It is also the other side of my techno-optimism. My previous essay celebrated AI as a technology for human advancement, but acknowledged that the real question is one of ownership. Who benefits from AI’s impact on society?

The internet could have followed in the footsteps of the personal computer and democratized wealth and ownership for society. It didn’t, because those who shaped it were not trying to. George Packer’s article in The Atlantic captures the ethos of David Sacks and the PayPal Mafia:

But these 20- and 30-somethings were not inspired in the same way that the founders of earlier Silicon Valley companies were: “They didn’t follow the vision of Steve Jobs, that tech can democratize power. They came to get rich.” McNamee added, “If their value system had been different, we would have a completely different country today.”

AI is here and it’s the most consequential general-purpose technology of our lifetime. Who benefits from the wealth it generates will determine the course of the next decade and beyond. That’s why, for Dwarkesh’s essay contest, I chose to answer this question:

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AI enhances individual capability more than any general-purpose technology since electricity. Having built Trovable in three months, for $3,500, and with no software building experience, I am living proof. But it is also widening the chasm between those who cross it and those who don’t. On day one, I would convene the other AI labs and the federal government to create the American Technological Consortium: a trillion-dollar fund by 2028, with dollar-for-dollar federal matching, to ensure those most at risk can cross.

Most American distributive programs have failed the same way: The primary resource arrives without the necessary complements. The Homestead Act and the roll-out of the internet were largely deemed successful, but each was littered with failure. At the root of these failures were our institutions. That pattern is our blueprint.

The Homestead Act gave US citizens the right to claim 160 acres in the West. Yet more than 50% of claims failed, and many successful claimants eventually sold to large companies. Claimants had few water rights, no credit or insurance, and no training. Congress partially anticipated this. That same year, they created the Department of Agriculture and passed the Morrill Land-Grant Act, which together distributed agricultural knowledge, and funded state colleges that taught agricultural and mechanical skills. But credit, insurance, and water went unaddressed. A single bad year could leave a family destitute. Water rights, based on a first-in-time appropriation, concentrated control among mining companies, cattle barons, and agricultural operations, leaving settlers beholden to the wealthy gatekeepers.

Land was distributed broadly, but power—the water and credit—was concentrated by few.

If the Homestead Act was a government trying to help its people, while partially failing, the internet roll-out was a government not even trying. The personal computer democratized control. You bought it, owned it, and could do extraordinary things with it. The internet had this same potential to democratize information. But the founders and investors built around a different business model: attention.

Platforms like Meta created walled attention gardens, stifling off-platform links and selling targeted “access” to advertisers. These mega platforms were preventable. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, pushed for regulatory changes. He proposed virtual data lockers, called Pods, to enable individuals to own their identity, social graphs, and data. But his, and others’, efforts never found political footing.

Where public policy took a hands-off approach to regulating the attention economy, they took an equally damaging hands-on approach to another resource: education. The internet rewarded agency, curiosity, and executive function. Meanwhile, our educational institutions doubled down on standardization by passing No Child Left Behind, and again with Common Core. Both raised the literacy floor, but taught compliance precisely when the economy was signaling for the opposite.

Access was distributed broadly, but power—platforms and data—was concentrated by few.

The AI economy must do what neither moment did: distribute the primary and complementary resources in the same act. Building on Sam Altman’s proposed Public Wealth Fund and universal AI access, the ATC treats compute as the primary resource, but progressively distributed. Those furthest from the frontier should receive the most.

Education for the AI economy already exists in schools like Alpha School. But that education is only available to the few who can pay. There is also an existing paradox. The most literate are at the highest risk of displacement, while workers least exposed live in low-literacy communities where autonomous robotics will arrive without transition infrastructure.

The ATC would fund the institutions closest to those at displacement risk. Community colleges and workforce centers are the descendants of what the Morrill Act stood up a hundred and sixty years ago. The instruction is simple and progressive: the further a person sits from the frontier, the more compute and the more fellows they receive. The distribution loop is not meritocratic, but diagnostic. When a site falls short, we ask which complement is missing, not whether they should receive the next allotment. The specifics of curriculum, of formula, of fellowship design, belong to the people who run those institutions. My job is to make sure they are given the frame, the funding, and the honesty to know whether it worked. The ATC’s most lasting move is the coalition it seeds for a future Department of Technology: the institutional complement to the primary resource the ATC distributes.

By year three, three milestones will measure whether our dollars are converting to impact: compute delivered to 10 million Americans in the lowest-income zip codes, bi-partisan support for USDT authorization, and one policy act that advances AI literacy in education.

One could argue that an OpenAI-led ATC recreates the very condition I just discussed. The coalition of frontier labs and the federal government is not the settler arriving in Nebraska with a wagon and a prayer; it is the mining company that already owns the river. Every consortium of incumbents in American history—from the railroad land grants to the 1996 Telecommunications Act—has ended by entrenching them. Why should the ATC be different?

Entrenchment thrives both in the dark and through the revolving door of insiders. Railroad land grants turned public settlement into private deals. The Telecommunications Act promised competition, but resulted in mega-mergers among incumbents. The ATC must be designed to accommodate human nature. Every dollar and compute credit would be recorded in a public ledger within 30 days. Frontier labs would receive minority voting rights, board seats would rotate regularly, and there would be a prohibition on self-dealing dollars and compute.

I do not know whether compute literacy arrives before displacement. What I do know is, for fifteen years, I’ve dreamed of building software applications and tools. This year, I built a functional app in three months. The difference was not knowledge or skill. It was teaching myself AI literacy. The question the OpenAI Foundation must answer is how to ensure everyone can convert their ideas into real-world solutions. On day one, I would seed the ATC with $180 billion so we do not repeat past mistakes.

And yet the instinct to reject and oppose progress most often comes from those who’ve had the luxury of benefitting from it.

AI is here and, from a technological capability standpoint, it is the worst AI we’re ever going to have. From his exquisite article, Steve Yegge (a former Amazon and Google engineer during their civilization-shaping eras), writes about the bittersweet feeling he observed of employees at Anthropic:

“At Anthropic every single person and team I met, without exception, feels kind of sweetly but sadly transcendent. They have a distinct feel of a group of people who are tasked with shepherding something of civilization-level importance into existence, and while they’re excited, they all also have a solemn kind of elvish old-world-fading-away gravity. I can’t quite put my finger on it.

