upside for doing that. The upside that you have only exists if upon a failure by them you can do something better.

For a thought experiment, let’s assume you live on a deserted island with one other person and you’re lovers, if you test them and they fail, you may come to dislike them. Now they’re not worthy of your time. Your only option at that point is loneliness, because you’re on a deserted island.

If only one person in the world can perform a job, for some weird reason, then there’s no reason to test them! They do the job or they don’t; if you test them and they fail, you are still going to hire them because you hope that that was just a random mistake from that only guy suitable for the job. How much do you want the job actually to get done? Maybe you want to save your money so much that you just don’t ever hire them. Maybe in that case, the testing still matters. The point is, testing only becomes valuable with an increased amount of changes that you can make upon a failure. If you can’t afford to go back out there and find a new party to interact with, or you can’t afford to hire somebody that’s better, maybe you’re better off lowering your standards than testing and failing somebody out of the pool when you don’t have any options. Now, should you have more options? Yes. Go build them, become worthy of them. Should you deserve an amazing relationship? Yes. Be an amazing partner. Earn the right to demand an amazing relationship, whether in business or in love.

The discovery that Scivive is trying to share with you is testing can be good. It can be bad, it can be harmful. It usually is, and its value has more to do with you and the options you have based on when that other party that’s been tested fails. It has less to do with the party that’s tested—you’re not bringing much value to their life by giving them that lose-or-break-even experience. Unreasonable, unfair tests for particularly greedy and jealous self-serving motives that don’t help the other party should be considered punishable and as a tax.

Much of what makes you human primarily developed for others to observe rather than for you to experience. It was more for them, and through their correct response and your bond to them, than it was for you. Laughter, yelling when surprised, crying—all are signaling mechanisms built to tell those around you the truth faster and more honestly than you could consciously through speaking effort. This is why dogs raise their tails and wag them; they need a fast thought-free method to communicate important information to their pack. What real advantages do we have as humans over all the other animals in the kingdom? Intelligence, communication, and tools. How good would the tools be without communication? Without someone being able to tell you or show you by example how to make or use one, you wouldn’t get too far.

Crying is a signaling mechanism that you genuinely need assistance. When someone scares you and you scream, that’s intended for everyone else to come help your ass! Posture, eye contact, crying, yelling, body movement, all of these things, they are signaling.

There are a lot of people on this green planet, and we all want to feel important. You want to feel important, everyone wants to feel important. Why? Because it’s the social world we live in. You most likely don’t make your own food, or didn’t invent this language that you are reading in. You don’t make your own clothes, you didn’t pave the roads, and you didn’t refine the gas that’s going in the car. You need other people to survive, and if other people don’t think you’re important, if you’re not significant, and if civilization starts to deteriorate or resources become very limited, you would get left out first and nobody wants that for themselves. We’re programmed to be meaningful among society.

Another upside: if there is wisdom of the crowds, which by theory in study there is, how do you execute the wisdom of the crowds personally? You need to care about the crowd, and what does that mean? It means that you’re not a psychopath without feeling and empathy and caring about what other people think. This means that if you care about what other people think, then you must want to be respected by them. You want them to think you’re important and look at the social group you’re in and feel important and have significance.

Now, do some people do this wrong? Yes. Some people try and get significance in a way that is more harmful than meaningful. Some people receive significance or respect at the end of a gun, some people get it through gang membership, and some people get it through self-harm or by harming others.

The Jackass (television show) guys became very successful and caused a lot of laughter in the world by destroying their bodies. These guys bodies are nearly destroyed; they have catheters, they are missing tons of teeth, they have PTSD, they have huge health issues because they sacrificed their bodies for probably lots of reasons, but one important one was the significance and feelings of the people who saw them doing what they were doing. They didn’t just mess their bodies up, they messed their bodies up with lots of cameras and those lots of cameras were an important part of what they did. If they were alone, you’d find they did a lot less of that crazy self-harming stuff. For social situations that are in front of the camera, they’ll engage in riskier behavior because the profit to them is more. If you’re the only one laughing, it’s funny, but if you and the rest of the world is laughing, it’s way funnier!

What’s the summary of this section? There are more and less profitable ways to become significant. Some of the things you might do to become significant, like flapping your lips and talking when you already know the person you’re talking to understands what you’re trying to say, but you just want to seem smart so you keep talking. If communication is as useful as getting an idea from one person to another, we’ll say that’s the level one form of communication, maybe influence and motivation will be level two, and level three. Let’s say level one is just getting the idea across. As soon as you know you got your idea across, please shut up and let the next good idea spread.

Men say women are a mystery and very hard to understand. It turns out that they’re only hard to understand and a mystery if you don’t understand the evolutionary psychology and game theory behind what they do. When you start to analyze that and have it in your head rather quickly, or the tacit understanding of it, then you understand why they do what they do, and you understand why it works and how you might not even suggest that they change much of it. Apparently everyone wins imaginary arguments in their showers. Due to the prevalence of the confession, it’s obvious how important relationships and significance are in our society. Studies show that the pain you feel when you don’t get the attention you desire from a person you feel is important, is nearly the same pain you feel from physical pain.

How do you feel important? Maybe through force. But how do you get away with it? Have a good excuse. There are guys who go out, dying for an excuse. Sometimes life’s got you down, and you don’t feel like you’ve got a way out. You want to hurt somebody, because it works. You hurt somebody, and now you feel important and they will show you respect. Now you have more power because you just took it. It’s not beautiful. It’s weird though, that it may make you feel good at least temporarily. We all have that piece of stuff in us that wants to do the wrong thing sometimes.

When you’re not feeling good, and someone screws up royally, you may wish to social justice warrior that guy, which is the popular thing. People get their violence out through social justice warrior tactics lately.

Social justice warriors want to do negative reinforcing, retaliatory actions under the guise of something positive. It’s just a way to feel more important, more significant and be violent and hurtful towards someone else with a good excuse. You can be compassionate to people who are bigots, that’s not social justice warrior. It’s not called social justice, it’s called social justice warrior.

For child bearing to take so long, and for survival in general against other tribes, against the elements, animals and disease, and just general life is so hard, we needed to develop that strength, we needed to develop that cooperation, or we would just be lizard or tiger food. To not be something’s food is actually a lot of work. That animal wants to kill you and eat you, and you have the littlest teeth and claws of all, so what do you have? You possess cooperation and tools, with cooperation being the most important; for if someone didn’t teach you how to build the tool, it is very unlikely that you would figure it out on your own. You don’t even get to use tools without cooperation. You think that if you were on an island you would know to make a spear? Even knowing that spears exist and how they are made, you still might not figure it out. You might never make a good spear, and if you can’t make a good spear, what can you make? That’s the most basic tool in the world. You need to cut wood, you need a knife, but how do you make a rope? No idea, twist some stuff together, see if that works.

It gets a lot trickier with emotional needs, there needs to be an emotional service industry, “more on demand.” We have physical services on demand, such as ordering a pizza. People schedule dates with their therapists all day long. Anybody that sits and listens to your damn problems, even if they just nod, you feel that that person is important, and connected, vital and really helping you. That’s what you probably feel and it’s probably true. Human beings need to feel heard.

What could give more significance than shutting up and listening to someone else? Actually listening to them. How could you give someone more significance than that? When you had an idea today, how much time did someone put into making sure they understood it? All the time it took! Because they know it’s important for you to feel that understood. It’s very important. It’s also greedy for the listener, one may want to understand what you are saying. Might turn out beneficial for them, because you might be saying something really useful.

You’ve heard the saying, “success leaves clues,” which has been made popular by Tony Robbins and Jim Rohn, two extremely successful performance coaches. You hear it so often and it’s so obviously true that no one ever does anything with it. People hear that science works, and then you notice that they don’t do any science themselves. You hear people talk about how important it is to eat healthy and then you look at what they eat and you’re thinking, “Wow. It’s like these people discovering that a good thing exists allows them to feel like they’re profiting vicariously by other people actually doing the things while they, themselves, do the opposite.”

You could almost make the statement that telling people that there’s a better way to do things and showing people that they are doing them better could actually do those people harm, in that they might think that those people are part of their social group and therefore enough of that is being done already, that they actually feel benefit from it by proxy. For instance, there’s a girl you want to make love to, but you already have a girlfriend, so you want to have your friend hook up with that girl because some part of you feels great profit in seeing that girl get hooked up with by someone else in your crew, in your group, in your family. That doesn’t just exist in interpersonal relationships with group fitness, it also exists in stuff that you choose not to do because you subconsciously think someone else on your crew is already doing it, but in reality this isn’t the type of thing where there’s a herd immunity.

There is no herd immunity for being a fat, overweight individual. The health costs of you being an overweight person will arrive upon you, regardless of how many of your friends choose to be overweight as well. Now, you could abstract and make some fancy excuse that their gut biomes are different, they might share saliva with you, they might be more resistant to disease and have better immune systems and somehow that would benefit you, but let’s be serious, you would get those same benefits more or less if you weren’t fat yourself.

Anyway, the discovery here is that sometimes people feel as though they’re making progress by watching other people’s progress, like watching sports. Your team is winning, you feel like a winner, but let’s be serious, your team is not actually your team. It’s a group of people who wouldn’t give you the time of day if they saw you. You think and you brainwash yourself into thinking your team, your tribe and your club and you are all kicking ass together because your team is kicking ass, but in reality you’re not kicking ass, they are.

In reality, in a time of war, they’re not kicking ass either, they’re playing a game when there’s real stuff at stake. The playing of games and the optimizing of outcomes for people who aren’t you, but you have somehow decided are a part of you; the teams you choose, the friends you choose, the family that you probably didn’t get to choose, but continue to allow to be a part of your life, don’t mistake their progress and their excellence for your own. Don’t starve yourself from excellence and progress because you’ve already fulfilled that desire and become full on the food of other people’s progress.

Tony Robbins says that all pain comes from one of your six needs not being met, but Scivive has some problems with that formulation. Tony Robbins’s six human needs are a useful way to look at the very complex inputs and outputs of the human emotional system. However, at the same time, they are inaccurate and wishful, and even though they are inaccurate and wishful, they are still way more useful than most other related ideas.

Tony Robbins’s six human needs are: certainty, significance, variety, connection, growth, and contribution. Growth and contribution do not exist as needs for lots of people, because many people are happy with the way things are. They don’t need anything else, they’re happy.

People want to be apologized to, because it reduces the chance that they’ll need to be apologized to again. If someone harms you or wrongs you, what is most important to you is that they don’t do it again. Apologies are a way to gain confidence as to the brightness and excellence of your future by having a life free from unnecessary or unfair harm. The person who has harmed you understands the following things: they understand exactly what harm was done, why that harm was unfair, how the harm occurred, and why the harm shouldn’t occur. They tell you how they’re not going to harm you in the future, and they tell you why it’s important to themselves that they not harm you in the future, and how they’re going to specifically not harm you in the future. The combination of original understanding of what occurred, intention as to why what occurred was bad, intention and understanding as to how the occurrence happened, then leads you into correct future action for correct future good reason.

The issuance of all of those things must be with sincerity, because sincerity is required to have a confidence that the plan gets executed. Just because someone knows they did you wrong and don’t want to do you wrong again, they may do it again anyway because there’s so much profit in it, or it’s their habit, or it’s their nature. When someone apologizes on one or more occasions, their apology can be worthless if it is insincere.

The point is to give you, as a reasonable person, a better feeling about being apologized to so that you can operate cooperatively with them again, or realize that they’re deceptive and that you need to move on with your life and not give them the chance to make the same mistake twice, because you don’t believe in the likelihood that they’ll follow through and not harm you again. That’s the reason sincerity is so important, because internally it anchors their own belief system to understand the importance of doing this thing right, because it’s emotionally tied to a feeling, which is usually followed through with extra attention, extra detail, and extra effort for things that people truly feel remorse, sorrow or importance about. They assign more processing power in their brain towards the effects. They assign more recognition of things that lead to those events in the real world, and they notice that something’s happening quicker.  

