This early April, I once again got the opportunity to head to Palo Alto and spend a week at K-Scale Labs: learning from founders, engineers, and designers—all truly united by the goal of changing the world.
Our mission at K-Scale Labs is to make humanity into a Type 1 Kardashev scale civilization. This means building a civilization that is capable of harnessing all of the energy available on Earth and channeling it toward beneficial outcomes. We are doing this by building general-purpose humanoid robots as vehicles for embodied intelligence.
Here are some insights I gathered throughout my time at the office:
- Picking your mission
- Find role models: read books and biographies; listen to podcasts and audiobooks
- Try lots of different things—every single thing you can possibly try
- Life is a lot of different games and you can do literally anything. Look at every opportunity as a math function you’re trying to optimize for: social life, career aspirations, or the impact you want to make. Maybe even more specific: a person in your life, a goal you hope to achieve, or a trait you hope to build up.
- While optimizing these functions, you need to ensure you’re finding the global maximums—not getting stuck in the relatives. More importantly, be very very careful in choosing the functions you choose to optimize for—because you definitely can’t pick all of them
- A useful question to consider prior/during optimization is the Hamming Question: “What are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them?”
- Eventually, when you know what you want to do, focus on that. This game is your game now. Cut out all the noise—other’s expectations of you, distracting goals outside of what you want to focus on—and focus on these games alone.
- When you stop playing other people’s games, you start competing WITH everyone else rather than AGAINST everyone else
- Be humble
- KT: “Morality is probably one of the most important values we’ve been raised with: I always do my best to always work harder than I ever have before; I always do my best to serve the people around me the best I can; I always do my best to be a positive influence and smile for the people around me. I always do my best to be good—why do I feel like I have worse outcomes than other people who blatantly cheat, manipulate, and operate dishonestly?”
- One fascinating conversation:
- “Think game theory. Things look grim when you look at everything as a one-shot game—because life is a repeated game. In a one-shot payoff matrix, defection (cheating) is always the dominant strategy—because you win and won’t have to pay the consequences. If there’s no tomorrow, cheating always makes sense. It gives the highest short-term reward, and there’s no cost to manipulation, dishonesty, and burning trust.”
- “But life isn’t one round—it’s an infinite game. Mutual cooperation becomes the rational equilibrium—it consistently outperforms defection over time”
- “You can term it as ‘morality’ or or you can look at everything through a selfish lens of maximizing your expected value; but regardless of your worldview, cooperation is always the optimal long-term strategy. You, by working hard and being honest, are optimizing for cumulative reward, not immediate wins. The outcomes come later, but they scale better and last longer.”
- KT: “But continuous short-term losses stack up and make it harder to stay committed. Even if I believe in the long game, missing the payoff again and again will eventually erode my conviction. And at the same time, winning also makes it easier to win more—making it easier for cheaters to win more”
- “Sticking with the long game doesn’t mean ignoring the short term—it means accepting that short-term variance doesn’t reflect long-term value. Of course it’s hard. Can you absorb losses without shifting course?”
- Another powerful perspective:
- “The path to success is not linear and there’s little fulfillment in being exploitative”
- “Just because good things don’t necessarily always go to good people, doesn’t mean that doing things out of good intention is bad”
- Outside of just finishing the AP Microeconomics Oligopoly unit, this conversation also reminded me of an interesting Veritasium video about game theory which I would definitely recommend watching
- Seek discomfort
- Pull out a sheet of paper and write down the 30 things you fear the most
- Starting from the easiest, go through every single thing on the list and fight it the hardest you can
- When you conquer your fears, you’re quite literally the strongest person you possibly can be
- Book Recommendation: The Courage to Be Disliked
- If you make your own decisions and it doesn’t work out, atleast it’s your own decision you regret—not someone else’s
- “People out in the world will want to expect and demand your goodness, but know that you don’t owe them it”
All quotes are paraphrased or recreated to convey my own interpretation