Fix The World
Richard Heart’s second book, Fix The World (or 15 Ways to Fix The World), is another take on life. In Scivive, it’s more about being the best version of yourself and how to get there. How to think better and understand how the world works.
This book is about using what you know to make things outside of yourself better and how to solve a lot of the challenges we face in society and how you can at least see what makes sense and what doesn’t in the sea of chaos and beauty you’re exposed to on an every day basis. If you want to get a grasp of what humans are dealing with in the modern world and how we might make things better, jump into it and be enlightened.
You can get a copy of this book online by joining the Telegram group where it is shared freely or by downloading a copy online at the mirror on Gitlab here. The audiobook is also available, narrated by the great AWildSJ, which you can find on YouTube.
Now let’s get into some of my favorites!
“You can predict the outcome by looking at the rules of the game. If you reward bad behavior, you will get more of it. If you punish good behavior, you will get less of it.“
Reminds me of “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes”, which has a lot of truth in it. If you play the corporate game, best case you get in corporate, often soul-sucking reward (usually more and more than you need to do to just keep up). If you play the money game, you can buy your freedom. That’s a much better reward.
With people, if you hang out with people who have a negative effect on you, and you do nothing about it, you’re effectively rewarding them (assuming you have something to offer them) by continuing the relationship or giving to them when you don’t get much good in return. However, if you have a good friend who helps you, but you betray them, turn your back on them when they need help or otherwise soil the relationship, they probably won’t be your friend for long.
If you meet good people, people who are good for you and you develop a mutually-beneficial, successful relationship and you have fun together in a positive sum way, go out of your way to keep them around. Do the little things. Even if they don’t directly help you now, I’d always want to be on the good side of karma. Likewise, if you spend time and energy with people who knock you down, they won’t change and you’ll keep eating crap. You can still be nice and limit interactions as necessary.
“Obviously no crime is better than crime and arrests, however that's not how we reward the police! Would you rather have full prisons, or empty prisons, due to no crime. Empty, obviously, but the private corps that own the prisons, and all their suppliers would really prefer full prisons, they like a revolving door of criminal customers.“
The criminal justice system has been evolving, but we’re still stuck in the mentality of “lock them up and throw away the key”. Most criminals (but not all, some are just gone) can be rehabilitated with the right tools and support. So if that’s true, countries spending more money and resources on mental health, rehab and reintroduction to society should have better outcomes and have criminals with less chance of relapse upon release.
Then comes the question of what do you arrest and prosecute for? Is justice locking people up forever? Does it need to match the crime? How much does context and intent matter? A lot. This is why laws are often less specific and more flexible so humans can interpret them and make a fit decision. Stop arresting people for shoplifting and people will shoplift more. Start arresting more people for shoplifting and the jails will fill up with people won’t don’t necessarily need to be isolated from society nor their social credit hurt that bad. There must be a balance and system that rewards good behavior and punishes bad, where the incentives are aligned to make people be nicer to each other. But we also want to live in a free society as well to make our own choices. Incentives aligned on both sides, not just for the citizens to be good, but also to stop this privatization of prisons, with lack guidelines and no reason not to fill them up to make more money from human suffering.
Everyone who says they don’t care about criminals is misinformed and hopefully won’t hold positions of power in this domain. You’ll be walking the streets with these people again one day and it’s in your best interest for them to be well and succeed, besides just being the right thing to do.
“If you’re advertising for people to do the wrong thing, you’re killing the mother earth that birthed you. You’re killing the system you live in. You’re making the world that you live in, a worse place. To some degree, that shittiness will come back to you. Probably nowhere near as close to the profit you make on causing it. Sadly. That’s the tragedy of the commons. If somebody gets to externalize the cost of destroying the environment and make extra profit, that’s a great idea for them.“
Advertising can be used for good, but it almost never is, or if so it’s indirect and accidental. Everybody who wants to sell you something does it out of their own self-interest. If the new car happens to make you happy, that’s an accident. Or maybe it’s intentional, but just to get you to come back to the same lot, grow the network of clients for that car dealership, and get your kids and grand kids to keep buying cars from them. Just like what Pepsi, Apple and other generational ad companies do. Do you love their products and see it being good for you? It very well could be, but know their goal isn’t to make you happy, that’s either an accident or part of a long term strategy to do what’s best for their shareholders: get more money from you.
Will that money be used to keep making great products? Sure, maybe. But if and when they go bankrupt one day, you can bet they’re not going to call you and see if there’s anything else you need.
Is there a better system for advertising? The best ads can probably do is not advertise for you to do obviously destructive things that affect almost all human beings, such as gambling, smoking, investing in ultra high risk schemes, scams or other vices. But they aren’t much incentivized to do that, so be vigilant.
“The world is paying attention to what it wants and on the other side of that one is a well-oiled multi-billion dollar machine built to addict, built to consume, built to give them what they want regardless of what is good (?) or not. If you want to influence your friends, your family and you then you need the money to out compete those other experts that have taken over your consciousness.“
Money solves money problems. It can amplify your voice and fund your mission. Use it to promote good messages and you become a powerful force for good. Use it to promote the opposite and you become the villain.
