The only way… everything else is hot air View quoted note →

Hot Chocolate Cocoa has been hot recently: prices have already more than doubled since the beginning of 2024 (up 250% in the last year), making the metric tonne more expensive than copper. As a chocolate gourmet, my initial reaction is concern, nay outright worry that I may get priced out of the volume of dark chocolate required for my daily fix. The main reasons for the rally are 1) crop shortfalls in Western Africa, the most important cocoa producing region in the world and, 2) the fact that cocoa is not a plantation business, meaning a significant portion of the supply stems from unsophisticated individual farmers, who get hit particularly hard by less than ideal weather conditions. What to make of it beyond bittersweet dark chocolate? While the above conditions may be relatively unique to cocoa, we seem to be in the segment of the economic cycle where commodities prices, which have long stagnated (or at least not benefited from asset price inflation to the same degree), are poised to go higher, simply because demand remains very strong. This means that inflation is very likely here to stay and this decade may see echoes of the highly inflationary 1970s.

The magic between inbreath and outbreath A couple of years ago my brother and I visited Maui and decided to seize the opportunity to try out freediving. I had been drawn to the sport for a while, due to its natural synergies with meditation and my love for the ocean. Even during the first few dry exercises under Lahaina’s Banyan tree, I felt I had hit gold. Working through our instructor’s exercises almost immediately allowed us to hold our breath for much longer than we had previously thought possible. The real magic of freediving, however, occurred to us when we jumped in the water a short boat ride offshore, surrounded by nothing but blue and a few errant fish. On the first day I was able to go down to 20m (65ft), a depth I thought would be much more elusive. However, the maximum depth, while important, quickly becomes secondary once you get into freediving. What feels much more important is the peace to be experienced between inbreath and outbreath, suspended at neutral or negative buoyancy, sounds subdued, body relaxed, thoughts on pause. There’s a reason some meditation traditions prompt you to familiarize yourself with that gap between breaths. Extending it through relaxation, rather than brute force, opens up a whole new world of play.

Feeling embodied: I used to live in my head, I didn’t know another way. Living outside of it can still be intimidating, but I am now increasingly familiar with an embodied experience of life. So much so that I feel a lack when I’m back to my (over)thinking ways. One way this still happens is on long-haul flights. There is something naturally ungrounding about being in the air and airplanes add to this through other artificial factors: highly processed or preserved food, bad air quality and visual entertainment overkill. I can feel my energy creep up into my head during the course of a flight. Getting back to ground can take days. Yoga, breathing exercises and good food are some of the easiest ways to put down roots again. Increasingly though, I’m looking not just for remedies after the fact, but for ways to stay here independent of obstacles thrown at me.

Everyone should just recognize that libertarianism is the only reasonable form of politics. It’s ok to be left or right of center, but at least recognize that you’re there not because you’re right, but because you care primarily about yourself.

A great indicator for a bad take is when it is one-sided or unbalanced

My favorite Ralph Waldo Emerson quote is: “Who you are speaks so loudly, I cannot hear a word you are saying.” The idea that we ultimately ought to judge people by who they are, not by what they are saying, portraying or displaying outwardly deeply resonates with me. One expression of this, in my opinion, is to avoid overindulging in credentials. Credentials are superficial. While one personally may be linking an experience or memories to them, using them to posture is superficial and ultimately misleading. Those who overuse their credentials for status, often seem to be insecure overachievers. Often they don’t have enough trust in the substance of their being to do without external accolades. Credentialism is tempting because sometimes it can promise shortcuts, but the reliance on external validation risks disconnecting us from our authentic selves.

Why I predict an Ozempic train wreck: View quoted note →

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 (https://tim.blog/2024/02/02/no-biological-free-lunches/) 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

Loving the diversity of new joiners on #introductions! Please don’t be shy about posting about other things than #nostr and #bitcoin!

Just received my @Bitkey, the self-custody bitcoin wallet built by the team at Block.

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.

WAR IS A RACKET There are a few pieces of writing that are modern beyond their age. One that comes to mind is Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations”, which reads like a self-help book written 2, not 2000 years ago. Another is George Orwell’s 1984, which is prescient in its description of mass surveillance and big data, although it was published only a few years after WWII. Another extraordinarily modern piece of writing is General Smedley Butler’s pamphlet “War is a racket”. Butler was a US Marine Corps General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. “War is a racket” was published in 1935 and mostly pointed to his experience and cautionary tales from World War I. Butler starts off by saying: “A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. […] It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.” This is as true today as it was then and it is all the more shocking that our public discourse - most recently in the case of the war in Ukraine or even in the Middle East - still treats war as something that our governments wage for reasons related to justice, nobility or our safety. “Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and ‘we must all put our shoulders to the wheel,’. Look no further than the fortunes being made in Russia, Ukraine, the US and Europe to understand the real reasons for this war and why it’s still ongoing. If you think the people at the helm and their lobbyists want this war to end, think again. “[…] fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.” Who’s paying the bill? First and foremost those leaving their lives on the battlefield and their families. “In our government hospitals are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men -- men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.” And then… way less importantly, we are all paying. All our purchasing power is being diluted and redirected into the pockets of the beneficiaries, by governments funding these wars through money printing. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a blue-eyed pacifist who believes Putin should not be resisted. But let’s call the means of resistance for what they are: The means are selected not to find solutions, not to reduce the number of casualties. They are selected to create another forever war and to fill the pockets of those running this racket. The only thing that is not modern about Butler’s pamphlet is that it was written by a (former) insider criticizing the establishment and yet he was neither locked away nor forced into exile. Next time you hear mainstream media propaganda about the evil enemy, alleged war progress or sanctimonious moral statements from our leaders, think of General Smedley Butler: “TO HELL WITH WAR!”

