Sorry for the continued poor formatting and logical structure. I will continue to post this quote until I get to a point of being okay.
“It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time. Give yourself permission to be a beginner.” — Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
^ AKA I have been lazy but at least I am not using it as an excuse to post nothing!
I saw a guy at YMCA pickup basketball this week wearing a Triathlon shirt, and asked him about it. Went to search for the first time in my life what the normal distances are, and for the uninformed, Olympic Triathlon’s are about a 1 mile swim, 25 mile bike, and 6 mile run (1.5km 40km and 10k).
THEN, a friend reached out and asked if I wanted to do a Triathlon this spring/summer out of the blue. Do you believe in signs?
I thought huh, I could probably do those distances, that's not that far.
So this weekend (Sat 2/8/25), we had the first-ever “Tri at the Y!”
I thought I could swim a mile, throw on some clothes, go downstairs, hop on a stationary bike, and then transition to the treadmill. Targets were 30-40mins on the swim, 75 mins on the bike, and 50 mins on the run.
Preparation?
None. Didn’t change a thing. Did it fasted. Ripped some pre-workout first. Brought a salt shaker and jar of honey in my bag just in case. Had my handy dandy 32oz squirt water bottle, a towel, and my goggles in tow.
Results?
Surprisingly good! It was fun. Had a minor mishap with my watch that paused the time and cals and everything for part of the swim, but it tracked the distance so it was all mostly good - just swam a bit further. Also, someone came in midway and I was splitting the lane
Transition was ok. The bikes have a limit of an hour, so plan was to bike 20, restart the bike and finish out the last 5. Went well enough. Wiped off the bike afterward (I was going for time but I am not an animal!) and then filled up my water bottle.
On the treadmill I had to stop once about 1.5 miles in and once more at around 2 and change to absolutely crank some salt in my mouth. Quads were going crazy and I was laughing to myself.
Mental strain? Pretty much non-existant. Body definitely not prepped for that but it was super fun to give a try.
Total time: 2 hours and 50 minutes
I think I have a screw loose or something but glad I did it!
It was also my birthday this past week, yay 26, yay end of parental health insurance! Last birthday of significance before retirement?
Some things I read/Saw this past week:
Stone Ridge 2024 Investor Letter
He had a gap in statistics knowledge so he decided to take a ton of stats classes > total immersion in statistics
“Can a page have three sides? What if it has to” - Electric quote
Misunderstanding LLN
Example with PDP’s and LLN
Example with re insurers and lln
Anthropologists coined the term “cargo cult” to mean effort designed to create a specific outcome that has no relationship to the output of the effort. Fiat central bankers observe that wealthy people have money, so they reason that printing more money will make more people wealthy. Printing pieces of paper to attract prosperity is no less preposterous than building a wooden bird to attract an airplane.
Ethically, at an individual level – as a function of physics at a societal level – we must produce before we can consume. We bitcoiners, emerged from our rabbit holes, have total clarity on the direction of causality.
“It isn’t obvious the world had to work this way. Somehow, the universe smiles on encryption.”
— Julian Assange, cypherpunk and OG bitcoiner
The world has never had a profitable use of energy that is location independent
Money is valued not for its own sake, but solely for its prospective exchange utility. That’s a fancy way of saying we hope it keeps its value long enough for us to trade it in the future for something we actually want. Nobody wants green little pieces of paper. Or bitcoin. We want what those things can buy us in future. Perhaps an education, a dream house, a wedding, a bucket-list trip
Just as a stock certificate is title to company property, money is title to human time. People sacrifice their time for money, expecting to trade that money in the future for the time sacrifices of others. When central(ized) banks breach trust by printing money – destroying the savings, and dignity, of the innocently trusting billions of people who had not exchanged their savings for a valuable hard asset – they steal time. Gruesome
Bitcoin’s tick, the incremental block height pace, b, is the world’s new universal constant – silently,
unstoppably, trustlessly ticking
–-
https://x.com/bpoppenheimer/status/1881781611181527348
Quentin Tarantino Clip on Rogan
“Tarantino said of those years working at the video store—“it put my ambitions to sleep. Because I was happy enough.” “I was happy enough,” he repeats.
When you’re happy enough, when the job, the pay, or the circumstances are good enough—the psychologist Adam Mastroianni calls this The Mediocrity Trap.
