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.

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.

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.