If you love your car and your car suddenly makes a funny sound, you notice it. For people who don’t love their car, it can make all types of funny sounds and they just don’t notice or care, because they didn’t develop that caring by trying to develop it, whether consciously or by accident. The people who care are more mindful, and therefore more sensitive, and interact in a more positive manner with that specific thing they care about.

How many times in your life has someone transgressed upon you, and then when you said it wasn’t cool, they started telling you all of the reasons why they did it? The problem is that every single excuse they give you for why they did what they did leads them farther from correct action. Every minute they spend telling you about how they screwed you over, how they didn’t mean to, how it wasn’t their fault but was the fault of some other thing—every single word that they say leads them farther from correct action in the future. It leads them farther from having cooperation with you, leaves you with a higher degree of certainty that they will screw you over again, and the next time, they’re going to have another really cool excuse and story why it wasn’t their responsibility, and that there was nothing that could be done about it, they’re powerless to do anything about it. They sell themselves this line of nonsense, making themselves less powerful, less reliable, less trustworthy, less benefitting from a cooperative relationship with you or anyone else who detects their nature or habit. It hurts you, it hurts themselves, and it makes the world a worse place.

There are two components to making the world a better place using this system. If you screw up, you will give a good apology. A good apology has the minimum dumbass excuses possible. Dumb excuses don’t lead to a brighter future, dumb excuses don’t tell someone that you are actually a good person that cares about them and wants the best things for them and is also committed to doing the right thing.

“In the future, I am going to do these things because I am committed to this outcome.” That’s a good apology. It goes on: “Sir, I’m sorry I was late. I understand how important it is that I show up here on time, I really appreciate the opportunity to work here. Here are the things that I’m going to do to make sure that I’m never late again. I’m going to verify that my car starts within an hour of when I need to I leave for work, and if for some reason it doesn’t start, now I’ve got an extra hour to get it fixed so that I can still show up and work on time. I’m going to fill up my gas tank at night, so that even if my kids take it out for a joy ride, or the gas station isn’t working or open, or if some other weird thing happens, there’s more gas in my tank that enhances the chance that I can get to work. I’m going to have it so that if for some reason there’s a blizzard and I can’t get to work no matter what, I’m able to work from home because I’ve got the phone numbers that I need, I’ve got the data I need. I’m taking proactive, measured action in order to achieve this goal which is important to me and important to you.”

That is an amazing apology. That is an apology that does more than lip service. That is an apology that leads to a better world for you and the person that you’re apologizing to.

Now, how many things in the following “apology” are really just lame excuses? “Well, you know, my car usually starts, and I didn’t know that it would be snowing, and I didn’t know that the gas station would be closed. I just didn’t foresee these things.” This is because you didn’t care. If you cared, it would be a hobby for you to think about and you would be prepared for it.

As an example, the difference between someone who takes responsibility and one who doesn’t. Through taking that responsibility, that person becomes more powerful, more effective, more worthy of higher pay, and more worthy of higher and greater employment with the best companies that exist. The person that takes responsibility becomes powerful.

If you think you’re not responsible, you have made yourself powerless. If it is true that you are not responsible for being late, then it is true that there is nothing you can do to fix it. You can’t get a more reliable car, you can’t live closer to work, you can’t live at work, you can’t bring your work home with you, you can’t leave earlier, you can’t start your own company and work as a partner with your original company instead of an employee; you can do none of those things because you’re not responsible.

Some people don’t want to be here at all, they can’t wait to get off this trip of life; they kill themselves. Everyone in this world has a completely different set of responses that are hard to predict. It’s like when a policeman pulls you over in the United States, and he’s got his hand on the gun, it’s kind of scary. Everyone knows why you’ve got your hand on your gun, because you’re reducing the amount of time it’s going to take to kill them. Many people don’t like that. Some people, they don’t like how the officers are hiding in your blind spot, you can’t see what they are doing, they are sneaking up on you, they blinding you with overhead lights, calling for backup, having you sit on your hands, and doing all of these things which you feel are totally unfair to you, and that make you feel threatened.

You’re not armed, you’re just going about your life, maybe got pulled over for a speeding ticket, or you didn’t come to a complete stop at a stop sign, and now your existence as a human being is being physically threatened because you’re in the lottery that he sees you doing something differently from what you’re supposed to do. You forget that you’re in a dangerous situation, you reach for your cell phone, the officer has recently watched a YouTube video where a policeman got shot, and now it’s on the officer’s mind. Maybe your phone looks like a gun, and now you’re getting shot. Is that fair?

Here’s the interesting part of this story: Look at it from the officer’s perspective. What is the difference between a good guy and a bad guy, visually? How can you tell the difference, visually? Can you tell the difference between a good person and a bad person? Can you identify a serial killer who’s got an arrest warrant and who knows that when handing over a driver’s license to the officer for checking, that person is going to go do life in jail or be executed? A person will do anything to not have that happen, including kill the officer who’s going to run that license. The officer is quite reasonable in keeping a hand on the gun, in keeping in the blind spot, in calling for backup and blinding you with the lights because the less threatened the officer feels, the more secure the situation is, and the chances of accidentally shooting you because of false threats are minimized.

What would be normally intuitive to a human being is that you want to maximize your humanity and you want to feel less threatened. You’ll feel less threatened if one displays none of what you would consider crazy bullshit, like unclipping the clasp on a firearm or keeping a hand on a gun. In reality, the actual thing that works is when an officer treats you like a total and complete criminal, has you sit on your hands, and does all the things that can be done to dehumanize you, because through that dehumanization, you actually become more secure, because the officer is less likely to accidentally shoot you from feeling threatened.

Now this is one of those situations in a world where everyone’s playing a slightly different video game. Ask any law enforcement officer what the most dangerous call they go out on is, and you’ll find that domestic calls, where the passions are at their highest, are the most likely to involve violence. You will find the logic of keeping your distance from people, activities, and behaviors that offer more risk of harm than benefit is a universally great strategy.

Do watch the YouTube talk “Never speak to the police.” It’s eye-opening for sure.

Why argue?

You will probably find very, very little enjoyment in trying to educate the people you meet on a day-to-day basis. They will hate being lectured by you, and to add injury to insult, they won’t even learn, and if they do learn, they won’t do the right thing. Save your breath and stop having one-to-one conversations to the maximum of your ability. If you spread your word through scalable means, such as video and audio, and allow them to be transmitted to people electronically and in print, then you can positively influence lives at scale and when people post uneducated and hateful comments, you quite literally don’t have to read them. When you have a one-to-one conversation in the street, say with someone promoting Islam and handing out mini-Korans, you’re going to find that you can’t avoid the negative feedback. It will take your time, and it will not pay you back.

If you’re building an idea and if you are the edge of understanding an idea and at the forefront, then that pedantic stuff is actually super important, because that’s the difference between getting the next idea right and not. For the layman, who’s not on the edge of understanding, who’s not getting ten different opinions about a thing that compare and contrast them in his or her own mental research paper, the 80 percent is quite good, and you should focus on those 80 percent. Do not get trapped up on the remaining 20 percent, unless it’s your thing, or something you have a focus or specialty in. You know what, you can still mess around at that 20 percent arguing with the person that just told it to you, and you don’t have to educate that person. That person already knows, so get what you can get; absorb. You’ll find that the amount of profit that comes from attempting to change other people is that most people hate you, and they don’t want to hear your point of view. Are you really helping them by making them hate you and giving them advice they won’t take? You may be making them feel worse.

There is a section on how the highest and best use of someone that has just met you is to argue with everything you say, so that they can appear cool to onlookers, or maybe even you. This is variable, based on their estimate of whether they want to align with you or not, whether they see more value in being competitive to you and fighting with you, or whether they see more value in aligning with you. You’ll find that when you present the same idea in the same way to two identical people in two alternate universes, what a lucky example that would be, that the person, the twin, who sees more value in you because he feels that you have something to offer, and will be around long enough to provide it, will tend to be much more receptive to your ideas; whereas a person who knows that you’re leaving shortly, or knows that you are unable to provide them any value, monetary, social, or otherwise, is going to see more profit in being more belligerent and disagreeing with your idea before the facts.

When you meet people and you want to influence them, thus have fewer arguments and more progress and education, to see if you can display that you have value to offer and then imply that you’ll be around long enough to offer it. Now, will this work with everyone? Nope. Will this even work most of the time? Depends on which kind of ideas you’re selling. If what you’re selling is wrong, Scivive hopes that it fails all the time. Please stop trying to spread wrong ideas.

Don’t aim for “over respect” by trying to take credit for every single thing that you could or should, because at some point you’re going to lose more than you gain. If people don’t already respect you to the degree that you think they should, it’s not because you haven’t given them enough evidence or won enough arguments, it’s because they have profit in or a habit of not doing so. Once you’ve reached the minimum effective dose of respect transition, pass that credit out and you’ll see more profit.

If you think it’s your job to make the whole world believe properly about a thing, you need to pre-suppose that the same stupidity that brought them to a solution different than the one that you feel you’ve got right, is the same stupidity that they’ll employ to misinterpret or ignore what it is that you’re trying to teach them. It’s the reason that there’s an education system that revolves around you not getting to learn a new thing until you learn the last thing. If you didn’t learn the last thing, you don’t get to learn the next thing, they keep you in that class again and again, and only then, when they think you’ll benefit from a harder class that builds on the last class do you earn the opportunity to try learning that new thing.

The Art of Being Right: 38 Ways to Win an Argument (also The Art of Controversy, or Eristic Dialectic: The Art of Winning an Argument) is an acidulous, sarcastic treatise written by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. For example, Number 5 is “False Propositions.” A false premise is a flawed proposition that forms the basis of an argument or syllogism. Since the premise (proposition, or assumption) is not correct, the conclusion drawn may be in error. For example, this syllogism involves a false premise:

If the man is wealthy, he has earned his money. (premise)

The man is wealthy. (premise)

Therefore he has earned his money. (conclusion)

This argument is logically valid, but quite demonstrably wrong, because its first premise is false. A man can become wealthy through inheritance, fraud, winning the lottery, etc.

Even if you shouldn’t be effective, the stupid people still believe you. One could imagine that it’s abuse of the common human misconceptions such as ad hominem and appeal to authority and other biases; sunk cost fallacy and such.

If you select a group of stupid people, there are things that they’re incapable of learning. Even if they were capable of learning, there are prerequisites that they need to understand in order to employ the knowledge. To hope that they’ve met the prerequisites and that today is the day that they’re ready to receive the information, presented it in a way that they’ve never seen before, that they haven’t already discounted, misconstrued, or become immune to, for all of those things to align, for you to be the day, the minute and the moment and the bearer of truth and change for that person, is often futile. That may be the reason that so few Republicans go into arguments with Democrats and leave, having changed parties. If you were to chart all of the political conversations that have ever occurred, and chart how many of those conversations resulted in a genuine belief change, you’d find it to be shockingly low. This is why, for some reason, people who vote Republican tend to stay that way for the rest of their lives, and people who vote Democrat tend to stay that way for the rest of their lives; because whatever immunity to new facts and ways of believing things they had when they came in, they keep for a lifetime.

The point is, don’t live your life as a blocker of ideas and don’t live your life as a problem solver of other people’s problems, because you will be restricted by what problems they think matter and what they’re aware of, particularly people that are overly conceited or arrogant and full of themselves that just happen to be wrong as well. That’s the worst of all worlds.

