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Chess and humility: There are few games to train in humility like chess. With most other games you can blame luck or a plethora of other external factors on your inadequacy. With chess, there is just you and complete information. There is no component of luck and there are no unknowns. In other words, there is little room for excuses. Blundered a piece? Clearly not your best decision. Gave up a winning position? Hubris was your downfall. Ran out of time? You'll need to speed up your decision making. As a result, those with a fixed mindset hate chess. If you don’t truly believe you can improve, you certainly don’t want to be shown the evidence of your ignorance on a regular basis. However, if you have a growth mindset, there is no greater teacher because there is no game that exhibits your opportunities for growth as clearly and frankly as chess.

Market is SELLING Bitcoin upon higher than expected US inflation data 😂 we’re still early

Hard times ahead: History moves in cycles (or a helix shape) propelled by the often quoted dynamic: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men and weak men create hard times” (please use “women” interchangeably). An increasing number of observers seem to believe that we’re at the end of this cycle, the fourth turning i.e. about to enter hard times. If you want to stretch to see the silver lining in this dire outlook: there may be opportunities for acts of true heroism ahead of us. To birth the next generation of “strong (wo)men”.

Even the FT’s most lethargic commentators are starting to put two and two together

On Honesty: Yesterday’s post touched on Harry Frankfurt’s essay “On Bullshit”. The opposite of bullshit, of course is honesty. Honesty is hugely underrated. Honesty burns away deception, including self-deception. Deception is the source of suffering, both for the deceiver and the deceived. And therefore the alleviation of deception results in the alleviation of suffering. Peter Ralston would always talk about “adopting a principle of honesty”. It means creating a possibility in our experience, for being honest at all times. Sometimes we think we are being honest, but really we are using a front of honesty in order to manipulate, to get what we want. This is not true honesty. Honesty is truly and genuinely being what we are — after tossing out the lies, the distortion, the deviation, the deception, the hiding, the insecurity and the bullshit.

proof of run

Frankfurt's Theory on Bullshit: In his most famous essay (https://www.math.mcgill.ca/rags/JAC/124/bs.html) Harry Frankfurt, a Princeton philosopher who passed away last year, picked as a central theme the topic of… bullshit. I’m finding this topic highly compelling, because 1) I, too believe that we’re surrounded by an all-time-high pile of bullshit and 2) we’re not as conscious of this as we ought to be. In theorizing on the characteristics of bullshit and why it has become so prevalent in our society, Frankfurt starts by quoting a poem from H.W. Longfellow (and apparently a favorite of Wittgenstein’s): "In the elder days of art Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part, For the Gods are everywhere." In other words, craftsmen did not used to cut corners, things used to be of a certain quality, not just on the surface. Today it’s corners cut galore. Bullshit, Frankfurt goes on to postulate, is a result of mindlessness. Our culture has become indifferent to producing and speaking truthfully. One might theorize that this is because being truthful has become disincentivized by our social and economic dynamic: “[…] the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.” I highly recommend the full essay, but to keep things short I will say this: We should all ponder that the proverbial gods, though they’ve been in hiding, might just be everywhere after all. That bullshit, when all is said and done, is met with a steep price. And that we may be entering a phase of human history where the discipline of correctness once again pays off.

I’m pretty certain all my semi-convinced no-coiner friends are ready to ape in at 100k

As Bitcoin jumps above its previous all-time-high, I think we should all expect significant government intervention pretty quickly. The signal from Bitcoin going to 100k is just too great for them to further ignore it and view it as a severe risk.

short squeeze incoming

A Process of Elimination A while ago I wrote a post about the “Paradoxical benefits of subtraction”. I recently came across a quote by Tom Myers that applies this principle to movement and the body: “I remain unsure to this day as to whether we can truly ‘add’ anything to a person. It’s debatable. We add information, we add sensation, we encourage experimentation in movement, but in fact the best structural bodywork is more of a process of elimination — a taking away of the tensions and holding that have been imposed by their accidents, traumas, training, and the heroes they emulated. We don’t want to ‘impose’ good posture on top of that accumulation of compensations but rather progressively decompensate them to ‘expose’ the essential individual within.” This perfectly summarizes my own experience of my body. I used to hold a lot of tension, making me feel highly inadequate in the first few Yoga classes I joined. Initially I thought that I had to add an understanding of postures or new movements to make my body more pliable. Of course, the opposite was the case: It has been all about dropping tension and holding patterns through various practices. Today I still hold plenty of tension, but my body is infinitely more capable and flexible. The reason this can be a a slow and difficult process, even after becoming conscious of this principle, is that we have to work against decades of habits and compensations. It’s worth every second.