But I am starting to suspect they feel genuinely sorry for a lot of companies. Because we’re not taking this stuff seriously enough. 2026 is going to be a year that just about breaks a lot of companies, and many don’t see it coming. Anthropic is trying to warn everyone, and it’s like yelling about an offshore earthquake to villages that haven’t seen a tidal wave in a century.”

Opposing the force of artificial intelligence will be like trying to stand your ground to stop that tidal wave.

General-Purpose Technologies bring Unpredictable Change

In 1998, Nobel Prize-Winning economist, Paul Krugman wrote, “The growth of the internet will slow drastically… by 2005 or so, it will become clear that the internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine.”

Although he has since acknowledged it was a silly thing to write for a throwaway essay, he defended his broader argument that the internet-skeptics were right and the internet did not result in greater productivity gains. He wrote that the productivity gains from the internet were modest compared to the gains of 19th and 20th century technological advances.

His argument hits at something important. Was the internet more impactful to society than electricity, plumbing, or modern transportation? From a statistical standpoint, no. The real problem is how we measure productivity. As new general-purpose technologies are invented, we keep using the same metrics to measure their success. The real benefit of general-purpose technologies often doesn’t get measured at all: How much they decentralize access by lowering the cost of entry.

What Krugman did not take into consideration is two-fold:

1. Much of the general use-cases for the internet, like search, maps, and email, were free. These don’t show up in economic statistical charts, but they enormously expanded the capacity of the individual.

2. The economic gains that did manifest were consolidated in small pockets of the economy due to lenient enforcement of antitrust policy that enabled companies to gobble up smaller companies (Google acquired Youtube and Android, Facebook acquired Instagram and WhatsApp), reducing competition and increasing their moats. Because of this, the enormity of wealth created resided mostly in owners rather than laborers.

Think of all the things you can accomplish today that you couldn’t 20 years ago. Streaming on demand, trading securities from your couch, meeting with colleagues in real-time across the world, sharing your work with millions of viewers. Could we have predicted any of these in 2005?

Because of habituation—the process by which our excitement to a given stimulus decreases with repetition—what was once extraordinary is now merely commonplace. Think of everything you put in your refrigerator. Do you give it much thought? I certainly don’t. But imagine how exciting it must have been in the mid-1910s when the first consumer refrigerators were being sold and families could suddenly store perishables at home.

“That’s kind of the sad thing about technology is that once it becomes a protocol, it ceases to be magical.” — Jean-Marc Daecius

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The Decentralization of General-Purpose Technologies

How much autonomy did the refrigerator give to families? Instead of having to make daily trips to the market, or the butcher, families could buy a week’s worth of groceries and store them at home. The internet did the same thing on an even larger scale: it freed us from linear TV, dependency on gatekeepers for information, and the need for a middleman to distribute your work. Each time, the pattern is the same: general-purpose technologies reduce our dependence on what came before.

AI is taking this same pattern and accelerating it at an unprecedented rate, affecting nearly every industry. Where the internet democratized access to information, AI is democratizing access to creation.

I have no idea how to write or read code. I tried to learn, but it never stuck. So when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in November of 2022, I was one of the first to see what I could do with it. At first, I thought it was way too overhyped. The single biggest red flag was how confidently the AI got so much wrong—it reminded me of one of my dad’s favorite quotes, “Often wrong, but never in doubt.” But when new technologies are invented, they are always in their worst form; they only get better through continual iteration and user feedback. As the models were upgraded, the hallucinations diminished.

I’ve since learned that using AI is like learning how to exercise properly: patience and iteration are the key drivers of success. Prompting AI is a conversation, not a Google search. Now, after 15 years of personal training, with no knowledge of software programming, Trovable is a live, fully functional website. Designed by me and developed by artificial intelligence. This is where the magic lies in general-purpose technologies. I’ve long dreamt of being able to build software, but it was always too daunting. “What sucks?” is a mantra I’ve clung to for coming up with ideas, but the true “What sucks?” for me was never knowing how to act on them. Sure there are still flaws and yes, the AI certainly doesn’t get everything right. But if I had to choose between impossible or possible with caveats, I’ll take the latter every time.

But as the tools for creation become commoditized, costs go down, and access widens until the skill to build is no longer scarce. Human judgment becomes the scarce resource.

A Coming Resurgence of Liberal Arts

Like when I give my four-year-old too much independence, these newfound freedoms often come with consequences. Streaming gave rise to binge-watching and a dramatic increase in screentime. Freedom of information meant anyone could build an audience and pass themselves off as an expert. The removal of middlemen flooded our eyeballs and ears with noise, making it harder to know what’s true and what’s worth your precious attention.

The benefits of decentralization come with the tradeoff of responsibility. With the coming tide of AI, individuals will need more of it than ever. Being able to detect what is real is getting more difficult. Lazy work—having AI do all of your work for you without checking it—is getting easier. Although AI is terrific for conducting research, the sources still need to be verified. Our ability to think critically and apply logic is paramount.

In 1998, Neil Postman argued that “technological change is not additive; it is ecological.” When a new technology is invented, the ecosystem is fundamentally changed. Electricity did not leave America intact and add one more convenience to it. Electricity reordered American life. When the ecosystem changes, the skills necessary to thrive in it change as well. We are witnessing this ecological shift in real time with AI.

Since the early 2010s, liberal arts took a back seat to STEM, and for an arguably good reason. Since 2009, STEM graduates typically earn 37% more income right out of college than their liberal arts peers. What’s not often told is that by the age of 40, the income gap significantly narrows. Now, with AI commoditizing access to building software, what matters is an individual’s ability to reason and think critically. We need a resurgence of liberal arts in its classical form.

Liberal arts stems from artes liberales: “Education befitting a free person.” It’s rooted in training the mind to think critically, apply reasoning and logic, and use rhetoric to communicate persuasively. All of these qualities are essential for an AI-driven world. The best AI models can now solve problems that PhD-level physicists and mathematicians face. The best human chess player will never again beat the best computer. Where does that leave us? With an incredibly powerful tool. That’s all it is. AI is an exceptional tool for productivity. But it’s still the user’s inputs that determine the outcome. How do you know which problem to solve and where to direct your attention? How do you know if you’re asking the right questions? How do you know if you’re getting the right answer from the AI?