If you’ve got a bad personality and you’re still productive, effective and useful, we’re willing to pay the personality price. However, if you’ve got a bad personality and you’re spreading the wrong ideas in the wrong way and causing the world to be a worse place, that’s not a good place to be. If you look at a lot of political arguments and the way they’re structured, with the ad hominem attacks and the assumption of worse motive and intention, there’s somebody on one side of the argument doing real bad for the planet. You can argue the right things the wrong way. You can try to achieve the right goals with the wrong methods, and end up doing more harm than good.

When you disregard specificity, you end up in arguments with people you actually agree with. There’s a law where by which two logical people given the same data will always arrive at the same conclusions. The only way it doesn’t occur is if one of them is not logical, that’s it. What happens in this world of intelligent smart people, some choose a different set of facts than others, some have hidden objectives that they’re trying to achieve, that they’re not aware of, and some of them just don’t speak with enough specificity to exclude the arguments close to their own, but not others’. Then, they have to defend positions that are not theirs. If people are more careful with words, more mindful of their objectives, then some of the smartest people of the world could come to more consensus of the correct paths. At least if not coming to consensus on a path, coming to consensus on “yes, a person that believes these things should choose for this, and we will both amend and update our decisions if we can discover better prices, better evidence, and better input for us to manipulate for better output.”

A good saying is, “outstanding claims require outstanding evidence.” Thus, if you think that you know something rare and insane has happened, you should require rather rare and insane proof of it happening, because you care about Bayes theorem and you accurately know that you must look at the likelihood that something is actually happening or not, and therefore modify what you require as evidence. Therefore, your evidence required for a rare thing must be much larger and much harder to pass than the evidence required for things that are common.

“Hitchens’s razor” is an epistemological razor (a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to quickly eliminate nonsensical explanations for a phenomenon, or avoid unnecessary actions) expressed by writer Christopher Hitchens. It says that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim. If this burden is not met, then the claim has no merit, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it.

Hitchens has phrased the razor in writing as, “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a type of cognitive bias in which people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. This is because people of low ability do not possess the insight needed to recognize their own incompetence. The combination of low cognitive ability and lack of self-awareness leads them to overestimate their own capabilities.

Stop trying to educate fools, there’s no profit in it. If you win, then you lose because they may despise you. If you lose, you’ve lost an argument to an idiot.

Be smart enough to lose an argument and learn something. Scivive can never figure out why people don’t respect intellect more. It is as though when arguing about an idea, people care so much about thinking they’ve won the argument that they can’t learn. They care more about looking right than learning a new thing. That is why so often you will see truly well-spoken and knowledgeable people being talked down to and yelled at by idiots, because the idiots are so short-sighted as to see the only goal as appearing to win an argument, not making a powerful intelligent friend, or really trying to change their mind, or even learning themselves. They’re only interested in the shortest goal they can visualize, which is to appear to win this argument right now, in front of these people.

If only the stupid were smarter, they’d know enough that there’s often an opportunity to learn from a skilled opponent instead of saying the same things over and over again every time a subject comes up. If you have a good memory, you will more quickly tire of saying the same things over and over again, because they are fresher in the mind of someone who remembers how short a time ago you had to use the same arguments. Being reasonable and better at winning arguments by assuming someone else’s best argument and improving its presentation is possible.

Honor the feelings, not the words. What would make you feel I understand you?

Hitchens’s debate tactics included ingratiating himself to his audience. “Isn’t it wonderful to have such people volunteering to hear about X on such a wonderful night? That is to say, I won’t speak to a captive audience, so anyone not here voluntarily, please leave now. I like the people of X because of Y good thing.”

Dress up like a really old dude, and then tear that costume off. Pretend you’re introducing yourself as the upcoming speaker, and then rip on out of it.

Imagine the silliness of me selling you a cure for your disease called “the magic high five.” HIGH FIVE! You’re cured! Borat tonality—stupid, don’t fall for it.

“Hello everyone, I have a surprise for you. I’m actually pro aging. I want everyone to start to smell funny, have hairs to grow out of their ears.”

Reframe the question of the debate: “It’s obvious that X and X, and so really the question of the debate is Y, which is unfortunate for my opponents here, because if those three things are true, they must lose this debate.”

It’s odd to be put on stage arguing against someone who is literally on death’s side, arguing for death to kill more people sooner. One may wish death would replace the opponent’s spot on that stage so one could battle the immortal foe directly.

If you’re already old, you’re helpless, and we can’t help you. The older you get, the less we can do for you. Every cure to every disease is anti-aging medicine. That’s what aging is, you see, it’s just all the set of crap we haven’t cured yet that takes longer to deteriorate you compared to problems that act faster, like heart attacks.

What’s the real difference between a heart attack that takes five minutes to kill you, and a gradual heart attack that takes a few years, or a lifetime? In the end your heart has killed you, one way or the other. If someone chooses to shoot you with a rifle, but the trigger has a really long trigger pull, say it takes a year for it to fire, do you as the bullet receiver care how long it took to fire upon you?

In this argument, if judged fairly, one extra day of life would win the premise. If you think people should live one day longer, to say goodbye to their loved ones, then yes, the motion is that life isn’t long enough. A single minute won would win the debate logically, so stupid. What a stupid question, whose life? The life of someone on death row, perhaps not. The life of someone just born, yeah, let’s give them a chance.

Whatever cures you implement will never benefit everyone equally. Aging research doesn’t help young people getting hit by busses or killed in war. What a poorly framed question and analysis. Immortality is impossible, even our sun will die, so can we stop talking about crap that’s already proven, and not relevant? Gravity also exists, what has that to do with healing people?

“Look everyone, I brought a bottle of pills with me, what would you do if I told you that these would lock the age of your body right now, at this moment in time? It comes with a partner pill that does the opposite, it returns you to whichever age you would have been if you didn’t take the first pill.” What would you pay for such a pill? Ten dollars? One million dollars? All your worldly possessions you have right now, because you’ll have more than enough time to make it over and more?

That’s what funding medicine and research does, it’s creating that pill. The other pill we already have, it’s the pill you were born with, and it’s in you. If for some reason you find the pill you were born with isn’t working, and you’re just too damn healthy for your liking at your age, there’s shelves of poison for sale, have a drink, have a smoke, or jump out a window. If you’re afraid that someone somewhere might enjoy a few more days on this planet, or another, and it pisses you off, cancel out their extra years by taking some of your own. Or, you could join them in having the courage of not trying to die earlier by stifling medicine.

The point isn’t to never be wrong; to push heavy weight up a great hill, one’s feet must slip sometimes. If you’re never wrong, you’re rarely right. Respecting your audience by assuming they understand your analogy is team building. If you believe in constant and never ending improvement and your curriculum hasn’t changed in 20 years, you’re a hypocrite.

Because luck happens, you can’t just rank people’s achievements, and then assume that those people are intelligent, effective or worthy in the same order that they have achieved; for if that were the case, then luck would play no role at all. You could just look at a person’s work ethic or knowledge, and then automatically know where they’re ranked in the world of financial achievement.

Jealousy is like the signaling that bacteria or fungus use when they’ve found food. That’s what jealousy is. Jealousy is like “come over here and do what I’m doing, because it works really well.” It’s an effective group signaling strategy.

The reason jealousy is such an effective emotion, it’s the reason you feel jealousy. You could also interpret jealousy the other way like Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, and try and cripple that opponent, not the right way. Jealousy can lead you to a positive outcome or a negative outcome, depending on what you do with the input. It is more often than not a useful input, or we would have seen it disappear from the world.

What jealousy is: “You see that other person has something that you want, and you want it because you think you can have it or deserve it.” It hurts that they have it and you don’t, because you have a belief in yourself that you could have such a thing. When you see someone doing something that you could never possibly do, you’re not jealous. If you see Superman flying in a film, you’re not thinking, “That Superman, I don’t like him; I should be able to fly too.” It just doesn’t feel right. By the way, Scivivors believe in jealousy, it’s effective, and that there is a reason for its existence. It is a signaling mechanism that says “I’m over here, this is working, pay attention, and it’s working, keep an eye on me because it works.” How else would you signal that to people?

You should choose what face to wear during your life, for it not only greatly affects those who look at you, it affects the inside you, looking at you.

Why are the whites of your eyes are so white? It’s actually group signaling.

You can measure the advantage of looking like what you are instead of looking like what you’re not in relationship to the likelihood you’ll be befriended instead of attacked and whether you are on the offense or the defense.

There’s a wisdom that you should forgive your enemies, and Scivive can tell you why that appears to be a wisdom. You’re built for a society where you have constant, rather reoccurring interaction with everyone, because that’s how it used to be. Food was scarce, shelter was scarce, danger was omnipresent, and thus you had to spend a lot of time around other people that you could cooperate with—kin, family, friends, even enemies. If you are constantly executing the tit-for-tat game strategy, where you punish those who you feel have done you wrong to enhance the chance that they do right to align your goals by artificially introducing a tit-for-tat strategy, which would normally exist. If you cut a tree down with an axe, the tree doesn’t try to get back at you unless you’re stupid enough to let gravity do its work against you by letting the tree fall on you.

The point is, in these societies that we’re in today, where we can choose with whom we spend our time, if you execute a tit-for-tat strategy where you try and punish those who have wronged you, you will be enduring that state of attempting to get back at them and wrong them in return, when they’re not around to sense that you’re doing that. You’re much longer destroying your own positive outlook and increasing your cortisol levels, harming your longevity and making it so other people don’t want to cooperate with you, because you’re mopey. How does that happen, how do you become so mopey? This is what happens when you try to execute a game theory for the benefit of interacting with people that aren’t there. The other party has moved on with their life, while you are stuck dwelling and grudging.

If you are affected by a road rage incident and beat up the guy who cut you off, you never see that guy again and you don’t reap the benefits of making him operate in a superior ethical fashion. For the same reason that if you execute a revenge strategy on those who aren’t around there to see it by not forgiving and purposely being vengeful and unhappy towards a person, you’re the one that pays a price and you never get the benefit from it. The tit-for-tat game theory only works on the other person. You have to be able to have a two-way communication channel. Or, at least a one-way communication channel to say, “You act like this, I act like this,” and your goals are aligned. “You act differently, I will mess you up,” and your goals are still aligned.

If you can’t transmit the goal alignment, then you can’t get any rewards. If you forgive those who have wronged you, get the benefit of what you’re supposed to get. In a small society when you execute a tit-for-tat strategy and you harm those that have harmed you, then they treat you right, then you treat them right, then everyone’s happy. That’s the state that you’re supposed to get to, but because of isolation, problems and communication and the fact that we don’t have to be forced to be around somebody, you often never get that fulfillment, you never get that closure of having things work out. Therefore you just live in a state of anger and vengefulness for the benefit of working with people who aren’t there. Forgive your enemies privately and then publicly say you never forgive, and so you’ll get the benefits of being a truly venomous animal without the cost of having to build toxins.

You’ll love this one. The reason they say the best revenge is a life well-lived is because when people notice you’re living a good life, it triggers their desire to execute quid pro quo, tit-for-tat, one-for-one, eye for an eye game theory strategy on you. If you live a life well lived, they get jealous, they get angry, they start executing the program where they feel like they have to punish you but you’re not around to detect it. Therefore, they just live in a horrible state.

Much more powerful idea than the common understanding of it is that you only get the benefit of living the good life yourself—it’s not true. You get the benefit of living the good life yourself and you get the benefit of those “closet haters” torturing themselves trying to get you to not feel good and not have a good life anymore, but they’re not effective at it. They just destroy themselves.

If you want to influence those around you, switch your “buts” to “ands.” Don’t ever use the word “but,” just switch it with the word “and.” Test it, try it, you’ll see what I mean. Allow them to save face.