Of course the hard part is figuring out what is good and bad for the long term, short term, good for whom and bad for what, all that stuff. There’s only a few objectively good and evil things out there, but if you try hard enough, study history, philosophy, focus on a area ripe for change or almost there, just needs more resources, then you can probably come up with some good ideas to promote. In a world full of noise, break through it with a solid, provocative yet endearing and healthy message.
“How many good men and women are wasting their lives away? How many people are sitting doing manual labor that a machine should be doing? Is this the meaning of life? To go to school so you can come the worlds shittiest version of google, spitting out half right and half wrong facts when queried? Can we please stop pretending that it is the mission of our education system to make automatons? Or is it actually.“
Spend your time learning things that matter and make you more effective, not trivial fun facts and party tricks that mean you’re still broke, and have long been on the wrong path, but sound smart. You’re more likely to become a great man by trying to become great than having accidentally been born with high intelligence and went to the right school and had the right people not waste your time. You can do it on your own, without much help at all, but you have to choose to do so.
“If you don't have your money owning productive things , you will never become wealthy. Wealth is not power, like knowing about lifting weights isn't lifting weights.“
If you work 9-5 for the rest of your life, when you had the IQ and access to information that shows you that’s not a good idea for those with ambition to live a great life, own your own time, and so on yet you still don’t act… well, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
“Progress comes from humans. Throw enough shit at the wall, more of it sticks. We need more humans, preferably the useful kind.“
Overcrowding is not a future problem we need to be worried about. Helping people live longer, happier, healthier, more productive lives is the better problem to work on.
“One of the biggest tragedies is that we want to keep our ideas secrets. Think about all of the times you have been interacting with a business and thought of a really good idea they should implement, or noticed how they could do something better, but didn't tell them about it. Or think about all of the good ideas that you've had that you thought would make a good business or invention that you didn't tell anyone about.
Every time one of those ideas dies inside your mind, never acted upon, sometimes even forgotten, it’s a great loss to the world, because there's all kinds of people out there that have so much free time, and literal boredom that would love to act on a great idea, hell, might even have the tools ready to execute a great idea, but they never learn about it, because you know that if you spread that idea before you have the ability to make any money on it, then the best part of the idea, the part where you get to be rich and respected for coming up with such a cool idea are lost.“
Have an idea? Write it down. You never know when you might want to act upon it and use it later. If you never write it down or capture it somehow, you never have a chance to use it and tell others about it who can benefit.
Good ideas may come to you while in the shower, driving or sleeping. Keep a pen and notepad, voice-to-text app or device or hurry to make sure you get it down somewhere that you can revisit later before you forget. Once you forget, it might be gone forever (or for a while at least).
“You must have choice to allow the selection of excellence. If you have no choice, you can't enforce excellence. Monopolies are bad for all parties involved. Well, I guess they are ok for the Monopoly, if all you care about is profit, and not net good for the world, or excellence in nonprofit for a single entity at the expense of everyone else.“
As Peter Thiel says, as a business you want a Monopoly, in the sense that nobody else can provide the product or service that you can at that value. So they’ll pay you for it. “Competition is for losers” because when you compete, you compete profits away. Of course this is the “good” kind of monopoly, not the one Richard is talking about and the one everyone thinks of as the “we have no choice but to pay you or use your service” monopoly. Those are the ones not good for the world. But of course the world, and many words, even if they happened to often be used in negative lights in pop culture and politics, aren’t usually black and white.
Look at utility companies: would it be better for you if you had to go and evaluate 4 different electric companies before you chose one to light your home? Would Apple phones be as good if they didn’t own half the market and reinvest for the latest and greatest gadgets? There’s many different kinds of monopolies, some better and worse for consumers and companies. Don’t forget, you need companies to give you stuff, unless you want to make everything yourself. But then you won’t have much time to do anything else and produce things that you are uniquely good at and are interested in for yourself and the world. Or do nothing at all, that’s a feature of choice and living in the modern world, for better or for worse.
“In a properly working economy, as prices increase it invites competition and increased supply, which brings the price down. It’s kind of a cool self-balancing thing. It's part of the reason capitalist economies work so well is flexible pricing and flexible production.
When you artificially limit the size of blocks allowed in the blockchain, what you’re actually doing is limiting the amount of people that can actually participate, and so if you create a “fee” market which increases the cost of putting things in the chain you’re not inviting extra supply, you’re not taking advantage of fees in order to making the world a better place by allowing more people to participate, you’re just changing it so that the only people that can afford to participate are the economically advantaged, and those that would benefit the most by reduced fees and being banked instead of unbanked will be literally taken off the chain.“
There’s some blockchain nuance required to see the trade-offs made with blocksizes and so on, but the picture of a healthy economy and sustainable capitalism is quite important to note.