Aspirational movie scenes Some of the best movies leave us in a state of aspiration. They make us feel there is something more to life than we had so far been aware of and, importantly, that this new something is accessible to us. One surprising way some movies inspire me, personally is when you have a character, who after encountering some important moment in her life, is shown just sitting or standing still — often with a cigarette — pondering or contemplating what has just happened. The reason I find this inspiring (or almost unrealistically romantic) is because most of us actually never take a moment to sit still and consider important events in our lives. We just go on to distract ourselves. So when I see such a scene, I try to embody the experience of the character for a moment and I try to remind myself what it feels like to really. slow. down.

The revered Indian sage Ramana Maharshi attributed his extraordinary insight and liberation to a simple question: “Who am I?” This self-inquiry, if contemplated with openness and intent, can lead to a recognition of our true nature. During meditation retreats, I have asked this question 1000s of times, usually in the form of diades: You’re facing another person and they prompt you with the question: “Experience who (or what) you are and communicate that to me”. You then go on to communicate your experience of self for 5 minutes, then the tables are turned. For the first many times of doing this, I was prompted with the question and immediately my habitual thinking mind became active and tried to answer the question in some cerebral way: “I’m Daniel, born in Germany. I’m human. I’m a curious person…”. There is no limit to the number of things your mind will come up with to answer a question like this. Over and over the teacher would ask us to actually be open to what the answer might be, to actually look for what we are… in our experience right now. Not through intellectual hearsay, but through direct recognition. One day, in between sessions I went for a walk, my mind finally capitulated and suddenly there was a very new, an almost inverted view of self and the world. I was no longer Daniel, up here in my head but I was one with everything: one with the soft breeze in the warm Texan air, one with the sounds of the cicadas and of shoes on gravel, one with my body but not limited to it. Before this day, I had a subtle suspicion that Ramana Maharshi and many other wise men and women before him, were onto something. On this day any last doubts were erased.

On the importance of incentives In 1995 Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s brilliant lieutenant, gave a speech at Harvard titled “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment”. One of the most famous quotes from the speech is “Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome”. This is an incredibly valuable framework for predicting outcomes in the world. One expression of this principle is Clayton Christensen’s “innovator’s dilemma” which describes why very successful incumbents in business often find themselves struggling to fend off competition using disruptive technologies. I witnessed first hand how Google, one of the greatest businesses of all time, set up internal incentives that make it increasingly difficult for the company to compete and innovate. To be very specific: the incentives at Google are increasingly oriented towards winning internal politics and this clashes increasingly with external outcomes. We are seeing the beginning of this clash as Google struggles to adjust to competition from challengers in the space of artificial intelligence. Another area where Munger’s model of incentives applies perfectly is in the area of predicting outcomes where politics interfaces with the private sector. Politicians generally are not incentivized to produce great outcomes for society, they are incentivized to win elections. This is the reason most politicians nowadays are not experienced technocrats but seasoned actors. As a result, wherever politicians interact with businesses, bad incentives arise (this is the reason libertarians advocate for a small government). One area where incentives and hence outcomes are particularly toxic is in healthcare. Pharmaceutical companies are incentivized to maximize profitability and politicians are incentivized to pursue populist politics. This inevitably delivers catastrophic outcomes as regulators that are half asleep at the wheel approve harmful drugs and as doctors are incentivized, nay sometimes even forced to prescribe treatments excessively, erratically and irresponsibly. Munger’s incentive framework has also been helpful to those who have been holding #Bitcoin with conviction for years despite its significant volatility. In order to do so one had to understand the context and incentives of a few key players: Government: They have to raise money in order to fund their lavish spending as well as interest payments on the nation’s debt. Taxes are unpopular so the better way to do this is to print money. Institutional Investors: They are looking for returns to beat and ideally exceed inflation. As valuations relative to earnings reach all-time highs, they have to look for alternative assets to potentially provide a source of return as well as diversification. Retail Investors: They are primarily incentivized to not be left behind (FOMO) and ideally to look for opportunities to get rich quickly. This creates a perfect storm of incentives for an asset like Bitcoin: Increasing liquidity in the system due to the expansion of the money supply, institutional investors desperately seeking yield and retail investors looking to FOMO into the market. It explains both the short term volatility and reflexivity of Bitcoin and the steady longer-term increase in its market capitalization