For the better part of the last four generations, Corporate America was the safe path: A steady job, a roof over your head, a means to raise your family, and a cabin for the next generation. It’s easy to forget that before the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age that followed, there was no Corporate America. Agriculture was this country’s number one profession and business ownership was the norm. Industrialization mechanized farming, electrified the production of goods, and motorized transportation. Machinery commoditized the agricultural and artisanal skills needed in the previous era, and we entered a new era of averages and standardization—Taylorism.

This next era will return us to small-scale business ownership and entrepreneurship being commonplace. One person can now use a vast array of tools to build a business that solves problems for their customers. The greatest cost to any business—and what stops people from starting—is the cost to hire another person. But with these tools, a company that would once have required hundreds of people may now be possible with ten, or fewer.

That might sound scary. We’re living through Joseph Schumpeter’s “Creative Destruction” theory and it is historically painful for many hard-working people. The 50-year stretch from 1870 to 1920 saw the invention of electricity, the telephone, radio, refrigeration, the modern-day combustion engine, and the assembly line. These inventions were part of a major ramp up of industrialization. However, it was equally brutal on the labor force. Rampant job displacement and exploitation, and the monopolistic culture of the Robber Barons meant an entire generation endured a great deal of suffering. The benefits eventually spread to everyone, but at great cost.

We must do better this time and I believe it starts with understanding the teachings of the classical liberal arts. One of the best things that came out of this historical period was the astounding increase in literacy rates, especially among minority populations. However, a key reason was that companies needed a labor force equipped for urban life in an industrial age: operate machinery, read and write, work an assembly line. The education system was deliberately built around these necessities. More than 100 years later, very little has changed in terms of structure: time blocks for subjects, age grouping, class sizes, and standardized testing all still remain.

The system that was designed to teach people to serve the industrial machine is the same system we use to this day. But classical liberal arts is about educating free people. Critical thinking, reasoning, logic, and the ability to communicate them do not serve industry well. But they do serve an individual who wants to think for themself; someone who has ideas, imagination, and questions. Those skills are precisely what using AI require.

Today, you can take your ideas and act on them at a tiny fraction of the cost compared to just four years ago. For context, what I’ve built so far with Trovable would have traditionally taken six engineers (an approximate cost of $1.3million/year), cost $415,000 to develop, and taken a year to build. It took me three months and $3,500.

There is nothing special happening here. I took a passion of mine (listening to podcasts), a passion of my wife, Jasmine’s (reading books), and applied what I know about human behavior. I am immensely proud of what I’ve built. But the real beauty is that anyone with domain expertise or passion can build the app they dream of.

With the barriers to entry diminishing, we must return to the traditional principles of liberal arts. How do we prepare for what’s coming next? My own observations tell me we are nowhere near ready. But we can be. Anyone can learn these skills and anyone can use them to then build something that solves other people’s problems. AI decentralizes our ability to actualize our ideas. We just need to learn how to come up with, and articulate them.

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Bifurcating AI the Technology From AI the Power

General-purpose technologies are often met with skepticism and resistance, primarily from the people that the technology displaces. AI is doing something unique in that it is unifying more people than any political party ever has. Unfortunately, that unification is in their shared opposition to using AI: 64% of Americans say they are resisting the use of AI for as long as possible. Understandably, their resistance has merit: it costs billions to train these AI models so it’s the billionaires who are building it, getting even wealthier in the process. The amount of water it requires to cool the data centers is unprecedented. In a world experiencing tangible changes to the climate, where drought is becoming commonplace, this is a genuine touchpoint for many.

Perhaps most damning of all though, are the unforced errors from the people building and selling AI to us. When the CEO of the second-largest AI lab comes out and says, “AI will replace 20% of all entry-level white collar workers,” and, “spike unemployment to 10-20%,” that doesn’t inspire people to root for you; it inspires pitch forks. When that same person writes a 38-page essay explaining that the next few years will determine whether humanity survives AI or “flames out” it doesn’t exude the same excitement as, “We choose to go to the Moon…” Not only is this messaging uninspiring, it’s causing vehement opposition to AI. Worse still, this messaging is causing people not to use it.

Daron Acemoglu, co-winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics, argues that these AI labs need to stop focusing on replacing humans and instead on enhancing humans. His Nobel-winning work argues that technology alone does not guarantee economic prosperity for all. Shared prosperity is dictated by the governing institutions who choose whether or not to regulate the technology. His views are not isolated either. Skepticism, and even direct opposition, to AI is most fervent on both ends of the political spectrum.

Their opposition is primarily to the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few owners, and the immense amount of power they wield by being the sole controllers of the technology. Not the technology itself. The question is about who has control over it, and who prospers.

Historically, regulating new technologies has been the norm in America for the previous century. We regulate what drugs can come to market through an extensive clinical trial process. We regulate safety standards for cars and planes. And we’ve made it illegal for any private entity to create nuclear weapons. It’s worth noting that these controls often follow tragic events. Surely, one could be forgiven for hoping we’ve learned our lesson this time?

As for the question of who prospers, my hope is that we again do not repeat the mistakes of the past where wealth is hoarded by the ownership class—or, we give everyone the opportunity to be a part of the ownership class. Many ideas have been floated within the AI ecosystem. But something I find fascinating about AI is its capacity to solve its own problems, if used properly.

To put this to the test, I prompted Claude to attempt to create a system of wealth distribution for the world we are entering. After four iterations, it came up with, The Complementarity Compact. My contributions were the constraints of the simulations, the ideas to stress-test, and deciding when an iteration wasn’t satisfactory enough. Otherwise, this Compact was generated entirely by AI.

The purpose of this experiment was not to create a work of national policy (Appendix G explicitly states the purpose of the Compact). The purpose was to demonstrate the importance of judgment. My policy experience is nonexistent, as is any work I’ve done at a national level. Yet this document is meticulously thorough and synthesizes the work of experts in this area, such as Acemoglu. Imagine how they will be able to use it to solve these problems. Or, how we can use it in our own domain.

Exponential Curves

Part of the prosperity from new technology is learning to use the technology for our own productivity gains. AI is arguably the greatest augmentation tool for productivity. In the case of Trovable, it took 1/6 the people, less than 1/100 the cost, and 1/4 the time. Someone who is using it will vastly outpace someone who isn’t, and for a much lower cost.

This is not a small, linear augmentation either. Our mind intuitively thinks in linear concepts: as X increases, Y increases correspondingly. But the fundamental nature of modern technology, and why its change is often resisted, is that it compounds exponentially. We see the initial phase of the curve and assume we can predict what the technology will look like in ten years. In reality, predicting even two years out is near impossible.