Mediocre situations, he writes, “keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity.”
To escape the mediocrity trap, you often need a setback (e.g. getting fired), a Steve-O rant, or, Mastroianni writes, “someone to come in and tell you it’s time to start living.””
https://x.com/bpoppenheimer/status/1886438036352721030
“The agitation and stress that you feel at the beginning of something—when you’re trying to lean into it and you can’t focus: you feel agitated and your mind’s jumping all over the place—that is just a gate. You have to pass through that gate to get to the focus component.”
https://x.com/Ruxpin84/status/1886842017025511434
Gabriels horn bitcoin - I just thought this was an interesting article
https://youtubetranscriptoptimizer.com/blog/05_the_short_case_for_nvda
Put off reading this deep dive on NVDA for a bit. Here are the quotes I liked:
what the wise man believes in the beginning, the fool believes in the end
The original scaling law, which is what has been driving progress in AI since AlexNet appeared in 2012 and the Transformer architecture was invented in 2017, is the pre-training scaling law: that the more billions (and now trillions) worth of tokens we can use as training data, and the larger the parameter count of the models we are training, and the more FLOPS of compute that we expend on training those models on those tokens, the better the performance of the resulting models on a large variety of highly useful downstream tasks.
the remaining "incremental" training data probably isn't all that significant in the grand scheme of things.
So we've always had a looming "data wall" when it comes to the original scaling law; although we know we can keep shoveling more and more capex into GPUs and building more and more data centers, it's a lot harder to mass produce useful new human knowledge which is correct and incremental to what is already out there.
Synthetic data possible in empirical fields
Training on Gene data
Raw genome size isn't directly comparable to token counts
The information content of genomic data is very different from text
The training value of highly redundant data isn't clear
The computational requirements for processing genomic data are different
But it's still another large source of diverse information that we could train huge models on in the future, which is why I included it.
it quickly becomes obvious that we are close to hitting a wall in terms of data availability for "generally useful" knowledge that can get us closer to the ultimate goal of getting artificial super-intelligence
Issues with training using x data clusters and then not using that old infrastructure, how do you make money after amortizing that cost
What's this "new" scaling law? Well, that's something that people really just started focusing on in the past year: inference time compute scaling.
Before, the vast majority of all the compute you'd expend in the process was the up-front training compute to create the model in the first place. Once you had the trained model, performing inference on that model— i.e., asking a question or having the LLM perform some kind of task for you— used a certain, limited amount of compute.
Critically, the total amount of inference compute (measured in various ways, such as FLOPS, in GPU memory footprint, etc.) was much, much less than what was required for the pre-training phase
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this approach, beyond the fact that it works at all, is that the more logic/COT tokens you use, the better it works. Suddenly, you now have an additional dial you can turn so that, as you increase the amount of COT reasoning tokens (which uses a lot more inference compute, both in terms of FLOPS and memory), the higher the probability is that you will give a correct response— code that runs the first time without errors, or a solution to a logic problem without an obviously wrong deductive step.
But as was pointed out earlier, what customers really tend to care about, all other things being equal, is performance per dollar (both in up-front capex cost of equipment and in energy usage, so performance per watt), and even though Nvidia's GPUs are certainly the fastest, they are not the best price/performance when measured naively in terms of FLOPS.
it's no secret that there is a strong power law distribution of Nvidia's hyper-scaler customer base, with the top handful of customers representing the lion's share of high-margin revenue. How should one think about the future of this business when literally every single one of these VIP customers is building their own custom chips specifically for AI training and inference?
Nvidia is largely an IP based company. They don't make their own chips. The true special sauce for making these incredible devices arguably comes more from TSMC, the actual fab, and ASML, which makes the special EUV lithography machines used by TSMC to make these leading-edge process node chips. And that's critically important, because TSMC will sell their most advanced chips to anyone who comes to them with enough up-front investment and is willing to guarantee a certain amount of volume.
