The Art of Learning

Why it's the most meaningful meta-skill you can learn – God, AI, and human nature.

Brand Marz
February 21, 2025

As far as I can remember I've been obsessed with learning.

Humans are learning machines with a twist of emotions. This is a good thing.

Don't confuse emotions with weakness. They’re proven, powerful drivers of learning and you'd be a fool to discount their amplification ability.

Let’s talk about the problems with learning today, the benefits of learning practice, how learning saved my life, applications to AI, and its relation to God.

So why is today the best AND worst time in history to learn?

Information overload.

We got unlimited options to explore with the internet, but the mind wasn't built for the endless scroll. We’re hypnotized monkeys with alien tablets.

You may argue access is better than combing through a library. But it’s not unless we control dopamine urges magnetized by The Algorithm.

Only once you've cultivated true focus, is learning easier.

You NEED it to climb new levels.

Knowledge ISN'T power but applied knowledge is.

Learning the right skills can triple your income in under a year as it did for me. Hobbies like drawing, playing piano, and carpentry inspire flow in life where time feels non-existent.

But the skills themselves aren't even the best part.

The leveling process of your REAL character feels like playing your favorite role-playing game (RPG). But The Game of Life is set to MAX difficulty.

And it parallels your ability to learn and adapt.

For a guy partly raised by video games, it was key to pulling me away from degeneracy.

If it weren't for my ambition to learn, I might still be stuck at my mom's gaming till 4 am every day or worse, imprisoned like a relative with 7 kids from 4 different moms.

Fortunately, A's and B's came easy in school. But I was lazy. I did the minimum to pass classes and spent my free time fooling around.

But the irony? I didn't learn much about life at all.

“Book smarts vs. street smarts," they said. It’s true. 80% of schooling was useless information for passing tests.

Life ain’t a sheet of paper you can grade.

I learned this the hard way.

In 2019, life hit me with a wake-up call when my apartment was shot up. My wife, 1-year-old son, and I feared for our lives.

This woke me up—Get your shit together Brand.

So I did what I do best:

Learned.

I learned how to code after joining a data science boot camp (during the pandemic). What field?

Machine Learning.

How did I learn something that took real effort to understand?

Learning how to learn.

Fucking meta ain't it? My life was built upon learning.

A decade later, I'm writing about my interests. I have a family of four, a one-acre property, time flexibility, and a healthy income job as an AI/ML Engineer.

Now, I'm teaching my kids the things I should've learned back then:

Discipline
Self-management
And compassion.

These are skills you learn. So clearly, learning is everything and it'll change your life if you do it right.

I won't cover learning techniques or the science behind them. Ask ChatGPT to explain it or check out my secret technique here.

Do you know what's crazy though?

Humans and AI have the same learning mechanisms.

Prove it?

Trust me, bro. I'm an AI/ML Engineer. Nah, let me explain, Feynman style.

Think of your brain as a sponge that soaks up information. When you see, hear, or do something new, your brain remembers it and connects it to things you already know.

The more you practice, the stronger your connections get, just like building muscle.

AI and machine learning work in a similar way. Instead of a brain, they have a network of tiny “thinking parts” called neurons, like your brain’s neurons.

They look at tons of examples, learn patterns, and use those patterns to make decisions—just like our experiences. The more they practice (data), the better they get.

This is how the famous ChatGPT and similar generative AI giants are built (simplified).

Most people think AI will take over humanity.

The big, bad AI companies are trying to play God. If we look back to the Bible, this is a big mistake (i.e. Babel, Herod, and Pharaoh in Exodus).

Learning and advancing technology aren't inherently evil, but we will never reach His level.

Let me explain.

God is the Ultimate game designer—the role of the Creator

There are three schools of belief for AI's role in spirituality.

1) AI will augment human potential, we'll be like gods eventually.

2) AI will control us and destroy everything.

3) AI and all technology/learning are Original Sin, we just need to pray and fast till we return to heaven.

Human's fall from Eden may be seen by hardcore Christians as learning = evil. The forbidden fruit was knowledge after all. But this is far from true. God created us and ALLOWED us to freely make choices.

Why?

To develop a personal relationship with Him. This is the start of The Game of Life. You're dropped into a rabbit hole as an empty slate, only given base stats (genetics) as a baseline to start.

Our individuality and the return to God in the end. All roads lead to Rome. All paths lead back to God. But how you meet God doesn’t mean you’ve won the game. There’s judgment day. And Salvation has a single path.

All learning leads to this. You understand Salvation or you don’t. And what really matters in life but learning the Truth and living it to our fullest?

I choose to follow the narrow path of Jesus. But we can get into that another time.

So I’m curious. I have a list of things I’m planning to explore. Which one interests you most? Here’s a list of things top of mind:

God is Real — Why Atheism is wrong and contradictory
The Deadly Problem with the New Age Spirituality and Self-Help (i.e. Law of Attraction, Divination, Hermetica, Enlightenment)
The multi-passionate myth — How many interests can you effectively study at ONCE?
Don’t Lose to Lust — Why Sexual Immorality will drag you to Hell.
Will AI replace your job? (An AI Engineer’s Perspective)