Moore’s Law is the canonical example. In 1965, Gordon Moore first predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year. He later amended his prediction in 1975 to doubling every two years. His discovery has been validated for more than 50 years and driven the expansion of the entire semiconductor industry. It’s the reason our phones are more powerful than the computers that sent humans to the moon, and why a company like Nvidia can build the hardware necessary for AI to exist at all. It’s the reason AI progress won’t slow down anytime soon, and will only continue to accelerate with each new iteration.

Now, extrapolate that across every industry in the world. Not adopting AI for ethical reasons is understandable, but it won’t stop the tidal wave. What it will do is create an ever-widening canyon between those who are and are not using it. Those who are using AI will also have much more say in the direction of the wave. Moreover, companies who are late to AI adoption are in for a reckoning. Those companies employ people. When those companies struggle to keep up with the productivity of their competitors who are using AI, what happens to their people?

In addition to theorizing Creative Destruction, Schumpeter also warned that capitalism would one day cannibalize itself from the weight of change undermining the institutions that hold it up. Maybe AI is that cannibalizing catalyst. A technology that enhances the productivity of the individual so much that it undermines the entire labor market that holds up this country. That sounds alarming. But the answer isn’t to refuse to use the tool. Equipping ourselves with the skills and judgment necessary to give AI the right inputs is how we will ensure our voice has a say in how the tool is controlled.

History Doesn’t Have to Rhyme

In the short term, inequality will almost certainly increase. In Derek Thompson’s conversation with Josh Tyrangiel, they discuss Tyrangiel’s cover article for The Atlantic: “America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs.” He explains how the CEOs he interviewed are under tremendous pressure from Wall Street to show financial returns from their investments in AI. The best way to show financial returns is by cutting jobs. Even if the technology isn’t ready yet. We are gutting the lowest rung on the corporate ladder—the rung where young people learn invaluable skills to succeed in the workplace and hone their skillsets. Meanwhile, the companies designing this technology, and their investors, are becoming extraordinarily wealthy (OpenAI is exploring a 2027 IPO at a $1 trillion valuation).

Despite this probable eventuality, I remain optimistic. President JFK famously said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Despite the positive sentiment, that dream has largely failed to materialize. The inventions of the personal computer and the internet came close; but wealth concentrated in platform-based companies, not the majority of individuals. The industrial boom at the turn of the 20th century resulted in numerous inventions without which modern society would look unrecognizable. Those inventions took generations to reach the general population. We must ensure we do not relive that timeline. AI has the potential to significantly compress the timeline, but only if people are well-equipped with the skills to wield it.

The beautiful thing about general-purpose technologies is that we can’t yet imagine what inventions will be made possible. A man in Sydney, Australia recently used AI and genomic mapping to shrink his dog’s cancerous tumor by 75% in a single month. Mt. Sinai used their deep-learning AI algorithm to detect diseases, before symptoms arose, at a 94% accuracy rate. Scientists are combatting climate using AI to map melting ice 10,000 times faster than humans can, and identify ocean litter for easy removal.

There are many harmful ways to use AI as well, and we cannot discount them. AI deepfake nude abuse in schools is a serious problem. This is again where learning AI literacy, rooted in the same liberal arts principles, is vital to drastically reduce the prevalence of these devastating acts. The skills used to build with these tools are the same skills required to know when they are being used to target and manipulate you.

My three kids will never know a world without AI. They will never know a world where a human is the pinnacle of intelligence. What does that mean for them?

It means that who they become as individuals is far more important than attempting to mold them to fit into an outdated system built on averages and standardization. The classical liberal arts were designed to teach people how to think, and how to solve problems—how to be entrepreneurial. That is how Jasmine and I intend to educate them. From there, they can use it to pursue their curiosity to its absolute limit. This is why I remain a techno-optimist.

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In this first essay, I will share with you what I have built, entirely on my own (with a ton of feedback and input from my wife, Jasmine), using nothing but AI agents and my own curiosity and the knowledge I’ve gained from consuming hundreds of hours of essays and podcasts about tech, business, entrepreneurship, and artificial intelligence.

What sucks? How can I solve it?

These are two fundamental questions anyone can ask to start any company.

Not knowing how to code was a gatekeeper that kept me from attempting to solve many of the “what sucks?” problems I had thought of over the years. Until AI meant that people like me didn’t need to know how to code. You just need to know how to ask questions, be patient, and keep asking.

And, while I respect that artificial intelligence is causing deep divides among people over the future of work, the enormous taxation on our electrical grid, and the vast amount of natural resources it takes to power the infrastructure necessary for AI to exist, I believe it has more potential to be the great equalizer of wealth and disparity in our society than any force that’s come before it.

The internet had the capacity to lift all boats. But, because of concentrated network effects, companies like Amazon and Facebook concentrated enormous amounts of wealth, it failed to do so. AI can strengthen the power of the individual and take that power away from the platform. A talented, creative individual will be able to build tools to market their talent without relying on gatekeepers: whether it’s building a consumer application (like Trovable, which makes you the main character of your media diet), helping to fill in gaps with writing, or automating administrative work that creators hate.

Kevin Kelly created the concept of 1,000 true fans: Anyone who can build an audience of 1,000 true fans who pay $100/year, or more, can earn a living doing what they love. He was right—Substack and Patreon have proven this. AI may well destroy the middle manager class and reduce the need for white collar service workers. But, it will continue to lower the barriers to entry and bring about the rise of the entrepreneur class with a much more balanced distribution than the internet produced. It will lower the financial and time costs for a creator to both build and curate their audience.

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WHY Trovable: Passion in ‘Thinking’

Since my grade school days, I have believed thinking and problem solving were of the utmost importance for a person to learn. In adulthood, I believe the absence of thinking critically is the root problem of most of our problems as a society.

For those of you who know me from Envision Fitness, or reading my essays over the years, you know I ceaselessly ask you to think: Which muscles do you feel working? Where do you think you should feel this exercise? This is partly for scientific reasons—neuromuscular strength is one of the quickest adaptations our body makes when we start strength training—but mostly it’s because I am passionate about inspiring the act of thinking.