A tactic Christopher Hitchens would use is that he wouldn’t say things to you clearly. He would make you guess at them a bit as though it were an inside joke that you’re in the know about, because you are on the inside because you already agreed with him. “My brothers and sisters, you know what I’m talking about when I say...” and whatever you frame in that way is going to be wildly more accepted. This is because he’s already aligned with you, he has already complimented you and he has already presupposed that you believe as he does. That’s a great way to start, and he was, depending on what circle you ran in, considered to be somebody you didn’t want to debate against because you were going to get stomped.

The reason Scivive tells you these interesting warrior-type stories is that, in this world, if you want to influence someone and you want to make an impact, saying something a single time and hoping that they heard it, hoping that they understood it and hoping that it triggers the response that it should if their brain’s working right and if their mind space is right, is not the right way to do things. Every time you read a book, you never read the same book twice. You’re going to see things and understand things differently. You’re going to start to see motive, “Oh, that’s why they put this here and there. Oh, that’s why they put it in the order they did. Oh, I bet that’s why they didn’t mention that.” You wouldn’t dissect most of that on the first read. After you’ve read a bunch of other books, you come back and you’re like, “Oh, here’s all that stuff that I didn’t even understand.”

If you study human compliance, the studies have shown that if you ask to cut someone in line and then you say “because...,” you get something like a 30 percent or 50 percent higher compliance with your request, just because you used “because.” That could be a part of the reason why some people always like to use conditional statements when speaking. If you think this, then this is obviously true, so what is the trick used there? First, get a little bit of yes-momentum, which is if you think this, they’re going to comply with that. Pre-select the “if” thing that you were saying to match something that they already believed, which gives you one “yes” thing.

There’s profit in restricting the scope of what you’re asking for in increases in lifespan and health span, because regardless, it’s not one of those things that whatever progress you make towards one year, also at least equally goes towards 100 years. It’s not easy to buy one year and not get a load of extra years for free along with it. If you reduce the size of the ask by asking for less years, whatever behaviors that would go into getting you that one year, but as a side result get you all these extra free bonus years that you didn’t have any benefit for asking for upfront, because it would just reduce the people’s likelihood to want to give them to you. For some reason human beings feel that extra years of life are some limited resource, that if we get them somehow, we’re screwing over something or someone else, as though it’s a zero sum game. If one guy gets to live one extra year happily, that’s not good because he shouldn’t get that. It’s like “crabs in a bucket,” the way of thinking best described by the phrase “if I can’t have it, neither can you.” The metaphor is derived from a pattern of behavior noted in crabs when they are trapped in a bucket.

The other thing that’s being done is restricting the scope of the argument. If you are vague in your statement, and don’t include a conditional “if,” and they have the mission of arguing you, as so many people do, then leaving out the “if” allows the strong man you and expands your argument. What you said is something that’s easy for them to argue against, which is a reason you would never say something like that in the first place. It may not be something you even believe, and so if you use conditional statements which are “If this, would you agree with, then obviously that.”

Scivive keeps saying here, “obviously.” We’re presupposing that it is obvious. We’re using a report that we built by agreeing on the “if” and we’re inserting an “obvious” where it may not even fit, because we feel like we can get away with it. We’re speaking as though we come from the same belief frame, so “if you believe this, then it’s obvious that you believe that.” That “obvious” is totally put there for rhetorical tactic. In this instance we haven’t specified what we’re talking about whatsoever. In summary, Scivive likes conditional statements, “I like, if then,” it helps when the “if” is chosen to be something that they already agree with you on for if you’re trying to influence people from what doesn’t move them, you have no hope.

If you want to influence people and you want them to agree with you, then you need to speak a language they understand. Your “if” better be something that they already believe, and if you can’t find a common belief to start from and can’t find an “if” that they already agree with, you might as well shut up and move on, because you will not be making any progress based on your speaking until you do find common ground.

It’s also a free pass if you make a statement outright and they don’t agree with you, you’re rather screwed. You only get a couple of those until they want to terminate communication, and with every single disagreement you find, you get further and further from getting agreement in the future. However, if you use conditionals, then you get treated as though you didn’t really make that agreement, because you don’t have to issue the second part of the conditional until you got agreement on the first part right.

The easiest thing in the world is to get an agreement on is the “if” statement. When you can’t get an agreement on your “if” statement regarding the very concept that something might exist, then you surely will not get any agreement that you’re going to mutate and perform operations on the “if” resulting in an “and then” statement and then somehow agree with the “and then” statement but not the “if.” If you can’t get an “if” agreement shut up and keep trying until you can.

When I discover a way that I did a thing right that I never knew that I was doing right, or what it was or what I was doing?

I just said to Tony, “You know, if you’re ever going to measure… Okay, what was the difference between this measurement and that measurement?”

And he says, “I don’t really know.”

And I said, “Well, do you know why you don’t really know?” And I wanted to insult him, basically, but I did it in a questioning format so it was much more acceptable. I wanted to say, “Measure it, you idiot. Why not? It’s easy to do, you can do it.” But I said, “Do you know why you don’t know? It’s because you’re bad at measuring, right?”

So, no fight back. He’s like, “Oh, yeah, I could be.”

“Well, yeah, you could be good at measuring, right?” I gave him the belief that he could be good at it if he wanted to. Instead of calling him lazy, I called him powerful.

I said the same thing, but in a language that was non-combative. But I didn’t even notice I did that right in the first spot. That’s just some new stuff I noticed. The stuff that I wanted to brag about that I said was right was, “You know, of all the things you’re going to measure this year, think about it, that’s probably the most important thing.” I invented a set that no one has ever referenced, that no one has ever existed, of all the things you measure this year, so that you could choose from that set, making it look more important than it otherwise would, this measurement. I found, by accident, a way to greatly enhance the importance of the thing by restricting it to a made-up set that didn’t exist, that no one’s ever used before, but that I could accuse it of being a member of, and now, because it is rare, you feel it’s more important.

If I would have chosen the set of “just,” if I would have just included it in the set of all the things you do this year, you would have not cared again because it would have seemed unimportant with the million other things you do. But when I isolated it to its own category, it artificially inflated its importance, so the derivative, the reverse engineering of that motivational technique that I just discovered, and, maybe it exists but I feel that I just discovered it because I can’t think of what it’s called otherwise. It’s to artificially inflate the importance of what you’re talking about by speaking to it as a member of an artificially small set. Anytime you’re trying to amplify the importance of a thing, restrict it to an artificially small set, which makes it seem more unique and more important. That’s awesome.

You can artificially create a product segment, so that the thing you’re mentioning can be the halo product of that segment. Even though it may look like stuff on its own, of this category of things, it is the best thing. You’re artificially giving a view of most importance through segmentation that will be lost in having too many products otherwise. You’re better off naturally mirroring people’s ability to chunk things into categories. It’s better to have something that’s the best of the middle category, than to have something that’s the middle of the only category.

To set up the situation properly, you shouldn’t have to figure out if other people are lying to you or not, because they have a reason to not like you. Basically when you’re trying to find the truth, you want to set the game up so that they would win by lying, that you would know what a lie would look like, and that you set the situation up where you get them to do that thing that would profit them. In reality, it doesn’t profit them, because you were hiding that fact from them that once they did the thing that they thought would work for them but what you knew was a lie, then they failed the test.

Lying about why you go to the gym: Isn’t it funny that the only reason anyone ever works out is for themselves, and not for any reason that someone might give them stuff for?

Visiting a therapist, where you go and talk about negative ideas all the time, to try to analyze the hardships is interesting. Maybe if you talked about what was good and what you wanted, that would be where your consciousness went. If you schedule a time to talk about everything you don’t want, you’re going to find that you notice a lot of stuff you don’t want; maybe stuff you wouldn’t be noticing and would have forgotten about long ago, if you changed the meanings to something positive, and were so busy doing awesome things that you didn’t have time to think about the negative. The hardship exists for everybody, if you empower it, if you look upon it, then you feel it whether it’s there or not.

If you go up to your friend and you say, “Why do you look sad today?” you just hurt your friend. Your friend doesn’t know whether he appears sad or not. You might have just forced your friend to look sad. If you say, “Why are you so angry? Why are you so angry right now?” You’re crushing, you’re forcing that to happen. Now the person will become angry because you falsely accused them of being angry, and are unwilling to listen to any arguments now that they have measured you improperly. There are some threads of negative focus which are self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling and self-creating. Then there are other threads that are positively framed that have much higher percentage chance of causing positive outcomes.

Some interesting ways of thinking, adding to the categorization of human behavior, and being an experience, is that there’s what you are and then there’s what you do. Then there’s what you can do and what you should do. Scivive came up with another way to help people visualize that we need more doctors, not less. You can start off with a false idea like, “Let’s take all the people that are working in hospitals right now and have them do something better, like build mansions for billionaires. That’s a good idea.” That’s the same thing as letting billionaires build giant houses and make sure that none of the people doing that is going into medicine, assuming that they have the capacity, and if they don’t have the capacity to go to medicine, the surest fact out of capacity is building a hospital instead of mansions. If you wouldn’t support going to one direction, then you notice that the inverse of that is true as well.

A good mental exercise to get people to access the parts of them that want to live is to have them figure out what they would say to someone who was going to commit suicide, and then have them mentally reverse it and you know, “What would you say to yourself?”

In his plays and poems, William Shakespeare used more than 20,000 words, and experts believe he invented or introduced into the English language at least 1,700 of them. He did this by combining words, changing nouns into verbs, adding prefixes or suffixes, and so on. A great many of those words are still in use today. They include alligator, eyeball, gossip, lonely, obscene, undress, worthless, and hundreds more.

Inventing words is cool. It’s one of those things where it’s hard to get traction at first and once you do get the traction, you get explosive results. It’s like a diet. If your new diet doesn’t become popular, you don’t have much impact, but if your diet does become popular, then you’re going to change the eating habits of a huge portion of the planet for the period of time where that little fad diet was fad full. That’s a funny word, fad full.

Thus, if you coin new terms and have the balls and the influence to get them to stick, you bring into the global consciousness an easier path to execution for that thing. For instance, there was a time where the term branding didn’t exist and then people figured out that it was something that worked, it was good to do. They assigned it a word and holy stuff, the branding thing is all over the place.

You’re going to find that with all kinds of human behavior. Like, “feeling the burn.” What’s feeling the burn? Oh, that’s when you work out real hard and your muscles feel like they’re hot. Oh, feeling the burn. That sounds good, I like that. Now, people are much more likely to work out until they feel a burn.

By coining terms and pushing them to stickiness, if they can be made to be sticky, it helps to have them sound nice, feel nice, be imaginative, have those little hooks that make moronic techniques work. Then you can for the rest of human endeavor and for the rest of human time as long as that word is used influence greatly the actions that people take. I’m a big proponent of taking what is true and commonly known these days, but no one uses it because there’s no word for the simple actionable action and malign a word for it, in the hopes that people then actually do the thing they know of. Everyone knows that science exists, but no one goddamn does it. If we can start to take little chunks of usefulness out of it, which is science, then people can get the advantages of doing them.

There is a website called Reddit, and it’s quite popular.

Why? In the past, what you saw of the world was pretty much filtered through another person. If you read the newspaper, you’ve read words written by another person, filtered through an editor and onward down the chain until the ideas eventually reached your mind. Because there was a constant overhead and chokepoint of quality assurance people making sure that they weren’t printing or offering up crap to their customers, it took a long time to get content out, and it also dulled down extreme ideas, because anytime two people cooperate or collaborate on something for public consumption, they tend to dampen each other and reach a middle more often than they tend to combine, resonate and amplify. That is the reason that collaborations are more effective for reducing failure than they are for achieving greatness or innovating. It just amplifies and dulls different activities.

Why is the best art never created by a committee? Why is the best food never created by a committee? How about film scripts, books? It seems like the most effective unit to operate under for any of these activities is at the individual level. That is not to say that it will always be that way.