Psychosomatic Inquiry: Everything we carry in our mind or broader experience is a reflection of some part of our body, we just may be unable to discern it. Becoming increasingly conscious of this psychosomatic connection is a powerful way to resolve resistance or obstacles we encounter. Once, at a meditation retreat with Peter Ralston, I told him that I was struggling with physical tension in my body and that this was preventing me from making progress during my meditation. He laughed, paused for a moment and then said: “Your body is your mind. They’re not separate”. While I had been convinced that my body was getting in the way of my mediation, the signals from my body or my resistance to them WERE indeed the meditation. Conversely, seemingly psychological experiences are also experiences of the body, an insight best captured in Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal book “The Body Keeps the Score”. One extraordinary therapist I recently reconnected with expressed this principle while he was studying my back: “Our front is what we show to the world. Our back betrays what the world has done to us”.

There is tremendous benefit in being with a teacher, therapist or coach in person. This is easily forgotten when we have grown accustomed to the comfort of connecting online. Being in person is beneficial because it facilitates an energetic transmission between teacher and student. It allows us to realize that our teacher is made of the same “stuff” as we are and consequently that whatever they are doing and whatever insight they have is accessible to us as well.

Many of my posts make references to “people” or “society” usually referring to some of the detrimental habits of life and thought we have grown accustomed to. This publication undoubtedly is contrarian but it is not misanthropic: It’s not out of a disdain for people that I write in this manner, it’s to highlight that I am convinced without the shadow of a doubt that the West is on a deeply troubled path. But more importantly, what I want to point at is that believing in something better is not utopian, it’s realistic and the path there is completely accessible, even natural. In fact, there seems to be a hierarchy of possibilities to be unlocked, for humanity to transcend its current trajectory: 1)Money — I debated whether money or consciousness should be in first place but I came to the conclusion that the former, in our current situation is even more important. The average person is not able to tap into greater consciousness while living in the current exploitative monetary system, which is causing significant economic and political distress. This is the reason why I view the introduction of sound money as humanity’s most urgent technological project, even before AI. 2) Consciousness — Once humanity is able to afford to live in more humane conditions (and yes, unfortunately this is referring increasingly to people in the West), the second most important project is stepping into a non-dualistic world-view. Descartes gave the West a great tool to accrue power, but his thinking also threw us into depression and anxiety. The movement toward Eastern practices of non-dualism has already begun but needs to be accelerated and broadened. 3) Health — I suspect that this third most important element of the next stage of human development will take care of itself as 1) and 2) are addressed. However, it’s worth calling out here, again, that our current view of human health is in a dead-end. What we need to embrace is a new paradigm of individual responsibility, holistic and preventative healthcare. In other words, when you read these posts, my hope is that they can primarily feel aspirational, rather than judgmental.

I’m not a Christian but appreciating the Easter posts today

Is it correct that @primal doesn’t have bookmarks?

nostring from a plane right now… feels good

Burnout and Freediving In freediving a shallow water blackout is when you almost complete your dive, but as you approach the surface, you run out of oxygen (hypoxia) and lose consciousness. One of the dangerous paradoxes about the sport is that, at depth the diver actually feels sufficiently oxygenated but as he approaches the surface this oxygenation proves to be partly illusory. The reason for this is that the diver’s lungs compress upon descent, the partial pressure of oxygen increases and hence there is a feeling of sufficiency. Upon ascending, the lungs expand and there is suddenly a much lower partial pressure of oxygen to go around. I think there is an interesting inverse parallel to the increasingly more common phenomenon of burnout at work: Working hard and ascending the career ladder can be highly compelling. In fact, the higher we go, the more we can feel like what we’re doing is satisfying and meaningful. But as our energy is depleted and we sober up, we come to realize that what we were doing was not nearly as meaningful as we thought and that we’ve been running on fumes for way too long. Our body collapses and insists that we fuel up on energy before proceeding in any way, shape or form. The only way to avoid this risk of burnout, it seems, is by finding work that is deeply aligned with our being and therefore practically effortless.

Almost every optimal state in matters of human affairs is characterized by balance. Balance of new and tried-and-true. Balance of stress and relaxation. Balance of haste and slowness. Balance of order and chaos. Balance of discipline and creativity. Therefore, in any debate or argument, you can recognize a bad take by its one-sidedness.