The truest sentence: Today things got in the way and I am late to publishing Soir Bleu. So I’m going to go with advice from Ernest Hemmingway: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” What feels truest to me today is that it is worth hanging in there. When things feel uncomfortable, whatever endeavour we may be pursuing, new doors tend to eventually open for those who persevere. I’m standing by, waiting for that next door to open.

Is someone tracking the average time miners are holding #bitcoin after mining over time?

#Chess and stoicism: A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the humbling benefits of chess. In addition to humility, chess is a great teacher in stoicism: Compare the post match interviews of football players (and most other athletes) with those of chess players and you’ll notice a striking difference. Football players are usually still emotional about the game and frequently feeling hard done by, whether by luck, refereeing or other conditions. When watching chess players analyse their game, on the other hand, it is not rare that it is almost impossible to parse whether they won or lost. In fact, rather than talking about themselves, they will say things like “black’s position” or “white was very slightly worse”. This is a masterclass in stoicism. Because their game does not leave room for subjectivity, it is essential for chess players to avoid redundant posturing or emotional outbursts which become a waste of energy. Interestingly other sports seem to exist on a spectrum between emotionality and stoicism depending on the objectivity of the game. Tennis post game press conferences, for example are somewhere between those of chess and football when it comes to objectivity. Arguably the reason is that tennis is not quite as objective a game as chess, but luck and external factors play a much smaller role than in football. Challenge me to a game!

@Robert Breedlove Not sure if it's intentional but just a heads up it looks like your most recent podcasts have not been added to Spotify yet.

Mysticism trumps orthodoxy: Most religions nowadays don’t call themselves orthodox but they are: they want you to take at least some element of scripture literally and make believe that by following certain rules, you can obtain salvation. A lot of the time this leads to confusion and conflict. Wisdom and awakening can never be the result of submission to some relative belief. They are the result of direct recognition of the absolute, achieved through openness and authentic engagement with what is real in this moment. In other words, they require a unitive experience, a certain level of mysticism. In fact, one might argue that every prophet, including Jesus and the Buddha are likely to have been mystics, men who were deeply in touch with the absolute. And the bible, while it is hopelessly inapplicable to our life today when read literally, becomes a book of wisdom, when it is reclaimed through a mystical lense of openness.

No time for things that have no soul: If you haven’t read Charles Bukowski, there’s no time like today to start. His work is like a gut punch from another dimension of meaningfulness: In his classic novels Ham on Rye and Post Office as much as poems like Let it enfold you. What distinguishes Bukowski is encapsulated in one of the most famous quotes attributed to him: “Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul” If nothing else, his art reminds us to not settle for the empty, the shallow or the superficial and… just from time to time to have the courage to decline to spend time on “things that have no soul”.

The only reason the market does not react more to these terrifying economic numbers is because everyone is waiting for the Fed to jump in. That’s the perversity of the situation we’re finding ourselves in..:

The risk of taking our societal order for granted: Our societal order is not guaranteed by any fundamental law of human existence. There is nothing in nature that says one human might not desire to harm another if they find themselves in an existential struggle. Unfortunately, increasingly people not just in developing countries but also in the West are finding their very existence at threat, both economically and socially. Hence the accelerating radicalization of our society. Beware the person who has nothing to lose. Instead of patronizing people at the bottom of the social ladder, as is the habit of the Western establishment, we as a society would be well advised to understand that their peril will be our own. If we care about our societal order we should stop taking it for granted.

Collective action problems: We are social animals that rely heavily on cues from others in order to make decisions. As a result we are at the mercy of a peculiar dilemma: collective action problems. Collective action problems are situations in which everyone would be better off acting in a certain way, but they do not due to incentives born by the collective. Jonathan Haidt recently introduced me to this sociological concept when describing why children excessively engage in social media. Overindulgence is not in any individual child’s personal interest but because all of their peers are connected via these networks, stepping away is costly. Collective action problems can arise in any group but logically, the less reasonable and wise the collective, the more prevalent they become. A couple of current examples: - Individuals sacrificing their health by overexposing themselves to stress — in order to keep up with an increasingly frantic economy. - A shortage of skilled workers in a society that celebrates higher education as as status symbol and insurance policy. - Increasingly indebted individuals due to societal pressure to maintain status through consumption

#nostr recently feels like it has reached escape velocity

The franticness of coffee culture #coffeechain: Ever wondered why, out of all the plants in the world, a select few play such a dominant and outsized role in our culture? The best example I can think of is coffee. Harvard professor Michael Pollan, in his 2020 book, goes as far as saying that not only is coffee a phenomenon of our culture, but that it is responsible for creating it. It’s an extraordinary hypothesis but one which just might be true. Anyone who drinks coffee for the first time after a while will notice all the good and ill of our society arise in the microcosm of his psyche. Productivity and concentration are amplified, but so are neuroticism and aggression. In fact, anyone who has tried to abstain from caffeine for an extended period of time, will find that continuing to “function” at the frantic pace of our society is a non-trivial task. So in a way, if we want to reduce our addiction to coffee, we may have to change our culture to accommodate those who are trying to live at a slower pace.

In other words FUD is going to turn from a reactive phenomenon driven by the ignorant, to a proactive tool for price suppression View quoted note →

When #Bitcoin hits 100k, the cat is out of the bag and everyone is going to “get it”. With that we’re going to see a phase shift in which the promotion of Bitcoin is going to become secondary and the artificial suppression of the price by all kinds of actors is going to become the dominant dynamic.