Anyway, Reddit is great because it allows the readers themselves to be the curators of the content and assure that the quality is there.

It has its own negative side effects, in that as a subject becomes popular and attracts a lower and lower common denominator of person, you get less and less unique and intelligent conversation, and more and more puns and memes.

If you wanted to hear bad puns, you could read YouTube comments, and then hang yourself. What happens basically is the continual birth and death of socially curated and socially generated mediums, as they are born fresh and clean with a tight focus and minimal distraction. They dilute over time, where you just can’t stand to read another pun, and you head on to the next community. This isn’t just how online communities operate, it’s also how real human societies operate. Once a place is too crowded, it’s time to go; once the quality wanes, it’s time to move on!

The point is, as your online community gains humor and general interest value, it will attract more people who are there to take the bounty and have less to give. When it was a barren wasteland, only the very motivated, and likely therefore to be very outlying and knowledgeable or driven in the area, would congregate there. Thus a less interesting to the layman, and less funny, forum will have a higher signal-to-noise ratio. If you want funny, please, there are lots of great places for that. Puns are the lowest form of comedy. Unless you have ineffective moderators, wherever you enjoy going now, you will enjoy less over time, unless perhaps, it is you that is the cancer, and has nothing on topic to offer.

Let’s be serious, you’re friends on Facebook with all the people you don’t like enough to actually text with and meet up with. Your actual group of people you want to tell about the new badass thing that you read or saw, and of which you really care about their opinion, is much smaller than the number of Facebook friends you likely have. How shall you have room to make new badass friends when you take up all your time learning about the weak and rather boring lives of all those you don’t even really want to have a coffee with?

Measure what you’re really getting out of Facebook and news reading. What have you gotten in the last couple years out of it? What could you do instead? If you have 700 friends and really care about 50, aren’t the other 650 more harm than good (unless you have learned the magic of the hide button, so they think you care, but really you never see their stuff)?

Coined in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. The number is one hundred and fifty. He says each of us has on average five intimate friends, 15 best friends, 50 good friends, 150 friends, 500 acquaintances and 1,500 people we recognize on sight.

Facebook friends are almost entirely fake, a study found. You can only count on about four of your friends, and most don’t even care if anything bad happens to you.

Some people are worried that we’ll accidentally create a machine that becomes super powerful, however due to lazy programming, decides the best thing it can do in the universe is turn every piece of matter it can find into a paperclip. Funny enough, we haven’t built a paperclip maximizer, but we did build a selfie maximizer. Facebook and all the other social media sites have transformed our youth into selfie generating machines. It appears the singular most important thing to the adults of the future is looking cool in photos of themselves. The more time you spend taking pictures of yourself, the less time you are being yourself. If the thing you focus most on in the world is your image, you’ll find the person behind that image decays from neglect.

It’s reminiscent of the picture of Dorian Gray.

Flush the toilet, and flush your camera. You are alone, in your bathroom, there is no way this can make you look cool. STOP!

More perverse incentives. Why must we all keep our greatest ideas secret, so that no one else runs with and executes to our detriment? If you could make a lower barrier to entry, profitable collaboration, or set a standard by which idea givers were commonly rewarded, people may be less secretive. This isn’t just a corporate problem, this is a science problem as well. Publish or perish? Well, better keep those good research ideas to yourself. How many websites have you been on that desperately needed improvement, yet you kept your ideas a secret?

“The suck,” sucks—and if you let the people that suck know that you’re punishing the suck less, you’ll get more suck. This whole “love the person killing you” thing only exists in cultures that are so far isolated from the real world they think they’re saving that they have no idea what they’re getting into; how could they? They live in a beautiful place, because it’s free of the very people that made the other place terrible. Guess what they do? They bring the negative aspects over here, perhaps dividing the detriment because it rubs off on you when you’re near it. Even great honest men are ruined by proximity to the negatives. Why do you think the police in America are so violent compared to the police in the UK? Because the police in America are getting kicked, teeth knocked out, stabbed, you name it, basically just because they had to pull you over for a traffic violation.

When you work in the country that has some of the most violent crimes, and you work with the worst of the worst all day long, you too are going to become hardened, and that hardiness isn’t going to turn off-and-on based on the lifestyle choices of the person you’ve pulled over. You could pull over a 90-year-old grandmother and ask her nice questions, such as, “Do you have over $10,000 in the car? Where have you been tonight, where are you going, do you do that often? Why are you really out here?” Ask a tricky compound question like, “Do you want to get out of here without a ticket, and may I search your car?”

If you say “yes” to the first part, the officer will assume the second part was answered “yes” as well, and get away with it. If you say “no,” you’re lying, of course you don’t want a ticket. How did we end up in a world where the police have figured out on their own or been trained to use confusing language to screw you out of your right to be searched without reasonable suspicion (which is easier to achieve than probable cause)?

The officer may respond with, “If you won’t let me search your car, I can call the dog out and it will be about 30 minutes before it gets here, and if it alerts me, I can search your car anyway.”

Being an inclusionist works really well. You reap the rewards of including people who are productive and awesome, and whom you might have otherwise easily excluded due to overzealous exclusion. However, you should exclude some people, like criminals. Criminals get excluded into little cells where no one gets to interact with them. There are some people in the world whose behaviors and ideas are horrible—truly, literally horrible—and they should be excluded.

If you wanted to be prepared for the most dangerous animal you could ever encounter, now you understand why we’re so social. Since humans are the most dangerous living beings on the planet, it’s great that we are preprogrammed to really, really care about other humans (this make them less likely to harm each other). Imagine a world where you didn’t have an inclination to get along with your fellow man. If they could get away with it, perhaps they just kill you when no one is looking, to see what it’s like to watch a man die. The takeaway is that not only is social stuff great for teamwork, but it’s great for survival. If you hear a bump in the night, the worst case is that it’s another human, more so than a wild animal is.

Tony Robbins told a story about a guy who was in a terrible motorcycle accident, became a paraplegic, was burned over 80 percent of his body, and could only use one arm. He’s harsh and insanely hard, his father was hard on him, and his father made him accept responsibility for stuff that truly didn’t seem fair, things that obviously weren’t his fault, and weren’t his problem.

One day he borrowed his father’s car and someone rear-ended him. His father made him pay to fix it, and that didn’t seem fair to him at all. After he was burned and slid under a tractor trailer, he found out that what his father taught him about accepting responsibility allowed him to feel better about whatever happened in his life. He chose to ride that motorcycle, he chose to ride that speed, he chose to ride that day, he chose to turn the bike over and now he is in the position he’s in, and he gets to choose his future. He gets to choose whether he kills himself or whether he can make the best of it that he can, so he went to become the mayor of a city, married a beautiful woman, and all of these wonderful things that were possible because he learned what true responsibility meant.

It’s hard to be certain if that’s how great writers or screenwriters write, but it seems like the parts that make movies good are those little magic moments, those little tropes, and the ideas. In the movie The Shining, when she discovers that all his work on the novel has actually been typing the same crazy stuff over and over again, the writer probably came up with that idea. If someone were to write some type of badass screenplay or book, they might find it easier to look for those tropes and then work backwards into them. Start with the punch line and then work backwards into it. The main character of the movie writing that novel, typing the same thing a million times, that’s the punch line. Her walking up to it, discovering it and just being curious, that’s the lead up. Which of those two things is the important part? The part where someone walks up to a typewriter and checks on the other person’s work?

No. If that were funny, that would be causing all types of joy and laughter all over every office, every day, everywhere in the world. The important part is the punch line; the same thing goes when you’re writing a book about ideas, it’s the punch lines that matter and then you lead up to them. Hypothetically, in imagination, Stephen King has an idea such as, “Wouldn’t it be crazy if a family went to some deserted place that was creepy and then one of the family members went crazy? Then, while they were trying to protect the kid, the kid seemed even slightly crazier in a metaphysical sense. That one person got possessed by a good external demon angel force, and then the other one got possessed by a bad external demon angel force. How would we lead up to that? All right, well, we’ll give the guy a job, we’ll give him a wife, and we’ll make them seem like normal functioning people.”

On down the list. How much a part of that movie was the crazy being a metaphysical? I don’t think that’s the interesting part of the film. I think the interesting part is that there’s no protagonist there. There’s no conscious motive or action on the part of that “character.” The supernatural force doesn’t have a desire. It doesn’t have anything standing in its way. It’s just basically a stupid distraction as far as I’m concerned. Whereas your loved one falling apart and wanting to kill you is a very easy to understand motive. What does he want? He wants to kill you. Why does he want it? He’s crazy. That’s very easy to understand and very easy to feel as another human being. Like some kid riding around on a tricycle seeing weird phenomena. Cool, can you also see the lottery numbers buddy? Sweet, you’re my new best friend.

“Resource holding potential” (RHP) is like the feathers of a peacock, which are an honest proof of work performed by the male bird as a trustable signal that he is a better mate. You could say this is dancing and fashion for humans, for the same reasons “play” is effective, or increasing weather durability.  

Punch lines are not called “caress lines” because they have to hit fast and hard. That’s what makes them funny. It’s a giant switch inside the meanings of the listener’s mind. That’s the difference between a funny joke and a not funny joke.

It should be common knowledge that if someone is telling a story, you shouldn’t try and top their story. If someone is selling a problem, don’t immediately try to top their problem.

Touch is worth about ten talking points. When someone touches you, you have two options: physically do the socially uncomfortable thing and tell them to take their hand off you, or remove yourself from the hand. If one chooses to forcefully remove the hand, it shows dominance on one’s part. Your other option is that you’re going to override the discomfort with believing what they say more. Some people take the socially harder, more adrenaline rush-producing path in conflict. Some people will take the stance of, “I’m OK with this conflict and I feel the discomfort go away the more I agree with what you say.” What you end up with is that if you see people who are very proficient with the ladies, they end up touching a lot to the point where they look like creepy molest dudes to normal Scandinavian understanding.

If you want to be differently effective with some people, try implementing touch earlier in the right amounts in socially acceptable ways. It changes from daytime to nighttime, changes with levels of attraction and respect change with the peer group, changes with what bar you’re in, and changes with how many drinks everyone’s had. However, if you want to talk to a person’s soul and really get to know that person, there’s nothing more personal than touch. That’s where kids come from. That’s where you came from. Touch is a big deal. Scivive would be willing to say that there are effects that you can have on another human beings through touch that you can’t have any other way. If you want to live the fullest and greatest life, you probably need to find the best touch from other people towards you.

To enjoy the best touch from you to other people, maybe you like to add even more people to the mix. Maybe some group hug is awesome for you. Human touch may become a more and more neglected part of the human experience the more and more digital our lives become, when you’re more interested in taking selfies and promoting the image of your digital self, in particular to people you will never meet, followers that you will never meet and if you met them, you sometimes would wish that you had not.

Just because someone follows you or likes your picture, doesn’t mean that you would like or follow them in the real world, for you see, following wasn’t invented in the digital age. In the world, you could actually “follow” another human being and that’s kind of where the word attraction comes from. Someone’s truly attractive, by definition, when you want to be closer to them. Literally they attract you like a magnet. You’re turned on by something that is going on there. You will spend money, time, and effort, compete, and do whatever is necessary to be closer to that person. It’s not only people in this world that are attractive, they are things to a lot of people, like beaches. There are sharks in the water, but they still like beaches, because to a lot of people, beaches are attractive.