Re: deepseek - All this stuff works because these models are ultimately finding much lower-dimensional representations of the underlying data than the so-called "ambient dimensions". So it's wasteful to store the full KV indices, even though that is basically what everyone else does.
it can actually end up improving model quality because it can act like a "regularizer," forcing the model to pay attention to the truly important stuff instead of using the wasted capacity to fit to noise in the training data
But unlike the case of Nvidia, where the cost differential is the result of them earning monopoly gross margins of 90%+ on their data-center products, the cost differential of the DeepSeek API relative to the OpenAI and Anthropic API could be simply that they are nearly 50x more compute efficient (it might even be significantly more than that on the inference side— the ~45x efficiency was on the training side)
What's particularly fascinating is that during training, they observed what they called an "aha moment," a phase where the model spontaneously learned to revise its thinking process mid-stream when encountering uncertainty. This emergent behavior wasn't explicitly programmed; it arose naturally from the interaction between the model and the reinforcement learning environment. The model would literally stop itself, flag potential issues in its reasoning, and restart with a different approach, all without being explicitly trained to do this.
Synopsis: With five distinct vectors of attack— architectural innovation, customer vertical integration, software abstraction, efficiency breakthroughs, and manufacturing democratization— the probability that at least one succeeds in meaningfully impacting NVIDIA's margins or growth rate seems high. At current valuations, the market isn't pricing in any of these risks.
—
Word of the Week!
Mudita is a Sanskrit and Pali word that describes a feeling of empathetic joy or pleasure that comes from celebrating the good fortune of others. It's a Buddhist practice that involves finding happiness in the success of others without feeling envy or jealousy.
—
A smattering of podcasts from this week follow. My notes are preceded by DH, still playing around with AI tools to help get links and titles and summaries, but alas.
Bitcoin Podcasts
ESCAPE The $250T Global Debt Bubble With BITCOIN | Jeff Park | BFM119
Listen on Spotify
Jeff Park explains how Bitcoin can serve as a hedge and alternative asset amid a global debt bubble.
He breaks down the “60-40” investment model and discusses why young investors should consider Bitcoin.
The conversation also touches on corporate Bitcoin adoption and how emerging technologies like AI may intersect with digital assets.
DH
I have enjoyed Jeff Parks takes lately and appreciate his 60-40 portfolio revolution
Talks about how bonds are intertwined with the social contract
Prior model of retiring at 55 or 65 when you live to 100 doesnt really mesh with the current system, bonds are not going to have performance and hedging ability in this environment
Lyn Alden Uncensored. @LynAldenContact #521 Once Bitten
Listen on Spotify
Lyn Alden provides her candid analysis of recent political and regulatory events affecting Bitcoin.
She discusses institutional investment trends and how companies might soon begin buying into Bitcoin.
Key market indicators and her outlook for Bitcoin’s long‐term adoption are also explored.
DH
Lyn is the GOAT, will listen to nearly anything she puts out
I read her newsletter and follow her takes on Twitter so a lot of those items are re-iterated
Sam Callahan: Is U.S. in Fiscal Crisis? Crash Course on Debt, Deficit & DOGE's Efforts to Cut Spending - Coin Stories
Listen on Spotify
Sam Callahan delves into the U.S. fiscal crisis and the mounting national debt.
The discussion centers on “fiscal dominance” and its implications for monetary policy and global finance.
He also examines how alternative cryptocurrencies may challenge conventional fiscal structures.
DH
Similar to Lyn, Sam works with Lyn on writeups and so they touched on some of those themes I have read before and have written in prior weeks
#579: Bitcoin 101, Chinese AI and Poisonous Modern Life with Matt McCusker - TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast
Matt McCusker offers a beginner-friendly “Bitcoin 101” overview, explaining the basics of Bitcoin.
He touches on the influence of Chinese developments in AI and their broader implications.
The episode also reflects on modern societal challenges and how Bitcoin’s disruptive nature might address them.
DH
Similar to the War Mode guys, it is great to hear the questions that someone outside of the space but still smart is asking
A lot of people realize that there are problems but it is hard to put your finger on the solution
The more you realize the broken foundational layer of the money is the root of all of these problems, the more frustrated you get
#578: The USA Is Losing Its Leverage with Luke Gromen - TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast
Listen on Spotify
Luke Gromen discusses how U.S. economic power is waning in the global financial arena.
He analyzes the impact of fiscal and monetary policies on national leverage and stability.
The conversation also speculates on how these shifts could pave the way for alternative financial models, including Bitcoin.