To think that Bitcoin is inevitable is Fiat hubris

The emperor has no clothes: When it comes to financial markets, the emperor has no clothes. We’ve grown accustomed to spectacular valuations for companies both in public and in private markets with questionable returns and long term business model. Every time the tide of liquidity comes in due to a debt crisis or inflation, investors briefly return to sobriety and value these companies closer to what they are worth. This is followed by an inevitable flood of liquidity from central banks to prop up markets and the hysteria is reinstated. This cycle is going to continue and accelerate as inflation becomes a greater concern due to public and private debt. When the bubble bursts once and for all, there will be no recompense. So when betting on these types of companies — you know what they are — one should avoid trying to make up fantasies about their long term merit and instead consider how many more times the government can flood the market with liquidity before it will burst at the seams.

Pain is widely misunderstood or if it’s understood, the understanding is ignored. Whenever my daughter gets vaccinated, the doctor wants to give her sugar water to distract her from the pain of the needle. Apparently, this is something that doctors now do. This is based on a false understanding of pain. Pain is not something to be avoided, it’s a signal. A signal that something is wrong. By numbing or distracting from the pain, we’re desensitizing our children and habituating them to a disfunctional habit that we later try painstakingly to disengage adults from. In fact our various recreational drugs, when used habitually all serve the purpose of numbing physical or psychological pain. And once such a habit has been built over years, it is very hard to drop. Let me pre-empt two concerns with this view: Chronic pain: If pain is chronic, there may be value in numbing it but this should not be done mindlessly and without first testing whether there is a way to truly address the root causes. The reason is that once you start numbing the pain, you may raise the bar for the identification and resolution of its causes. Overwhelming pain: Of course I would not want to expose my daughter or anyone to pain that is so overwhelming that it causes trauma and further issues down the road. The definition here is subjective but I don’t think a needle sting belongs in this category. Lastly, there is an inverse view of pain that I want to mention: One meditation practice is to go into pain and to experience it fully instead of shunning it. This is a difficult but powerful practice because it allows us to realize that the pain is separate from its observer. Loosening our identification with pain is the only way to live from a more powerful relationship with it and to avoid the pitfalls of destructive coping mechanisms.

Ludwig van Mises and the UFC: The times they are a-changin’. In 2020, Russel Okung, Super Bowl Champion and then NFL offensive tackle of the Carolina Panthers, made some headlines by deciding to receive half of his salary in Bitcoin. At the time he started the trend #paymeinbitcoin which lost momentum in the wake of the FTX scandal and the ensuing crypto winter. This week something more extraordinary happened: After winning his fight in the lightweight division of the UFC, Brazilian MMA fighter Renato Moicano announced: “I love America, I love the constitution […]. And let me tell you something: If you love your country, read Ludwig van Mises’ 6 lessons of Austrian Economics… Motherfuckers!” The last word rounds off a perfectly legitimate philosophical call-to-action from an unlikely source. Ludwig van Mises was one of the most prominent proponents of the Austrian School of Economics and mentor of nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek. The Austrian School emphasizes the spontaneous organizing power of the price mechanism, the importance of individual preferences and choices, and the limitations of government intervention. For all of these reasons it remains relevant today. However, I would argue the reason it is now finding its way into the mainstream in as extraordinary a way as the post-fight incantations of an MMA fighter, is for its view on inflation. Inflation is and will continue to be a defining problem of our time. And unlike our politicians, Austrian economists subscribe to the strict view that inflation is not a magical and baffling phenomenon but that it is always a result of monetary expansion. Or in Friedrich Hayek’s more blunt words: "I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflation engineered by governments for the gain of governments" For these reasons, Bitcoin proponents have found a natural home in the theory of Austrian economics. In fact they argue that Hayek prophesied the rise and importance of Bitcoin as early as 1984.

Self defeating assumptions: It’s a habit of our culture to assume that when an aspect of our health has deteriorated, this must be a result of genetics or irreversible damage. This is lazy and self-defeating. Of course, genetics are an important component of our physical health. But WHEN our genes may trigger a physical affliction is typically a function of choices we are making in our day-to-day life. Of course some of the damage may be irreversible. But some of it may be reversed by taking responsibility and changing one’s lifestyle. This dynamic is particularly notable where a large fraction of the population suffers from a disease and is reaching for quick fixes. 1 in 10 Americans now have Type 2 Diabetes. Even with this condition, you still commonly read that it is strongly tied to family history and genetics. Yet we all stem from about 300,000 generations of humans before us and I find it hard to believe that many of them dealt with Type 2 Diabetes as early in their lives as we do. We know that this condition is largely reversible and yet drugs seem to be the treatment of choice. Nearly 30% of Americans are myopic. Did our ancestors really run around and constantly bump into trees? Or is there something about our choices that is contributing to this huge percentage? We may not be able to change our lifestyle completely but what can we change? About 10% of the US population have a food allergy. This number has tripled since 1997. And yet, everyone I meet that has a food allergy seems to just take it for granted and show little interest in its underlying causes and potential reversibility. There are many more examples. Every time I run into one of them my initial reaction is bewilderment followed by deep curiosity in what is actually. going. on.

Thank you for the likes and resposts! If you'd like to test and train my humility, find me on chess.com:

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