What you’ll find with the most really smart, effective people is that they shut up when they’re talking to someone else unless they know something good is going to come out of that talking. Sometimes you’ll see an interview where there’s a comedian interviewing a genius. Now, here is an example of such an interview. Seth Green, the guy who makes the stop motion sketch comedy television series Robot Chicken, is hilarious and has a very successful history of both acting and more importantly, writing hilarious things. He was interviewing Peter Diamandis, who is a MIT graduate, physician, insanely successful intelligent guy who is part of the human longevity project, which is probably one of the best projects on the planet currently. He was part of the Ansari X Prize to get space flight going, which, who knows, maybe influenced Elon Musk to start SpaceX. He isn’t perfect, but boy, he is doing a million times better work than most of us. There was an interview between these two, and every time Peter Diamandis would want to teach a cool idea, talk about some stuff people didn’t know about and talk about the future, Seth Green wanted to be funny, and as a result, take up a lot of time and interrupt him.

You can see that poor Peter was getting super pissed off, because he saw that literally the thing he wanted to do was make the world a better place, and maybe seem like a smart guy. What the other guy wanted to do was be funny and be funny personably—be the guy that was causing the funny and be identified for it. That conflict between those two was obvious and made the interview highly uncomfortable.

Why is Scivive telling this story? Because Peter tried to do the right thing and shut up enough to not lose the crowd, not have conflict and restrict what he was saying to maybe stuff that would have less hooking, funny points that the funny guy could get in on. Maybe it’s not the world’s best example, but it’s a good example of as you become more intelligent and have less ego around those that talk to you, or have huge ego, but just shut up because no one else cares about you promoting yourself. As you become more intelligent, you learn to shut up, because when you’re shutting up, you can learn and have more useful things to say.

Stop speaking so quickly. Is your mission to cause understanding in the person that you’re speaking to? If so, slow down! The problem with getting people to understand things isn’t that you’re not spitting enough data at them, it’s that they need to understand it better. The faster you speak and the harder to understand things you say at them, the harder it gets.

Notice the word “at,” You may be speaking “at” someone if the ideas are bouncing off and making it harder instead of easier for them to understand. Maybe we should use the word “to,” not because it’s more accurate, but because it’s more commonly understood to be a positive interaction when you speak with or to someone, rather than at someone. “At” is very self-focused, it only cares about the transmission, not the receiving. It’s basically the spam of the speaking world, whereas speaking with someone implies that it’s a two-way conversation, which unfortunately can be painful when one person is trying to educate another. If a teacher in the classroom keeps getting interrupted by the students wanting to speak, at the end of the day you will discover that he didn’t get to teach much because those with less information took up more of the communication space than the people with more information. It’s folly to assume that all communicative events have the same value, as it is folly to assume that all measurements are as accurate, all interventions are as accurate, all light was the same color is a world of nuance and difference.

For those of us who use words, just the smallest difference in tonality or word choice leads to great differences in understanding, especially if you’re talking in a language that’s new to the other person; they could not understand half of what you say because they just don’t know those words. With more than 200,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, the English language has the most words of any language, and as such it has the most opportunities for you to choose a word that the other guy has no idea what you’re saying.

Back to the speed of speech. The faster you speak, the less influential you are. If you don’t change the rate at which you speak based on the up time and measurement of the understanding of the person that you’re speaking to, you’re doing both of them and yourself a disservice. You will seem like a needy, whiny individual who needs people’s approval so desperately that you’ll speak quicker and quicker as you notice that they don’t agree with what you’re saying, and they’re not giving you significance of what you’re saying. We as human beings are programmed to value the person in need as less useful and less powerful than the person who is reactive and comes from a space of fulfillment.

What’s the downside to this? The downside to this is that it allows dumb people, who don’t have anything to say, but learn to say it in a deep voice and slowly, to take lots more respect and influence than they deserve to, because we’re all programmed to respond to that style of interaction. It’s an unfortunate consequence of powerfulness of speaking slowly that today rates are artificially slow and the time must be wasted honoring ideas that aren’t great in order to buy compliance and influence for the ideas that could be considered great.

Trust used to be much, much more valuable, and the rates at which you could check people’s trustworthiness were much lower. Progress in recording technology and transportation speed has made trustworthiness less valuable, because now we can verify things in real time. At least, most of them.

Since they get attacked all day long, any suggestion you make will be considered an attack. The default position is that you are the enemy. Only lots of ass kissing seems to work with these folks. Chances are, if you’re speaking to a moderator at all, you’re probably going to have a bad time. Like the police of the real world, when you deal with assholes all day, it tends to affect your demeanor negatively.

There’s no such thing as writers, only dreamers.

The writing is but the means to the end of sharing ones dreams with the world.

If you don’t want to write, but you like arguing with people, try pretending that you are arguing against yourself. You might be able to trigger the reward that comes from thinking you’re gaining social value, but really you’re just gaining value against yourself.

Ambiguity is your friend, and the advertisement that peaks interest has an unanswered question, a curiosity that only a visit or purchase can solve.

It’s the same as when you’re texting people or trying to have an influence. What they don’t know and what they imagined is at least as powerful and at least as compelling, because it’s already in their head and from themselves, as anything that you try to transmit. Whatever you transmit, you’re lucky if it gets received, processed, and has the effect that you hoped.

If it comes from them, it doesn’t need to be received, doesn’t need processed, doesn’t need to go through the same filters that your output does. It’s faster, works better, and it’s cleaner. Scivive would call it mental negative space. The blanks that they fill in that you set the framework around, but they really painted in the boxes. Paint by numbers—you’re setting up the numbers and they’re doing the painting.

There’s a saying that “It’s much easier to fool a man than to show a man that he’s been fooled.” It’s that same; did they fill in the blanks, did they fill in the negative space? Now you combine the concept, the idea that they think came from them, they have to defend and fight for, because it came from them, so it’s got to be good or people will like them less. That’s why it’s easier to fool people than it is to show them they’ve been fooled.

There’s nothing like the self-awareness that comes from doing a ninja roll off your bike from hitting an unexpected curb or whatever. Nothing like hitting a curb and being like “Yep, ninja roll, meant to do that stuff, meant to totally roll off the bike here.” You’re doing something you’re used to doing, and when something unexpected happens, it breaks you out of your normal pattern and gives you the chance to see the world in a new way, perhaps a view of the sky from the pavement.

You can use pattern interrupts to stop people from running the same disempowering patterns they’re used to. For instance, if someone is about to go into their terrible story about how life is so unfair to them, you could ask them, “I’m really interested in that, can you tell me real quick, have you ever drank pizza through a straw?” Then give them a little playful push, or tap, whatever it takes to reset them off the old disempowering path. A reset gives you a chance to stick something better in there. It’s important to follow up with a new good path. You only open the door, you have to get them to step through, lead them to a better place.

Because our perceptions are so easily influenced by what we want to believe, it’s very easy for bosses and employees to work together better. This is because the boss can tell you what you should do. Because he doesn’t have to do it, he can be truthful about what you should do. But you, the worker, actually has to do the task. You care a little bit less about what you should do and more about what you can kind of get away with or would be good enough to remain employed. For people who actually need to do the work best is often not an option, but for people who can sit in fancy chairs and just dream up tasks for faceless masses to just do. You know for those best is a lot more affordable, emotionally.

Demand respect, even if indirectly. You can pay people to do as you wish even if they don’t respect you, so respect is a way people can be influenced for free-ish.

If you want to move a man, you must already know what he is moved by.

If you know what already influences someone, you can bridge that to what new thing you want to have influence on them. This is the same way that we peg new understanding to things already understood. In this case, we’re just switching understanding for influence. We peg the new influences to the sites where the old influences were docked, or if they’re useful, we dock right on top of them.

I had my sights set on writing the best self-help book, and using Think and Grow Rich; Richest Man of Babylon; How to Win Friends and Influence People; The Secret; Rich Dad, Poor Dad; Four Hour Work Week, and others as benchmarks for the maximum impact that you could have in the self-help space. Now, through the deep study of what is possible, what does exist and what has existed, I see that you can reach billions of people instead of millions; you can engage them for hundreds of hours instead of a couple, and that you can addict them 10 times harder, if only you speak the language that they speak; the language of fiction, the language of myth, the arc of story, a relatable protagonist—the language that human beings have been programmed to be receptive to since before the written word existed.

Stories have existed since long before writing was invented. Speech has existed for longer than writing and social structure, respect, reciprocity and knowing what’s important and what’s not, feeling fear and not, and feeling that you’re a member of something greater than yourself. Altruism precedes history, writing, and likely precedes much of math, probably anything past addition and subtraction.

If you actually care about making the most impact on the people of this planet, at this time, you need to speak the language that they speak and that they prove that they are most receptive to. Sadly, that language is not an honest language. Sadly that language is a very convoluted, very abstracted imaginary language. It’s the language of things that never happened. What if you were to measure the conscious input that goes into human’s brains and measure the ratio of things that actually happened and things that didn’t happen? You may find that that which didn’t happen is a huge component.

Back when I was having a conversation with a friend about how to get people to stop rejecting and instead start accepting ideas or advice—they never did it, because they had a chip on their shoulder—I figured out that the way to do it was by storytelling. You tell a parable or a story that’s not about them and not about you, but proves a point some other way, just like a joke with a punch line. For example, a nurse is walking through the hospital, and she pulls a rectal thermometer out of her coat pocket and goes, “Damn it! Someone has my pen!” There’s some other version of that joke where, basically it injects into your brain the punch line that her pen is up somebody’s ass because she has a thermometer in her pocket that she was supposed to be taking someone’s temperature with.

The concept is that you can tell someone a story, they follow along, and then you hit them with the punch line, which causes them to understand all at once, without them being able to avoid or reject the point. They are prevented from using mental tactics that they would normally use to avoid getting an idea, or being caught getting the idea.

Do you read fiction? Do you listen to music? These things are not facts in the objective world. These are permutations and combinations of human created things, and thus you’re going to end up with a canon of work with an enemy, a hero, a path, learning, self-discovery and betrayal and all of the other successful addictive tropes, hopefully combined with accurate, educational, effective badass action performed by the protagonists.

The intelligent people only want to build and promote ideas and show how ideas are the universal frameworks that underlie things. However, just like martial arts class, they teach you the katas (the Japanese word meaning literally “form,” referring to a detailed choreographed pattern of martial arts movements), they teach you the strategies that you can use, and they teach them in individualities. They don’t teach you the universal that they use to then permute out into the strategies, because they’re too vague and they’re too un-actionable. It’s through the same vague and un-actionality of knowing universals before specifics.

Vagueness and un-action-ability is the densest, easiest to manipulate, greatest way for some intellectual people to think about things. For others that don’t have the capacity to write their own self-help books or haven’t had a decade to spend learning cool and interesting things however, to assume that the densest format would help everyone else just the same is obviously false. What’s going to help those people is to not see the underlying universals. Maybe you could mention the underlying details in passing if you wish to. You need to focus on the things that can fit in their brain, mesh with the mind space they come from, and are actionable.

If you played football in high school, you’re going to love professional football a lot more because it has more detail and nuance to you.

If you focus on the flavors of the food you eat, you’re going to have a better time eating nearly anything because that’s what you’re paying attention to most.

If you’re a guy who builds ideas and is intrigued by universal truths, comparing and contrasting, specificity, really getting things right and not leaving cracks for a weakness for people to attack, then you’re going to appreciate a new sentence or a new idea. It will be totally lost on other people that don’t have that mind space.

If you’re an artist and you say, “Hey, look at the way that I used this brush,” or, “Look at the way that I mixed these colors,” you’ll find there are some people in the word that don’t literally have the same capacity to see color that you do. You might be tri-chromatic, you might be able to see more colors than they can see. Or, if it’s digital media, you might be working on a screen that can show 100 percent of a Dolby RGB and they can only see 100 percent of SRGB, maybe half the color space.

Consider some times when you shared a piece of music with a friend or a piece of art with a friend, how often is it that it just didn’t have the impact on them that it had on you? You laughed for 20 minutes at something, as did everyone else that saw it, which is a reason you discovered it. Then, you show it to your girlfriend and she doesn’t think it’s funny at all. Now, does that make it not funny? For her, yeah. For you and the other people that preceded you, no.