DH
Luke is a beast
He has been pretty sharp over the past 7 years or so in calling these big macro trends
I really like how he is able to explain complex topics
He reads so widely and can tie in topics from history and arcane meeting minutes seamlessly
A lot of signal as usual
#1482 Chris Kline | Tax-Free Bitcoin Is Here! - The Pomp Podcast
Listen on Spotify
Chris Kline explains strategies for achieving tax-efficient Bitcoin transactions.
The episode discusses the intersection of taxation, crypto regulation, and personal wealth optimization.
Listeners gain insights into how investors can structure their portfolios to potentially avoid tax pitfalls with Bitcoin.
DH
More than anything this made me think about inheritance protocols for me and my family
Also spurred me to think about opening an IRA to take advantage of the tax benefits
259. Cory Klippsten and Swan - The Bitcoin Standard Podcast
Listen on Spotify
Cory Klippsten and Swan explore the evolution of Bitcoin as a monetary standard.
They review historical monetary systems and compare them with Bitcoin’s growing role in finance.
The discussion includes practical insights into the potential benefits and challenges of a Bitcoin-standard economy.
DH
Biased against Swan TBH since they banned my account for no reason and never followed up
Opened an account and then got banned and never got an explanation, never traded, never connected accounts
That being said, The idea of Scambling was pretty great
Relative to these two talking, I almost feel bearish
Such crazy and innovative ideas in the space and I am happy to be learning along the way
Other Podcasts
DOGE vs USAID, Crypto Framework, Google's $75B AI Spend, US Sovereign Wealth Fund, GLP-1s - All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
The episode debates the narrative around Dogecoin versus governmental agencies like USAID.
It examines how major tech investments and sovereign wealth initiatives influence the crypto landscape.
Broader discussions include the role of government and institutional actors in shaping digital asset policies.
The Ultimate Fat-Burning Running Tips: Sprint, Don't Jog, and Walk Your Way to Results || MBPP Ep. 1125 - Mark Bell's Power Project
The episode provides actionable running techniques focused on optimizing fat burn, such as sprint intervals and strategic walking.
It explains how these methods can boost metabolism and overall health.
Practical tips are shared to help listeners integrate effective running strategies into a busy lifestyle.
DH
Recommended the book “burn” on calorie burning
No upper limit for benefits from exercise
Fat max hr - about 180 minus your age
“The obligate runner” - this could be a good blog post - funny i listened as i was doing a triath to get away from my problems
Youre an addict, need run to feel baseline
Marathon story is a farce! What a surprise that was
Energy burning methods
For output its atp creatine phosphate for up to 7
Then cant go longer than that time
7 seconds to about 30 go to lactate pathway
Then lactate, biproduct hydrogen ions burn, lactic
30s to 2 mins glucose through anaerobic glucose pathway burning sugar
2 mins longer and longer - all out - goes to fatty acids
1:15 all out is 50/50 aerobic to anaerobic
6min all out is 79% aerobic
3:43 mile is aerobic
High jumper or powerlifter is all mostly anaerobic
"Stop Eating This CRAP!" – Paul Saladino DEMOLISHES Modern Diets, Processed Foods & Big Food Lies | PBD Podcast | Ep. 539
Listen on Spotify
Paul Saladino critiques modern diets and the prevalence of processed foods in today’s food industry.
He champions a return to ancestral eating practices—often aligned with paleo or carnivore diets—for better health.
The discussion exposes how Big Food’s practices may compromise nutritional quality and public well-being.
DH
PBD is an interesting guy, he has not come across as very intelligent in the few clips I have seen him in, but that helps to get the message across
I am sure when he is speaking in his domain it is better, but I could tell he was genuine which I enjoyed
Good rule of thumb, if your great grandma wouldn’t recognize it, don’t eat it!
Tucker & Piers Morgan Debate Foreign Aid, Hate Speech, NATO, Gun Control, & Is Zelensky a Dictator? - The Tucker Carlson Show
Piers Morgan engages in a heated debate covering foreign aid, hate speech, and NATO’s role in global politics.
He tackles contentious topics such as gun control and questions about Zelensky’s leadership.
The episode offers contrasting perspectives on current global political challenges and media narratives.