“Where do you feel it?” applies to much more than just biomechanics. When you’re emotionally triggered, how often do you stop to ask, “Where do I feel this?” Anecdotally, animal videos hit me particularly hard—both happy and sad videos. I feel them viscerally, more than any other type of content. I used to react impulsively with a comment, or allow myself to be pulled into the algorithmic wormhole. But being attentive to our internal mechanisms creates pattern recognition. Pattern recognition enables the formation of a disciplined response that isn’t impulsive, but rather one we’ve chosen.

The Wise-Mind technique was created by Marsha Linehan in the late 1980s (and formally published in 1993) to help people who were suicidal and used as a tool to help them find balance in both accepting and changing themselves. It dictates that when we find ourselves emotionally triggered, we recognize it and apply our logical mind as a form of counterweight. Our Wise Mind lies at this intersection of reason and emotion, applying both in equal measure. Too emotional, and we act on instinct, little different than an animal. Too logical and we leave out what it means to be human—we lose sight of our core values.

Social media companies do not want us to be wise. We are not their customer (to be fair, in some cases social media companies do charge a subscription in exchange for removing ads). Their customers are advertisers who sell more of their products when we’re in a state of emotional reactivity. It’s not just them. All media does this to a degree. I love The Lord of the Rings. My logical mind knows it’s not real, but my emotional mind buys into the world J.R.R. Tolkien built.

The difference is choice. With traditional media, we can slow down and take our time. We can recognize a wonderfully crafted story for what it is, and extract from it what we choose—our Wise Mind at work.

The rapidity of scrolling puts our emotional mind in a persistently triggered state, while our rational mind struggles to keep up. We don’t know if what we’re seeing is true or false. Add AI-generated content into the mixing bowl and now we also don’t know if what we’re seeing is even real or not. Social media in its current form is designed to strip us of our choice.

Trovable is my attempt to give it back.

Breaking the Dopamine, Doomscrolling Feedback Loop

Dopamine is not about pleasure—it is about the expectation of pleasure, entirely dissociated from the actual experience of enjoyment. The allure of scrolling was built upon the same psychological foundation that makes slot machines so profitable for casinos. When we scroll, we don’t know what we’ll see next. That’s the genius of the algorithm: to keep showing us things that will reach us on an emotional level and keep us wanting more.

While I believe social media is an invaluable tool for raising awareness and keeping people informed, I simultaneously hold it responsible for the social climate we find ourselves in. As users, we are herded into echo chambers. Echo chambers create “Us vs. Them” divisions. These divisions cause a level of online vitriol we would never have in real life discussions. When ‘rage bait’ is named Word of the Year we’ve hit new lows of people’s ability to think critically. When experts are discounted and dismissed in favor of social media prognosticators, we’ve abandoned truth in favor of belief—not unlike the Dark Ages and the denigration and stagnation of cultural and scientific progress.

We need ways of countering this toxicity.

This was my “What sucks?” moment.

This is Trovable

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Trovable helps you discover content you'll actually love.

Trovable is what I envision social media can be: a way to stop scrolling through the morass of noise, and instead find a true signal; a way to avoid the emotionally triggering influencers who profit by sowing fear and anger.

The query engine is intentionally designed to give you verified, quality content based on what you’re looking for—prioritizing active, established creators and filtering out inactive accounts that haven’t published in over a year. No scrolling, no unintended emotional triggering. Moreover, if you are searching for specific content that can have many different perspectives (e.g. politics), the engine is designed to give you multiple, differing viewpoints. Whether you read, watch, or listen to those differing viewpoints is entirely up to you, but the feature is to help us avoid our own echo chambers of confirmation bias.

One of my favorite features of Trovable is that it is designed to learn with you. The more content you read, watch, or listen to, and the more you review content, the more personalized your recommendations will be.

Here’s how it works:

1. On the homepage, you can filter which kind of content you are looking for. Specificity is king. The more you narrow your parameters, the more personalized the answers will be.

   

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Our philosophy, as explained by Trevor, the Troving Turtle, is to slow down and explore our curiosities; to consume content we actually enjoy and want to learn from; to form meaningful connections with other curious people.

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If Trovable sounds like the tool for you, I am launching a BETA test of our premium services. We’re not yet in the app store, but you can download Trovable as a Progressive Web App (PWA) by going to our website, Trovable.app. The site will ask you if you’d like to download the app. We’re fully operational in your browser, or as an app.

If you would like to be a BETA tester of Trovable, you can go to Trovable.app/Beta and enter in the code: EARLYBIRD26

This will give you access to all of the features in both our Core and Studio tiers:

“If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking for permission.” — Unknown

We are an output-obsessed society. We care about the athlete’s performance on the field far more than who they are in practice. The grades on our report card influence the future of many, far more than their curiosity, interest, and work they put into a given subject. Our performance reviews are driven by the results we’ve generated for our company, and our company’s stock price is primarily driven by its forecasted earnings for the upcoming quarter and year. Outputs.

None of this is inherently bad. We should expect results and hold each other accountable for achieving a desired outcome. If someone chooses to work with me, I know they are, rightfully, expecting results.

But an athlete’s greatness on the field—what we see—didn’t come from asking for permission and fitting into a predetermined box. It is primarily dictated by the effort they put in behind the scenes: Their effort in practice, their nutritional discipline, and their willingness to be coached and critiqued—which we don’t see. In other words, the inputs we choose determine the outputs. Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Lebron James—three of the best basketball players of all time—are famous for their relentless practice habits. Kobe said it’s not about the hours you physically practice, but rather the hours you’re mentally present at practice. The inputs matter, and the inputs you choose matter.

Key Performance Indicators

This is as true in business as it is in life. Being healthy isn’t about the intensity of a lone workout. But it’s also not just about showing up either—though that’s a significant component. Businesses often rely on key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine if their efforts are successful. But choosing which KPIs matter is crucial. Track the wrong KPIs and you will likely get very different results than you anticipated.

As long-time readers know, my wife and I are building a Lux Health & Social Club—a micro gym, co-working, cafe hybrid. A question we’re focused on is which KPIs actually matter. For example, we could focus on attrition—what percentage of members are cancelling their memberships each month. Here’s the problem with that: once they’ve left, those members are gone. If we focus on attrition, we’re too late. And finding new members can be enormously expensive, what’s known as customer acquisition cost, or CAC. Instead, what if we focus on net promoter score, or NPS? How happy are current members? Are they telling their friends and colleagues about Lux? Are they thinking of cancelling? How can we prevent that from happening? These are the crucial inputs to getting the desired output: a thriving micro-community, ecosystem, and business.