Coins have not two sides, but three.

If you look at one side of the coin, do you know what’s on the other side? Not really. You only know what’s on the other side if you look at it. It’s like flipping a coin, it could land on heads or it can land on tails. Actually, there’s another side that every once in a while it does land on; you can have a coin land on its edge. Sometimes if you drop a coin, you see it roll away from you. That’s because it landed on its edge; it didn’t land heads, it didn’t land tails, it rolled away.

The point here is that you didn’t even know the coin really had three sides when you first looked at it, you never really considered the edge much. You didn’t think about it possibly being a coin with the other side ground off, or a trick coin where the other side was identical to the side you are looking at. The more complex the thing is that you are looking at, the more costly the false but normally correct assumptions will be. Thus, it’s not good enough to get information “near” a thing. You must get the closest, most specific possible information, or you will very likely get bad information.

Here are two examples of people who, you might think, are qualified to give you some good advice, even though they are not.

This is the same reason that if you were to ask a girl, “What’s the best way to make you fall in love with me?” They could answer you, they can try and answer you truthfully. Whatever answer they give you will be entirely wrong because there’s nobody in the world that probably has less experience getting girls to fall in love with them than that girl.

It is the same thing with sales. If you were to ask your customer, “Hey, Mr. Customer, what’s the best way to sell you this thing?” He’s going to tell you, “Give me the best features and the best product at the lowest price,” when in reality that’s not the case. It might be to tie your product to Michael Jordan, it might be to put a limited time offer on your product, or it might be to add something to the purchase of your product like McDonald’s did with their Happy Meals by including a little game piece for a game. There are all types of different ways to sell a thing, and the people who know those things are the salesmen.

People who don’t know these things are the people on the other side of the transaction, the purchasers. Why is this lesson important? In this life, the best way to teach people a thing is to relate to what they already know, which is basically what you’re doing when you’re speaking to them in a language—you’re not speaking to them in a language they don’t speak, you’re speaking to them in a language they do speak. If you believe as you should, that you must speak the language that people understand, then it’s in your best interest to use analogies that are the simplest, most agreeable, most understandable that can to get your point across.

Ideas that are related, but in actual use, lead to massively different outcomes.

Focusing on what you want vs. what you don’t want.

The solution to dieting is not concentrating on dieting, it’s concentrating on good food. The good food idea cannot be found on the bad food coin.

If someone needs to open a dictionary before they can understand your analogy, you’re doing more harm than good.

For instance, Richard Dawkins decided to say that ideas were like genes, and that just as genes find their way to be executed in reality through living beings, so do ideas find their way to get executed into reality through living beings as well. The problem with this analogy is that few people understand biology and phylogeny, with all of those fancy words. It’s hard to understand genes, it’s hard to understand mutation, and it’s hard to understand recessive and dominant traits; that is all complicated. Therefore, trying to understand the way knowledge travels in the world using a harder to understand biological parable or analogy is not the most effective way.

So, Scivive has invented the idea of an ideological invasive species. That’s much easier to understand, because people know what an invasive species does; it comes in and it dominates all the other things that are there because it developed in a more hardcore place. In order to survive in that hardcore place, it had to be extremely efficient and resilient. Then arrives in Lazyville, which is wherever the species is that haven’t had to become as badass are, and it goes there and it takes over. You see that same thing with ideas. That’s what capitalism did to basically all the other ideas in the world.

If you want to make an impact in the world and you want to make it by being on the radar, in the ears of, through the eyes of, in the hands of other humans beings, look at those other human beings and measure the ratio of input that hits them through loved ones and friends compared to through mass media and marketing.

What you’ll find is an increasing amount to the ever more increasing digital age. The amount of a person’s personal ear time, brain time, eye time and thought time is much greater affected by the mass media, by the Internet than it is by their actual friends. If that’s the case, then it means that you can afford to market to your friends. Then, you might not have the impact on them that you otherwise can have.

If you want to affect the movers and shakers of the world, then you need to get your message into their brains. These guys have limited time spans, because they’re so addicted to making the next dollar. Or, in their vision, they don’t see it that way. When Fortune does their 400 richest list and they interview these guys, a lot of the guys hate them. They’re like, “You think we just sit around here and think about how much money we have? We’re trying to do the next thing.”

And their response is, “No, that’s our job. We’ll think about how much money you have. It’s okay.”

If you want to influence people who can make an impact in the world, and you believe the numbers that 1 percent of the world controls 80 percent of the wealth or more, then that 1 percent is the percent that matters. That’s a little bit misleading because apparently, if you’re making more than 35 grand a year, you’re in the 1 percent globally. But even in that subset, the 1 percent of that subset is massively more powerful than the rest.

If you’re in America, you’re probably already in the 1 percent. Then, if you’re in America, the 1 percent in America makes you look as stupid as you made everyone else from other developing countries look. That’s how uneven the income distribution is. If those were the people that need to be reached - let’s just look at that.

This stuff’s important enough actually to make sure we got it right. Is it fair to say that the 1 percent is who needs to be reached? Well, there are three goals, and they pay off at different times. And it’s really more than three, depending on how you chunk them.

In summary, if you want to have an impact on this world and you don’t have much money, you can pretty much give up now, because the world isn’t paying attention to what it should be. The world is paying attention to what it wants, and on the other side of that one is a well-oiled multibillion-dollar machine built to addict, built to consume, built to give them what they want regardless of what is or not. If you want to influence your friends, your family and you then you need the money to outcompete those other experts that have taken over their consciousness.

Interestingly enough, money is only one part of the equation. A lot of movies are made for hundreds of millions of dollars, and no one watches them. Having money is just one part of the equation. The other half is having a good, sticky message that matters and pays them benefits for following it. Lots of money in with a stuffy message that no one cares about, is false or harmful, or both. You should get bankrupted and it should be burned money, but a great idea that no one ever hears about isn’t good either.

Learning is similar to cryptography, and there are one-way functions. Sometimes it’s a lot easier to create an idea and tell it to somebody. Then the amount of time it takes them to digest it is longer, and not log rhythmically longer, but at least learning early longer, so that an hour of your speaking might be six to eight hours of their understanding and depending on the difficulty of the material, they may never understand. They may not have the tools that would be requisite beforehand to have truly understood what you were building on top of.

If Scivive was to give advice for other speakers, system designers, educators, or people who are in the business of influencing others, perhaps even yourself—internal influence, self-influence—it would say, “If you’re not going to execute every single possible part of a plan to the letter like a recipe that you’ve maybe done for the first time, then give yourself some leeway with some broad strokes and you’re going to get a lot more distance than getting hung up on something that didn’t really matter that much anyway.”

Let’s say that the world already has a religion, but you want them to follow yours because it pays nice. You eat for free. Everyone loves you. Everyone respects you. You’ll be the most protected in a time of war. You’ll be the most protected in a time of famine. If you have a normal human wiring to be significant, being a religious leader or in between people and God, or an advisor to people in regards to the most important thing that they can think of in the universe, which for many, many people is God, how would you get rid of the old and institute the new?

There are a limited number of strategies. You can kill your way through, but in order to do that, you’ve got to be more than a good storyteller. In order to kill your way through, you’ve got to be a badass killing machine that can recruit, influence, control and maintain order with other badass killing machines to kill so many people that the people that are left are thinking “You know what? I would rather believe this new cool story and stay alive than believe the old cool story.” And, it’s funny if you think about what it takes to worship most religions.

They promise you the sun, the stars, the moon, eternal ecstasy in a place that’s so good it can’t even be described. They promise those things to you.

It’s advance-fee fraud. It’s a Nigerian scam. Their cousin has a billion, zillion dollars that they’re going to give to you for some weird reason they made up, you just need to give them the money to pay the Western Union guy off, or to pay the public official off, or whatever excuse it takes to get you to give in order that you should receive in the future this thing that you have assigned value to.

Guess what? A “confidence man,” a con artist, is not someone who gains your confidence; that’s a misunderstanding. A confidence artist gives you confidence, and then you feel so privileged to have it, you see such value in it because you think there is value in that person, and you are privileged to have him believe in you and offer you something that you will pay now in order to maintain that relationship. So a confidence man doesn’t want your confidence. He wants to give you his.

Human beings are reciprocal, and we believe in reciprocity due to it being an effective game strategy. Life is not a game, however. Life is the most important thing in the world, and let’s not demean it by calling it a game.

There are effective storytelling techniques that were included. What you will see with the passage of time, is an increase in the offers provided by these religions and a decrease on the sacrifices you have to make. This is assuming some cataclysmic event doesn’t wipe out all human history, but if human history continues, and people are aware of the religion they’re currently in and the religions that existed previously, if you want to out-compete the religion that people are already in, which almost everyone has been affiliated with one or another throughout the history of mankind, at different levels of advancement, the new belief system must offer more and take less.

If they don’t offer you more and make you work less, they can’t out-compete the other religions that already have market share. Applying inflationary economics to belief systems and understanding that over time they will just continue to inflate to the point of absurdity, is quite revealing. Just like Zimbabwe where there’s trillion dollar bills that you are better off lighting on fire for warmth than you are trying to buy anything with, that’s the result of needing to continuously increase the fantasy pay off of the fantasy work that people are doing.

It’s really fun to be proud of what you came up with, what you invented, and what’s novel that you did. It gives you a sense of significance, importance and achievement, and that’s fabulous.

On the other hand, if you’re in the business of influencing other people, such as the education business or the motivation business—maybe what your clients and your customers and your students need isn’t what you have uniquely created, which is a very, very small subset of all the things that have been created before you and after that act of creation. We could call it procreation, then it would be better for you and your students that listen to you and are influenced by you to be exposed to a message that they need to hear, regardless of whether you’re the originator of it or not.

It would be a terrible tragedy for math teachers to not teach algebra, addition, or subtraction because they didn’t invent them. To only talk about this new thing that you could never even understand, that’s at the limit of understanding because you were deprived of the prerequisites of understanding it, because no one wanted to teach it to you, because the people talking to you didn’t invent them. The people that invented them are long dead.

The most important part of writing a book isn’t to present all the data you have on a thing, because in an ideal world, where one has a ton of memory and access to the internet, the reader already has access to everything in the world. What they need from you is less, not more. They don’t need more data, they need less data. You need to refine and hone their limited attention span on something that is truly beneficial to them, not to tell them a million things to confuse the issue. You don’t need to learn from the man who can do a thousand different techniques, you need to learn from the man who can do one very well.

Giving people what they want is not giving them what they need. Giving them what they want is making them fat, killing them, addicting them, and making them non-creative and non-productive.

Over complicating things to look smart is the opposite of being smart. Use the cheaper word. It’s hard enough to get people do anything in this world, especially if I have to Google what you have said.

Regarding The Giving Pledge, it’s good enough for the richest people in the world to try and influence their peers, and influence you. If you want to have an impact on this world, you can do it through a business, that will get you millions, it’s how you can legally control other people’s lives, not just your employees. You control their lives, and you choose how they spend during their day. If you give them work, a good work environment, and a good goal, you can really enrich their lives and make them feel pride, make them feel good. Let them know they’re doing something good for the world.

Examine a sports player, whom you could consider to be part of the entertainment industry, and you see how many people they influence or control in the world, other than to convince other people to do the exact same sport thing that they’re doing. The only influence that you may see them having is over perhaps their maid, whatever house staff they might have, maybe a driver. Then there exists this weird mechanic by which if you make enough money, then the money that you have, if you spend it, then you control things, but not in the past.

If you buy a really expensive house, you’ll increase the likelihood that the people who put all the work into that house to create it, will end up going and doing that thing hoping for the same reward. You didn’t control them during the process, and you didn’t control them before the process, but you controlled them after the process, assuming that they’ll continue the same type of behavior hoping for the same type of reward elsewhere. The discovery is that there’s something called reverse timing control, and you do it just by buying stuff.