DH
This was awesome because they were just yelling at each other
In cable news you get the little sound bites and people dunking on each other, but they were having a long form conversation and allowed it to continue rather amicably even though they were fiercely disagreeing
Dana White: Joining the Board at Meta, the Bryce Mitchell Controversy, and His Friendship With Trump - The Tucker Carlson Show
Dana White discusses his transition into corporate roles, including joining the board at Meta.
He addresses controversies such as the Bryce Mitchell situation and reflects on his personal ties to influential figures like Trump.
The conversation provides insights into leadership challenges and navigating high-profile public controversies.
DH
Dana White is an interesting dude
I definitely respect how genuine he is and how he sticks to his principles
Seems like a great friend from what I have heard and seen on different podcasts
Absolute grinder as well
Nicole Shanahan - Part Of The Problem
Nicole Shanahan shares her vision for innovative financial technologies and disruptive payment systems.
She outlines her entrepreneurial journey and discusses how technology is reshaping economic opportunities.
The episode highlights future trends in digital finance and the importance of embracing new economic models.
DH
Funny that Dave was talking about tariffs being dumb
Also just generally talking about how Trump policies would be short-term bad for the economy
Dave is a super smart guy and I will actually go to see him this coming week on Princeton’s campus which rocks
In this instance, economically, I think that there has been a can kicked down the road for a long time, and his beef seemed to be that he wanted to keep kicking it
Sure there will be short-term pain, but I think it is necessary for long term correction
517. Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins - The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jordan Peterson and Tony Robinson delve into psychological and existential challenges beyond mere survival.
They discuss practical strategies for personal growth, resilience, and finding meaning in life.
The conversation also reflects on societal narratives and the impact of self-improvement on broader cultural well-being.
DH
we don’t experience life. We experience life we focus on. In every moment, what’s wrong is always available, so is what’s right. And it’s not positive thinking. It’s about intelligence. If you’re in a lousy state, you don’t treat people better. You don’t perform better. You’re obviously not happier. So what we teach people is how to shift their focus, how to determine what values at this stage of your life are the ones that are most important to you that will pull you towards what you want.
push vs pull motivations
there is a limit to willpower. I got a lot of willpower too. But there’s no limit to pull motivation. Pull motivation is where it’s something that you care about more than yourself, something that’s a magnificent obsession, something where you’re contributing. It could be your kids. It could be your family. But all that ties to the aim of your values that move you forward.
information without the emotion doesn’t have any lasting impact. So that’s sort of like the biochemistry of a very enhanced flow state
two characterizations of God, spirit of calling and adventure and the voice of conscience
people see the world through their aim
When you when you see the when you hear the story of someone’s life, you actually hear a description of their aim
The first thing that happens is that once you specify the aim, the pathway appears.
And the reason for that is, well, if you can’t see your way to get where you’re going, then what good is it to see?
The next thing that happens is that sets the frame for emotional experience. So now everything that you encounter as an obstacle on that pathway elicits negative emotion. And everything that you encounter that facilitates movement forward evokes positive emotion. So one of the corollaries of that is no aim, no positive emotion.
Anyone anyone can deal with a difficult today if they have a compelling tomorrow
hink about it. When your energy drops, usually negative thoughts grow with that pretty massively. Right? Self negative thoughts, thoughts about society. As you raise the energy level, it’s like plugging into a computer. You have the greatest computer but enough electricity. But if there’s full electricity, there’s power there. And most of us have gotten adjusted to a level of energy, especially post COVID, that we don’t even realize because we’re like fish and water. It has dropped massively.
you can imagine for a moment that you could have what you wanted and needed in 5 years.But there’s a condition. You have to know what it is, and you have to specify it
Even hypothetically, what would get me out of bed in the morning on a very, very difficult day?
The secret is reasons come first, answers come second. Once I know what I want, I got to figure out why.
Because purpose is stronger than object. So the object may inspire you, but what’s going to keep you going is strong enough reasons when it’s tough. What are the reason okay. I want this money. For what?
Because they don’t have the reasons to push through, they don’t have the strategy. It’s wonderful if you say, I want to see a sunset. But if your strategy start running east as fast as you can, I don’t give a damn how positive you are? It’s not going to work.