“Do NOT give anyone cash. Ever. Period. Just don't. Do not buy them houses. Do not buy them cars. Tell your attorney that you want to provide for your family, and that you want to set up a series of trusts for them that will total 20% of you after tax winnings. Tell him you want the trust empowered to fund higher education, some help (not a total) purchase of their first home, some provision for weddings and the like, whatever.
Do NOT put yourself in the position of handing out cash. Once you do, if you stop, you will be accused of being a heartless expletive. Trust me. It won't go well. It will be easy to lose perspective. It is now the duty of your friends, family, relatives, hangers-on and their inner circle to skew your perspective, and they take this job quite seriously. Setting up a trust, a managed fund for your family that is in the double digit millions is AMAZINGLY generous. You need never have trouble sleeping because you didn't lend Uncle Jerry $20,000 in small denomination unmarked bills to start his chain of deep-fried peanut butter pancake restaurants. ("Deep'n 'nutter Restaurants") Your attorney will have a number of good ideas how to parse this wealth out without turning your siblings/spouse/children/grandchildren/cousins/waitresses into the latest Paris Hilton.“
Teach a man how to fish, don’t just keep giving him fish. You must be careful who you tell you have money, who you give money to (or help in general) and how you raise your kids if you happen to have found wealth during that period of your life. It’s easy to spoil kids or people, but the harder thing is usually longer lasting and worthwhile. Make an effort to give people what they need and make them earn what they want.
“There is no "cloud." It's just someone else's computer. Very ever so rarely you could need lots and lots of computers on short notice, and then it could be quite useful to have instant access to lots of them at once. It is still important to know that there's little magic, and much of what people want from the cloud, they can do with their own group of computers they already own, for free and with better privacy and security.“
Cloud computing is how you scale internet-based services these days, but know the trade-offs. They aren’t there to keep your secrets safe, they are there to make money from you trusting them to make sure your website doesn’t go down and works when your customers need it. They want to make themselves invaluable to you so that you always need them, but you can host your own hardware, servers and dedicated internet connection or build your own data center. It’s just easier to use AWS. And that’s OK most of the time in the modern world, just know what you’re getting and giving up.
“I think, Aubrey (de Grey) is a hero, and I do not use this term lightly. He used to be a computer scientist in Cambridge; also, he has a PhD in biology that he got without attending any classes. Biology was just a hobby for him at first, but later he decided he wanted to take up biology seriously. He figured out why mitochondria ruined, no one knew why it happened before. Free radical theories did not help to understand this process. Anyway, he figured it out, wrote a thesis about it and defended it in Cambridge that is how he got his PhD. It is a great way to obtain such a degree, no need to attend any courses and just figure out something that nobody could do before. Then he started the SENS Foundation that became his life’s mission. He got an inheritance when his mother died, something about 8 or 10 million, he donated 6 million to the foundation.“
The SENS foundation and other longevity and anti-aging medical research organizations are literally trying to enable humans to maximize their healthy lifespans. I don’t think there’s many things more important to work on or support in life than living longer, happier, healthier lives with your friends and family.
“So this is a common trope going around that we shouldn't have an armed population because the government is just too strong. And it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Because when we deploy larger numbers of armed men with a greater desire to just kill on sight say in Afghanistan. That less armed to population seems to be absolutely unconquerable in a smaller quantity with less firearms.
So then how can you translate that American law enforcement with weaker tools against a better trained better armed more populous population is somehow going to lose the battle if the government of America ever wants to go to war with the people of America. The government of America is going to lose and it's going to lose hard unless they just nuke it all you know cancel out Earth. So, no having a more armed more effective more militarized law enforcement system will not allow them to win an oppressive government regime against an armed American population. It won't happen.“
Cash, the right to bear arms and privacy: these are three essential things to keeping a free society free.
“I love the countries like Sweden and Norway that say the stupidest things. For instance, let's get rid of physical currency and use only digital currency. Yeah, that sounds great, until Russia invades you, or just decides to hack you from afar. Then what happens to commerce in your country? It grinds to a halt. You don't get a taxi and you don't get to eat, because you thought you were too good for physical currency that requires no electricity.“
Crypto is an amazing way to transfer wealth to new generations who think differently and have hopes of investing for financial freedom, but they do not and should not replace physical assets or currency.
“Progress isn't magic, smart people, with funding, applied over time towards a compelling and interesting goal. Hell, throw some recognition and competition in there, and you've got a recipe for success.“
Let it compound over time and we may just continue on this road paved by human consciousness on a green rock floating through space we call mother Earth.
This world has so much beauty and yet these days we focus too much on the horrors. Be happy you’re alive, you’re a survivor by the fact that you’re here with eyes and ears to read these words and listen to your favorite songs and love, eat good food and appreciate each other. Channel your inner peace, avoid losing it and choose the unique road you want to travel.
And those were some notable lines from Fix The World. You want to really make the world a better place? Go get rich and use your resources to apply these principles. Money is a force multiplier (Scivive), so use it for good. If you believe these ideas to be good, then you already know what to do. Go forth, achieve success, live a healthy, happy life and pay it forward (but don’t keep count).