The summary is, if you want to make an impact in this world, stop absorbing and start producing. But beware, not everyone has earned the right to be heard. A lot of people would do harm, more harm than good, by spreading their terrible ideas.

The reason for this being mentioned is if the thing that you want to influence in this world is the human being, and that your highest and best outcome is to create a better world, a better life and a better outcome for other human beings quite similar to yourself, you must influence them through the channels that exist and only through those channels. They are two-armed, two-legged, two-eyed, and feel love, and feel hate; they’re humans as we understand humans to be.

If you want to lift up a rock, you have to grab the rock. Can you grab it by proxy? Can you have something else grab it? Can you pretend air is grabbing it but it’s not really grabbing it? You have to interact physically with the thing to move it and the channels by which you can move someone’s understanding, desire or belief are very finite and they’re programmed. People have experimented with and discovered odd and interesting ways to influence other people. The point is, if you want to influence to the best degree possible human beings, then you must take advantage of the thousands, if not hundred thousands, of years of development and storytelling, trance and refinement of what human beings care about, and which changes by culture, changes over time in the evolution of the being.

If you think that you’re too good for above and beyond using the perfected, optimized, thorough breed, most well rewarded financially tropes; (meaning strategies, ideas, imagery, form, shape, timing, pattern, structure, setting, theme all of those things, which have been proven though billions and billions of dollars of commerce in the past, great percentages of GDP) if you ignore the presence and powerfulness of those things, it’s very likely you are creating a story that no one will pay attention to and is unworthy of interest because it doesn’t speak to them.

In summary, if you want to influence other people, don’t be an arrogant and closed-minded individual. Look to the past and look to see what those addictive traits are that are being used successfully by people with less wholesome, less honest motives than you have. Scivive hopes that if you’re an evildoer, you’re not understanding these points. If you’re an evil piece of crap, it’s best that you remain less effective in this world.

If the “us-versus-them” mentality is sometimes useful, then referring to how people not with a cause are happy to die, might be one way to lightly tease them into action.

There’s an internal conflict inside yourself which are amongst 1) the set of stuff you would do ideally, 2) the set of stuff you’ll actually do, 3) then the smaller sub set of stuff that you’ll actually do over a long enough period of time to get the benefits you want, and then 4) we got another smaller set called stuff you convinced people to do, and then that set gets run through the same stuff that yours just did, because all you did was add to their big list and then it gets to their smaller list and then it gets to their even smaller list.

The actual amount of stuff you can convince people to do for a long enough period of time in their own life to improve their life is super small and probably an order of magnitude smaller than what you can do for yourself. The point of all this is once you know how few hours you really possess to influence other people, and once you know how little impact you have on other people, you better only bring your A-game and you better only talk about what’s important to you.

Scivive hopes that you’re advanced enough to know that what should be most important to you and someone near you, is the stuff that might actually happen in the real world for you or that person. If you’re talking about stuff that’s just mentally interesting to you, you’re wasting their time and you’re wasting your time, because it’s not going to turn into worldwide action. If you’re talking about stuff that’s most proud to you because you’re the guy that invented it, maybe that’s not what they need to hear most. Maybe what they need to hear is what’s most profitable for them and might actually happen in their lives, and you can shut up about your pride. Stop talking about what’s on your mind and what you saw in the news when you can save someone’s life out there if you paid attention to them, your audience, in a selfless manner or even yourself.

What could this person do that might benefit your life? What could that person do that could benefit their own life? Let’s not talk about trivia and stupid nonsense that no one cares about, or that’s already been done a million times. If you want people to do drugs, then give them a book by Timothy Leary—he probably sold it better than you did. If you want people to lift weights, give them a book by Arnold Schwarzenegger—he’ll probably have more influence than you would.

You may not be the best carrier of your own information. As a matter of fact, people might dislike you enough that you telling them to do the thing will make them not do the thing. You need to be really artful in knowing who you are and how you are perceived, because you might do more harm for the mission that you’re trying to do in the world than good. If Kim Jong-un started talking about longevity research, longevity research would take a hit because that guy is often considered problematic.

The moral of the story is, don’t assume everyone else’s worldview or abilities are similar to yours. Don’t assume that what moves you and you think is compelling matters to anyone else. You might be moved by logic, and that’s why you’re such a smart dude. The rest of the world, the logic that they think they’re moved by, is not actually logic.

It’s all types of fallacy. It’s all types of silly. If you don’t learn to speak that language, you’re never going to reach them effectively. You’re never going to change them. You’ll only be able to influence them by what already influences them, and it’s a very stupid assumption to believe that they’re influenced by the same things that you are, because they ended up with such a wildly different opinion in basically the presence of all the same information.

There’s a fancy philosophical theorem that states that if any two rational actors communicate in a logical and effective way with each other long enough, and they both operate from the same observable data, then assuming that the logic that they’re using is proper, then they must always come to the same conclusion. This is because if you have the same data, and you have proper reasoning, you always will come to the same conclusion regardless of your identity as the processor of the information.

The Serenity Prayer is a prayer written by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971). The original text is: “Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other.” Variations have been adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs, and the best known form is, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Similar to most other things in religion, they all have precursors of nearly similar things that preceded them. The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus wrote, “Make the best use of what is in your power and take the rest as it happens.” He also said, “There is only one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”

Our opinions are up to us; and our impulses, desires, and aversions are our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices. You’re going to make a much bigger impact in the world changing those who want to be changed than you are trying to influence the un-influence-able. Not everyone will ever be able to understand some of the things you understand if you’ve got a book like this in your hands, let alone be influenced by a novice debater that maybe they only respond to identity. Maybe they respond to you if you are 100 times richer than them. Maybe that’s their qualification for when they’re willing to accept a new idea from somebody else.

Maybe they only accept ideas from spiritual leaders. Maybe they only accept ideas from the weird voice in their head. Maybe they’ve locked out and they’re not interested in new ideas, they’ve got it all figured out. That happens to people in their 20s. As soon as people turn 20, they know everything. Maybe 18-20. Then as they get older, they realize, “Oh, the set of things I don’t know is actually quite large.” Specificity is friend, when you tell someone something, and they have to take time to explain to you that what you said could be understood more than one way. You made them seem pedantic for asking, and you have to say the same thing you already said over again, in a slightly different way. If you’re specific the first time, you have one statement, one direction, instead of three statements in two directions.

If you weren’t lucky enough to be speaking to someone that knows that what you said could actually be understood more than one way, now you’re even worse off, and they might only discover they need more info from you when it’s already too late. Don’t leave the success of your influence through speech or writing up to the quality of your listener. Speak clearly and with specificity; this is influence, speak clearly and you won’t have to repeat yourself. This is cool because it works for both speaking loudly, and speaking specifically, e.g. volume and accuracy. Imagine a friend calls you and says, “Hey man, that thing you wanted done might happen then around here sometime, or maybe over there.” It would probably be more confusing than useful to be told such gibberish.

Not all things amplify the same way. With some things you get diminishing returns the more you do, and with some other things you get diminishing returns in the short term, but you get a huge pay-off and breakthrough at some future date. Science is that latter thing. Some types of artistic activity is that latter thing, even if you’re trying to create viral videos in the Internet, you got to throw a lot of stuff at the wall. To tell you the truth, there is no formula, no method by which to create viral things because the recipient and their subjectivity, and whatever else you’re competing within the popular culture at the time, is as equally important as the idea that you’re trying to spread. People that have had success virally, very often are unable to ever create it again even though it is they that are the most successful examples of a viral thing.

You could say it’s similar to some bands and musicians that made some amazing music and now everything they make isn’t as good, and now the band is breaking up. Why is that? It’s because the understanding that we have about how to create that type of excellence in the world is either so harshly ignorant of what is actually the effective part, which is the recipient, the culture and the competition, and that we’re only focusing on the things that are actually easier to influence and measure which is the work product that you’re creating, the words that you’re using, the colors, the social. Yes, you can try. Yes, it may work. It will only work if you try often.

The point is twofold: one, be mindful of the recipient, it is very often more important than the producer or the transmitter. The receiver is often more important than the transmitter. You can change either of them; you can change the framework, change the delivery method, you can focus on transmitting, you can focus on receiving, but a lot of things you can do on the outside of what is commonly done to a misunderstanding of the components of their model. The second thing that Scivive is telling you is that some things that you do more, well, it’s qualitative difference that matters. You can’t just change the quantity’ it changes the quality. You can’t just measure something with a thermometer. Imagine that the thing you were measuring was just slightly bigger than a thermometer. Now, the mass of the area that you’re measuring has been vastly affected by your measuring tool.

In life, you affect what you measure and your measurements have presuppositions. They’re excluding other measurable things. You’re making value judgments before you make your first measurements. Judgments have already been made. You’re not measuring all the things that can be measured.

Understand that some things like your last rep, that’s most of your gain, but doing 500 more reps doesn’t help that much. Is it important enough to do it up to the last rep? Yes. Is it important to push that last rep as hard as you can? Yes. Is it important to do 500 more past that? No. It’s important that you don’t do that. You need to tear your muscles a little bit, but if you push too hard for too long you can actually rip you bicep in half. Tearing your muscles slightly, micro tears are good. Real tears, macro tears are bad. The actionable idea here is to know the measurable limits of what can be done, while lifting weights or in other areas of life.

The same way that Scivive would tell you that you shouldn’t try and become a very bad version of Google, you should let Google do what it does best and you should do what it can’t do, yet. That’s the same way that you want to get better data from voters. Scivivors won’t just tell you, “Hey, don’t teach memory skills, let the computers do that.” Let’s take the fallback position, which is try to not teach memory skills if you don’t have to. Or, if you are going to teach them, at least teach them correctly, and learn some tactics that work, because competition and excellence has already been developed in the area so use what the competitors use.

That’s the same thing as voters’ mindsets when choosing an ordered list in a vote. “If I can’t get this guy, give me this guy; if I can’t get that guy, give me that guy; and if I can’t take this other one, okay then I’ll take that one.” Just like an improved voting system that gets more data from the voter whose will you’re trying to execute in the world with telling you about how the education should look. Scivive doesn’t take the raw binary position that you shouldn’t teach the thing, but you shouldn’t teach the thing unless there’s an exception, or if you don’t completely agree with that then the fallback position is this.

Anytime you’re giving someone advice, it might be more useful to adopt a menu of preferable fallback positions than throw the all-or-nothing hail Mary pass down the field and hoping they fall upon your most extreme position, or what might appear to them to be your most extreme position, even though it may not be extreme at all or even harsher than your other suggestions.

When you’re arguing against other paths of belief or activity, it’s not that they don’t work. It’s not that it can’t be argued against, or shouldn’t be argued against or should never be done, it’s just that they have a higher likelihood of leading to outcomes that are bad. This may not always be the case, but they’re statistically more likely to. The improvements that you suggest are not perfect, they are just better.

You can influence people who don’t know you exist, and you can also have multiple identities as well.

If you look at the distribution of books on syllabuses, you will see that Plato’s Republic is still the required reading across all college syllabuses. Isn’t it rather odd that the most prescribed books are the oldest? Shouldn’t we have new progressive benchmarks? Hasn’t anyone made better books covering the same material?

Be a beacon of greatness before being an identifier of the negative lights. Try to focus all positive and leave out much of the negative if at all possible. The amount of time you can spend disproving the idiots and stupidity is vastly larger than just promoting the right stuff, and if you disprove the bad stuff, you only leave a hole that they will fill with different bad stuff. It’s much better to just push the smart good stuff up front. This is perhaps why it’s not that useful to go and disprove all the wrong things one by one.