Once you have an aim - How would that possibly affect your family? How would it affect your community?
we don’t experience life. We experience life we focus on. In every moment, what’s wrong is always available, so is what’s right. And it’s not positive thinking. It’s about intelligence. If you’re in a lousy state, you don’t treat people better. You don’t perform better. You’re obviously not happier. So what we teach people is how to shift their focus, how to determine what values at this stage of your life are the ones that are most important to you that will pull you towards what you want.
Priming— need to prime yourself because you are primed anyway, you need to choose your priming “much of what we think we’re doing ourselves is being shifted by the outside world. So I say prime yourself.”
Align your physiology (shoulders back)
Focus on who you are talking to
Knowledge is not power, knowledge is potential power
Need to prime yourself, your reticular activation system
Think through your emotions and goals and how it would feel if these things happened
Envision making other people in your life happy etc. things you want and how it feels when you get them
Well, if your goal is to support your family, that’s a different level of insight than just you. You’re going to get more insights. If you’re looking to serve a community, if you’re looking to see humanity, I’m not talking about virtue signaling. I’m talking about in your soul, you know what is real, what your deepest purpose and desires, what you’re called for. Well, when that happens, there’s an aliveness and a strength that seems to overcome. It overcomes exhaustion. It overcomes everything.
Daily 10 minute priming: https://www.tonyrobbins.com/priming?srsltid=AfmBOopSRYlyk5OGp3sjhsnI5pZQ19rzrJFiUR1ymUwwmxsWZjtxmWwm
I close my eyes. I see, feel, and I feel. I walk through it. I celebrate it.
I have a problem = I have a question
So but the real secret to influence is being able to influence anyone by understanding what’s already influencing them. So my whole focus is enter people’s worlds where they are by understanding their model of the world as opposed to trying to impose yours and wondering why it doesn’t go anywhere. If I can align your needs, your desires, your outcomes with what we’re doing together in a company, in a family, in anything, then we’re going to have enormous harmony and there’s less friction.
Hero Jouney - most people don’t take the call, so you have to take more hits. So they have to take the call. And then you go on the journey, and you meet new people, new friends, and you meet new mentors. And you get past the point of no return where you have to go forward, then you do battle. And eventually, you slay your dragons. You come home the hero of your own life, and you have something real to give people because you’ve lived it. It’s not just book knowledge. And then as soon as you’re done, it happens again. You’re ready to be challenged again.
What is your deepest desire now? Let’s awaken that. Let’s find the reasons for it. What do you want now? Because desire sets the tone of the story. Is my desire to serve God? Is my desire to build a family? Is my desire to whatever it is, you know that sets the tone
#2269 - Bret Weinstein - The Joe Rogan Experience
Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein explore topics ranging from evolutionary biology to societal change.
They emphasize the importance of free speech, open dialogue, and questioning established narratives.
The discussion also touches on controversies in science and culture, encouraging critical thinking and debate.
DH
I have to say I’m just upset at the general pattern of a failure to recognize how right those of us who hypothesized that there was a racket that had overtaken our entire governance structure. We turn out to be absolutely right about this, and no one’s going to mention it.
The whole idea is power is utilized to free resources that garner more power, and it is the exact inverse of the system that we are supposed to have.
That their corruption was immediately apparent, and they’re not used to that. They’re used to having a whole phony journalistic layer that covers for them.
I see Bernie Sanders, and I see him reading from a script that is no longer relevant to the movie we’re watching.
Everything that is supposed to evaluate something like safety or efficacy or analyze net effects, anything like that has been captured by the PR wing. And so the consumer is in no position to… to navigate a world like that. I mean… and we know that this encompasses everything. You know? How many people’s doctors are pharmaskeptical? Right? Your doctor should be very pharmaskeptical
I’m constantly in a battle with the ultraskeptics who claim to have gotten everything right during COVID because, basically, they never believe anything.
And so I have the sense that you and I are now watching the first… the outcome of the first genuine election since 1963.
unfamiliar to us because we’ve been watching theater for our entire lives and being told that it was the transfer of power. And the other is that there’s a lot of pent-up need for change because you’ve effectively had a cryptic power structure that never gets displaced, that has gotten so entrenched that rooting it out takes, frankly, an extraordinary, in every sense of the word, person like Donald Trump. And an extraordinary team
I think if you had gone to 2018 and… and had, like, a real conversation with most people in this country about the level of corruption, it would be a fraction of what they believe it to be now.