These same principles apply to our own lives. If we take Arthur Brooks’ “be your own CEO” analogy, which KPIs are necessary to track for your goals? It sounds so simple. If you want to lose weight, get on the scale and track your weight, duh! But we’re human. That means it’s never so simple.

If you only track your weight on the scale, you will miss all of the adaptations your body is making in an effort to lose weight. A major reason why weight-loss-only programs fail is they are very successful at helping people lose weight; but the tradeoff is the physiological adaptations actually hurt long-term health. Metabolism and muscle mass—Two essential components for longevity—often decrease. When our metabolism slows, it’s like your car going from 35mpg to 25mpg to 15mpg. Our calorie-burning engine becomes much less efficient. Muscle mass is essential for structural support, injury prevention, regulation of our blood sugar levels, and, yes, metabolism. If you go on a starvation diet, you will lose weight, certainly. But you will create these negative consequences that have real, sometimes irreversible effects on the body—especially for men and women over 50, where regaining lost muscle mass is extraordinarily difficult.

Individualized KPIs

“There is no such thing as the average person.” — Todd Rose

Societal and cultural norms implore us to be like one another, to be average. Our school system teaches us, more than anything else, to fit into a mold. Look closely and we can see these cookie-cutter KPIs emerge throughout the first 22 years of our lives: Grades, social circles, fitting in, extracurriculars.

But research in neuroscience suggests there is no such thing as an “average” brain. And, in fact, that “average” is a construct that pigeonholes us into environments we aren’t suited for. Like a 2-year-old trying to fit a square block in a circular hole, we get stuck on paths that were never designed for our individual shape. Todd Rose’s research on individuality and intelligence has proven this. In his interview with Jim O’Shaughnessy, he cites what we miss when we lump people into numbers, labels, and averages:

“The second piece is you cannot know in advance what any one person is capable of, you can’t.

The biggest study on IQ ever was a 40-year longitudinal study that said, “Look how good we’ll predict society.” You predicted middle management. That was it. You predicted people who could fit into this one-sized-fits-all system and follow the rules. That study literally missed every genius of the last 40 years, including the top statistician of the time whose methods they were using to analyze their data. The irony was lost on them.”

The study Rose is mentioning was the “Terman Study”, or the “Genetic Study of Genius”. It’s worth noting that this study began in 1921, at a time when the eugenics movement was on the rise, as was the “standardization” of our modern world. The study, run by Stanford Professor Lewis Terman, followed over 1,500 kids with average IQs of 150. Terman expected these kids to change the world with their genius, inventing new technologies and winning Nobel Prizes.

The result was that mostly all of these kids were successful, but not in the way Terman intended. Most ended up in administrative, white-collar roles. However, the study found that no kids became world leaders, inventors, or Nobel Prize winners. Worse, however, was that the study rejected those who would shape much of the 20th century, such as William Shockley, who co-invented the transistor and won a Nobel Prize in physics. Moreover, it had no way to test for artistic or creative genius, only IQ.

To reiterate, I am an enormous supporter of expectations and outputs. Without them, we’d achieve nothing as a society. My problem lies not with standards themselves, but with the monocultural expectation that everyone must fit into the same square peg. We place kids on this path—just as we were placed on it once—before they can comprehend meaning and reasoning.

The Illinois Valedictorian Project—a similar study that began in 1981 and followed 81 valedictorians and salutatorians—found that many of these high achievers were so focused on their success and achievement, they didn’t stop to question whether the path they were on was the right one for them. This is from a review of the book, Lives of Promise: What Becomes of High School Valedictorians: A Fourteen-Year Study of Achievement and Life Choices by Karen Arnold:

“Many high achieving students become so focused on a trajectory that was set early on that they don’t explore other options and often, down the road, find themselves dissatisfied with their career choices, but reluctant to change because of the time spent.

Many valedictorians also struggled to find meaning in their achievements as they reached their late twenties and thirties. Having worked so hard, some questioned who they were working so hard for.”

They had followed rules and asked for permission, but they never learned to pursue their own curiosity.

Standardized KPIs—whether IQ scores, BMI charts, or generic fitness programs—are designed to predict conformity, not greatness. They measure who can follow the rules, not who can break new ground. What if we individualized our KPIs to match our own skillset, motivations, and journey? What if we honored our uniqueness by aligning our personal KPIs with what we found interesting?

The Process Matters

Results matter, but they are a reaction—the product of a complex equation. The best teachers I ever had throughout my education, the ones I vividly remember, all had this same characteristic. They cared about results, yes, but they seldom talked about them. They only spoke in inputs, often in the form of questions.

“What are you curious about?”

“I can see where you were going. Where do you think you went wrong?”

“Have you thought about trying it this way?”

“Can you see it from a different perspective?”

In other words, getting the answer correct was less relevant than the thought process and reasoning behind the attempt to get the correct answer. What Annie Duke refers to as “Thinking in Bets” to avoid “resulting”. The idea is the same: The process matters more than the outcome. If you achieve a positive outcome without knowing why, you won’t be able to replicate that outcome. Conversely, if you fail at a task without knowing why, you won’t learn from it and are likely to make the same mistake again. Developing and continually iterating a process is what makes an athlete exceptional as much as it’s how a company scales its operations. It’s how, even if you aren’t performing well, you know to stay the course.

I sincerely hope I’ve made those teachers proud by attempting to replicate their methods in my own teaching. Results, or outputs, are the direct result of putting in the work and allowing ourselves to fail. No one—not one, single, individual—gets an exercise right the very first time they do it. If I expected perfection from a client every time we performed an exercise routine, I would be setting them up for disaster. Either that routine would be far too easy and not challenge them to do better, or they would feel defeated because they couldn’t perform to my expectations.

As essential as outputs are to success, we must be allowed to fail. No progress happens without it, and it is essential to the journey. We should fear failure, yes, but the degree of fear matters, as does the magnitude of that failure. If I asked a new client with osteoporosis to perform a single-leg squat while balancing on a Bosu ball, that client’s degree of fear will likely be astronomical (as it should be—if a trainer asks you to do that without first building up to it, run) and the magnitude of that failure could mean a broken hip. If, however, I ask that same individual to perform a controlled step-up where, even if they stumble, they won’t be at risk of falling and breaking a bone, then the degree of fear is much less.

