Wisdom is the tolerance of cognitive dissonance: I first heard this said by Josh Waitzkin, former chess prodigy and Tai Chi Chuan world champion and it stuck with me. It is possible to verify this in one’s own experience. Wisdom is being able to hold two competing thoughts and recognizing that the true answer is never one-sided and never conceptual. It can both be true that climate change is real and that the right response to it is not to try to reverse it. It can be true that the acts of Hamas were horrific and that Israel’s response is not justified. It can be true that Donald Trump’s presidency was a low point in American history and that one should not vote for Joe Biden. In Zen, Koans are a way to resolve cognitive dissonance. Every once in a while we should look at the world as if it’s a Zen Koan.

Tim Ferriss is not a scientist. He’s a self-proclaimed human guinea pig. His study of the human body may not be rigorous, but he and others who self-experiment and introspect still offer valuable insights. Their experiences can help us understand health and wellbeing more completely, and they deserve a seat at the table. Last month Tim posted an insightful article (

The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

No Biological Free Lunches - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

It’s alarming how many folks now treat “T” or “TRT” (testosterone replacement therapy) as something akin to taking a multivitamin, when t...

about his perspective on the project of physical performance optimization in humans. The basic premise: there are no biological free lunches. Most optimizations of one trait come with a non-negligible trade-off in some other trait. I would go further than Tim: I believe his premise expands beyond just performance optimization to almost every aspect of human health. Look at his first three heuristics: 1. Assume there is no biological free lunch. 2. Assume that the larger the amplitude of positive effect of *anything*, the larger the amplitude of side effects. 3. Don’t ask a barber if you need a haircut. If you agree with these, why shouldn’t they apply to almost every pharmaceutical, or in fact every exogenous compound? Which brings me to the title of this post: Ozempic. Ozempic is proving to have enormous positive effects on the dimension of human weight loss. The barber recommending the haircut, Novo Nordisk, is now Europe’s most valuable public company. I predict that we’ll find out that what looked like a biological free lunch was too good to be true and that Ozempic will follow in the footsteps of other biological free lunches before it.

Looking forward to playing around with bitkey CC @jack

People talk about the free market economy as if they are intimately familiar with it. They aren’t. A system in which the words of one government bureaucrat are the single most important predictor of the price of assets and goods is not a free market economy.

There are people shorting #bitcoin here in the hope of making money... 😂

@primal I can't seem to post a note that references another note (with the "note:" notation). Any idea why? I'm on MacOS

Learning how to move from my toddler: If you have a toddler, I highly recommend considering them your movement teacher. Children move very freely and effortlessly, without all the internal resistance and tension that we accumulate over a lifetime. I notice this in particular when I watch our daughter pick up objects from the floor. Unlike me, who bends down forward to perform this action, she effortlessly squats down. The squat, of course is the much more efficient and healthy way to do this, in fact it is one of the most essential movements and increasingly used as a measure of youthfulness by the longevity community. It is just something we unlearn. By playing with children we can slowly but surely regain our ability to move in an optimal way.

A principle that stuck with me from my time at Google was a quote from co-founder Sergey Brin that “scarcity breeds clarity”, alluding to Google’s humble beginnings in a Menlo Park garage. Being confined to a small space and limited resources helped Brin and his co-founder Larry Page focus on the essential and thus build one of the most important products and businesses in history. Today, clarity is hard to come by, both in the products and news stories we are exposed to and in our day-to-day interactions with colleagues and friends. #Bitcoin proponents will claim that the current absence of clarity in our social, economic and political lives is largely due to… an absence of scarcity. When money is not scarce but abundant, even the worst business ideas (the class of WeWork, Peloton, Snapchat, 23andMe etc.) can garner a lot of initial attention and make their founders very wealthy before inevitably returning to a more sober valuation. An abundance of bad ideas and businesses, funded through the dilution of all our purchasing power results in frustration from those who are not participating in the pipe dreams. And this frustration eventually overflows into outright hostility and political radicalization as the resulting inflation makes most poorer. Only scarce money can return an economy back to clarity and sobriety. Scarce money, not subject to arbitrary government debasement, allows for unencumbered price discovery for economic goods. #Bitcoin is the only scarce money currently in existence. Maybe, just maybe, a #Bitcoin economy will end the myopia and blurriness of our current economic and social lives and will ensure that those who are playing crucial roles in our society (nurses, teachers, artists etc.) earn their fair share again. (If you enjoyed this short read, I would really appreciate a like on my substack page: https://soirbleu.substack.com/p/scarcity-breeds-clarity)

I understand what market makers do but - why do we need market makers?

Having been right about Bitcoin may provide wealth and relative safety but it won’t provide the satisfaction many of us are hoping for: victory laps will feel out of place in the face of misery of those who thought they were pursuing real careers when becoming influencers, economists or real estate brokers

I will respect the “stay humble” part and not shove this rally down people’s throats…

…or like acquiring property in America’s 19th century west. Pioneers and trail blazers will be rewarded royally. View quoted note →

We came here for social cooperation leveraging #Bitcoin and what we got was… badges

#[0] Thanks for reposting my post. Just sent you 2300 sats in return