Like, there’s a collective consciousness in which we figure out what we think is true, and it’s been downstream of this amazing propaganda engine. Well, we’re now learning to spot the propaganda and to understand what it really means and to figure out what it’s cloaking. And a lot of that is happening on Twitter because it can, and it’s actually forcing, you know, Facebook to come around.
one of the things that we, many of us came to understand during COVID about proposals is that very often the proposal comes after the experiments have already begun.
’m going to share credit with Ben Davidson for this, but the basic point is PSYOP until proven otherwise. Yeah. And PSYOP until proven otherwise, I think, is a very functional way to approach this because depending upon what kind of program we’re looking at, and there obviously is governmental involvement in whatever it is, either concealing real stuff or pretending that it has real stuff that it’s pretending to conceal or whatever it’s doing.
There is every possibility that there are sort of layers of awareness. And at the bottom layer, there may not be anything alien at all. But it may be that people fairly close to the center have been shown something.
his is also a violation of informed consent. If those were our drones and they were nightly traumatizing the residents of New Jersey and pretending they didn’t know what it was, That’s a de facto experiment that they were running on the citizens of the country. They have no right to do this stuff.
Our ancestors, our hunter-gatherer ancestors, even our farming ancestors lived in a world where the world itself provided the incentive structure. Right?
If you didn’t work hard enough as a hunter-gatherer, it manifested as hunger and jeopardy. So people were naturally incentivized to invest in the right kind of stuff, and the right kind of stuff is hard work in some cases where, you know, you pursue the materials that make your hut better, that procure more food for your family. Or it could be insight where you figure out some way to do something better so you make more with what you’ve already figured out how to get. That’s a very natural structure, and it’s what we neurologically are built for.
The economy has some of that characteristic. The economy rewards hard work somewhat, and it rewards insight somewhat. But it also rewards cheating, and it rewards lots of unproductive behavior that actually destroys wealth but creates a profit.
what made people smart was not libraries. What made people smart was an interaction with the world that rewarded them when they figured something out, And very often, that was the physical world. So one of the things I worry about with, you know, a kid who maybe is not getting so much out of school, but they have access to an entire world of fascinating things on their computer is that it turns all of that stuff into an exercise in consuming information rather than discovering.
that it is that feedback where you are not a consumer of the world, but you are a producer. You’re interacting with the world rather than just seeing it represented that is the most intellectually enhancing thing
If you can get a student to want to understand something, most of the work is done.
I believe there’s a kind of information stored in genomes that is not in triplet codon form that is much more of a type that would be familiar to a designer, either of machines or a programmer
Darwinists will tell you that evolution cannot look forward. It can only look backward, and there’s a way in which that’s just simply true. On the other hand, a Darwinist will also tell you that you are a product of evolution, and you can look forward. Right?
So if evolution can’t look forward, but it can build a creature that can, then can evolution look forward? I think it effectively can. So my point is that random mutation mechanism is in a race to produce new forms that are better adapted to the world than their ancestors. What if it can bias the game? It can enhance its own ability to search.
So evolution should be expected to find all of the cheat codes and to build them in. Because any creature that has access to all of these different ways of adapting more rapidly or more effectively will outcompete the creatures that have fewer of these things.
His argument was that human beings or our ancestors attained a kind of ecological superiority where the most important dictator of whether or not you evolutionarily succeeded or failed was your competition with other humans. And so his point, which I think is accurate, is that it is humans in an arms race with other humans that caused the radical elaboration of our capacity to puzzle solve, to think, to exchange abstractions.
you’ve basically solved the problem of explaining Earth’s creatures at a cost that is a million times worse in terms of parsimony. If it’s hard to explain a tiger through Darwinian processes, it is that much harder yet to explain a tiger designer
Why are Most People Cowards? | Obedience and the Rise of Authoritarianism - Academy of Ideas
This episode examines the psychological roots of fear and conformity, questioning why many people shy away from risk.
It analyzes the role of obedience in the rise of authoritarian regimes and the suppression of dissent.
The discussion challenges listeners to rethink societal norms and embrace individual courage for change.
DH
This was mentioned on a podcast and I am glad to find their little channel
I really like bite sized philosophy and psychology
Specifically with what has happened post-covid, I am trying to be more conscious of how I am acting and what I am thinking and what drives both of those