I could use AI to write for me. It would make getting an essay published into the ether a hell of a lot easier. But “The act of writing is an act of thinking.” — Derek Thompson. In the time it takes me to write, research, delete, rewrite, and repeat, I learn to ask deeper questions. Like learning a new exercise, I never get it right on the first attempt.

Infinite Humility, Curiosity, and Agility

This is the crux of the Infinite Game, which states that the only competition is with yourself, and the only way to lose is to give up—a game of attrition. Most importantly, the infinite game is positive sum. Two people, each playing an infinite game, can both win. A famous adage in the investing world is “Time in markets beats timing markets.” As long as you have your slice of ownership, the opportunity to make choices, the curiosity to learn, and the agility to change your mind, you can’t lose.

These same principles appear over and over, not just in markets, but in every corner of life:

“Long-term consistency beats short-term intensity every time.” — Bruce Lee

“Your success will be determined by what you choose to ignore.” — Dan McMurtrie

“Journey before destination.” — Brandon Sanderson

“Greatness cannot be planned.” — Kenneth Stanley

These aren’t simply maxims that make for good social media clickbait. They are the foundation layer to my own cognitive realm; they are the first and most important input for me to play the game. To attain our desired outcome, we have to start with our mentality. As Todd Rose describes of his Think Tank, Populace:

“We really don’t like politics, and we’re not very good at policy because we also believe those are all downstream from culture. And culture is downstream from mindset.”

Our ability to focus, to think, and to push ourselves to do hard things—the reward we seek is on the other side of that equation. If you want to lose weight, or learn a new skill, or accomplish something you’ve never done before, it starts with your attitude.

Last week, I was working with a client who’s in her sixties. In the roughly one year we’ve been working together, she’s always come in with specific goals and, while those goals were finite, there’s always an underlying infinite aspect—her primary objective: Do something hard; something she has never done before; and something that frightens her so she may overcome it. Her goal for the previous two months has been to do a “regular pushup”. A pushup from her toes without assistance. While this may sound easy to you, bear in mind, she’s in her sixties and has never done one before. Ever. Finally, today was the day. Until now, we’d been working on accessory movements to build the necessary strength and foundation. She comes in and I tell her today’s the day. Initially there is nervousness on her face—that gnawing doubt that creeps into her micro-expressions. On her first attempt, she did two of them in a row, with perfect form. Second attempt comes around, I ask, “What do you think? Up for trying another round?” She did four in a row, again with perfect form, and nearly a fifth.

This is the best part of being a personal trainer. It’s not the fitness or the health. It’s that every single one of us is unique. I have worked with over 150 people in my career. No two are the same. We are all on a different journey and, although two people may state the same goal, those two goals will look very different to each of them. You will never see me administer the same exact workout to two people. Similarities, sure (we’re different, but we’re still human), but everyone moves different, has different motivations, and has a different definition of success.

To achieve greatness for ourselves, it’s not about asking permission and fitting into an orderly box. It’s the humility to ask for help, the curiosity to wonder what we’re capable of, and the agility to recognize a point of failure, learn, and pivot. The inputs we make, the journey we’re on, and how we approach it are far more critical than any finite destination.

Media That Inspired and Contributed to This Piece

Articles:

• Everything Is Television — Derek Thompson

• The End of Thinking — Derek Thompson

• The Age of Anti-Social Media is Here — Damon Beres | The Atlantic

• The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism — Adrienne LaFrance | The Atlantic

• Why Students Are Obsessed With ‘Points Taken Off’ — Ian Bogost | The Atlantic

• The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books — Rose Horowitch | The Atlantic

• The Rise and Fall of Social Media — William B. Irvine | More Better Thinking

• Are You Pigeonholing Yourself? — William B. Irvine | More Better Thinking

• Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months — Ted Gioia | The Honest Broker

• Is Honest Writing the Next New Thing in Journalism — Ted Gioia | The Honest Broker

• The Terror of the Great AI Displacement — Jason Calacanis

• The one resource more precious than time — Graham Weaver

Podcasts & Conversations:

• Escaping the Trap of the Standard Path — Todd Rose & Jim O’Shaughnessy

• The Trap of the Objective — Kenneth Stanley & Jim O’Shaughnessy | Infinite Loops

• The Power of Permissionless Action — Jay Yang & Jim O’Shaugnessy | Infinite Loops

• Why Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness in America — Morgan Housel & Derek Thompson | Plain English

• Everything is Television — Max Tani, Ben Smith, and Derek Thompson | Plain English

• Malcom Gladwell’s Theories on Podcasting, America, and Joe Rogan — Malcom Gladwell, Max Tani, and Ben Smith | Mixed Signals

• Is This the End of Literacy? — James Marriott & Jared Henderson | The Honest Broker

• The Rise of the Anti-Social Century — Derek Thompson & Jared Henderson | The Honest Broker

Books I’ve Read Recently:

• Stormlight Archive — I finished book 5, Wind and Truth, of the Stormlight archive by Brandon Sanderson several weeks ago and it is easily the best fiction book series I have ever read. In addition to wonderful world-building, Sanderson builds exceptionally believable, dynamic characters, with complex backgrounds who encounter philosophical, moral, and ethical problems that cause them to question who they are—things we often have to deal with in our own day-to-day lives. They say the best way to deliver a message is through storytelling and Sanderson has done it masterfully.

• White Mirror — I’ve followed Tinkered Thinking on Twitter for many years now and thoroughly enjoy his ability to be undeniably optimistic about technology and the future. Coupled with his understanding of human history, and behavior his book gives a pleasant counter narrative to the dystopian future so much of media and culture throw at us. Above all, my primary takeaway is that humanities greatest trait is our need for discovery. But with every new technology we create, it is ultimately up to us—our critical thinking, curiosity, and mindset—that will decide whether that technology is good or evil.

• Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire — Andrew Wilkinson is another individual I discovered via Twitter. His book is a great reminder that money and status are not the key drivers of happiness. Status games happen even, maybe even especially, among the ultra-wealthy. But my key takeaway from the book was the underlying theme Andrew brings up numerous times: what motivates us in adulthood often starts very early in our lives. Our relationships with money, people, success, and self-worth so often seem to come from observing our parent’s relationship with those same things.

This thesis has formed from the drastic increase in loneliness among young people, the rapid rise in the time we spend online, the increasing division in our society, and my own despair at witnessing what my favorite online social platform has devolved into. It now stands as the gravitational core around which a new business my wife, Jasmine, and I are building orbits.

A significant portion of this article discusses the division we are all too aware of in politics and society. As I finished the previous draft of this article, we learned of the assassination of Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the attempted assassination of Rep. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. I decided against publishing then, and indeed rewrote an entire section, because I was very emotionally triggered—I think many of us were.

Lastly, as you read on, if you find yourself disagreeing with me, great! That’s the point. Tell me why.

-Eric

Your perspective is unique to you. No one else will ever truly know your perceived reality, nor will you ever know theirs. That in itself, is a terrifying, yet equally empowering thought. And yet, how often do we take the time to try to understand someone else’s perspective? Especially someone who may think differently than we do?

Jasmine and I thoroughly enjoy watching Survivor. It is perhaps one of the best examples of a uniquely perceived reality. As viewers, we get to see the tailored edit of the producers, but that is still far more than a contestant on the show gets to see. The conversations that take place and the levels of trust—or faux trust created as a means of deception—are at each contestant’s discretion, both on the delivering and receiving end.

Each season offers an extraordinary glimpse into human nature on many fronts, both the kind that raises your optimism in humanity and the kind that would make Emperor Palpatine cackle with glee. One cause for hope is that the latter group never wins and is almost always unanimously disliked by the rest of the tribe. But there’s something more enlightening, which is the undercurrent of the entire show: In a microcommunity where there is no technology of any kind, the usual suspects don’t matter. Politics, religion, and financial status - none of these matter. All people have is their mental fortitude and each other. The best players tell the best stories. They share their perspective and create a narrative.

Of course, luck plays a factor—as it does in many aspects of our lives—such as being placed in the wrong tribe or being cast in a season where your skillset is not valued in the way it may be on a different season. Frequent viewers may also note that many of the savviest players recognize luck and take advantage of it. But on the whole, it boils down to one human’s ability to convince another human that they are trustworthy and then earn it (or break it).

Storytelling is the pinnacle of human evolution. To invent that which does not exist, to create excitement in the otherwise mundane, and to convince others to join a cause. In the most recent season of Survivor, we see this manifest as Eva, a young woman from Minnesota, is comforted by Joe, a firefighter from California. Two people from different backgrounds and, at the time, on competing tribes, shared one of the most heartfelt moments of the entire show. Eva then tells her story of having autism to the tribe and, despite the competition, creates an environment where everyone on the beach is captivated by her journey to get where she is. In addition to having the host, Jeff Probst, in tears, she had Jasmine and me in tears as well.

Yuval Noah Harari, author of the worldwide bestseller Sapiens, describes storytelling as our superpower:

“Stories are our superpower. It's what enables complete strangers to unite and to work together towards common goals. But, at the same time, they could also be the cause of the worst crimes in history.”

In his conversation with Adam Grant, Harari asks him:

“Why do you think that… it seems to become much more difficult to simply hold a conversation with people who think differently from you… it now seems that, especially in democracies, the conversation is breaking down. We have the most sophisticated communication, technology in human history, and people are just unable to talk with to one another anymore. What’s happening?”

Grant replies by referencing a recent study that states, “People would rather have a conversation with a stranger who shared their political views than a friend who didn’t.”

That 2024 study stated that, in reality, the fear of having a divisive conversation is often misplaced, and that conversation usually helps us learn from each other:

“In both experiments, participants expected more positive experiences talking with someone they agreed with than some one they disagreed with about a potentially divisive topic. In reality, participants had similarly positive experiences in both cases, meaning that participants were the most miscalibrated about the conversation they would also be most inclined to avoid. Mistakenly fearing a negative interaction may create misplaced partisan divides, not only keeping people from connecting with each other but also keeping people from learning about each other and from each other. Mistakenly avoiding these interactions may indeed, as Martin Luther King suggested, create more fear in social life than is warranted.”

For the entirety of human history, we connected through storytelling. Sharing a meal, sitting around a fire, or congregating in the town square, our stories connected us. It was our stories that formed bonds. In the last 130 years, we’ve had the rise of the radio, then the television, and now smartphones. As a result, we’ve increasingly stopped sharing our story and replaced it with someone else’s. When we stop learning about other people’s stories—especially those from entirely different backgrounds—we stop viewing them as whole human beings, and instead identify them solely by their ideology.

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Unchanging Humans in an Exponentially Changing World

“Technologies change, businesses change, and markets change. Human nature remains constant.” — Josh Wolfe

What enflames your emotional self? What gets your blood boiling to such a degree that it compels you to do something (regardless of whether that something is constructive or not)? There are many narratives in today’s society that create divides among us. Perhaps you have kids in high school or college? Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation called attention to the destructive force of smartphones and screen time on our kids. Jasmine and I certainly have strong opinions on that subject. The Israel-Palestine conflict seems to inflame many on both sides here in the West. Immigration is another powerful narrative. If you’re on the right, the left wants open borders to boost their voter count; if you’re on the left, the right is cruel and inhumane.

These are all important issues that impact people’s lives and are worth discussing. But, unless you have the power to directly influence change, do any of these stories directly impact our day-to-day lives? If you, like Jasmine and I, are Jewish, then October 7th, 2023, likely affected you on a deep, personal level. With the holocaust already a lifetime ago, it’s easy to forget thousands of years of persecution. If you work or are friends with an undocumented immigrant, immigration may affect you deeply as well. Without personal attachment, how do you inform yourself and shape your opinion? In other words, what is your information diet?

Algorithms dominate our consumption. If you’re left-leaning, you’ll likely see mostly left-leaning posts and articles. If you search for running shoes, you’ll see running shoe ads everywhere you look (even though you’ve already bought them!). The problem is, algorithms reward the loudest, most inflammatory voices. These individuals typically have no personal attachment to the issues they address but will pass themselves off as experts in their effort to gain attention on social media. How do you win the algorithmic game? Tell the most inflammatory, incendiary stories you can. Use stories as a weapon to trigger your audience’s emotional response.

The internet—especially social media, where you can read and reply to a text, image, or video in seconds—has been a glorious tool for attracting attention by telling stories and shaping narratives at scale. But the human brain has not evolved to keep up. Our brain has evolved to default to the path of least resistance. Our emotional reaction triumphs over our rational response. 10,000 years ago, if your tribe experienced an imminent threat, you didn’t have the luxury of sitting and thinking rationally. Fear is what kept our ancestors alive.

Today, we have that luxury. I believe there’s no time in human history that is better than today. But human nature has changed extraordinarily slowly compared to the rapid technological advances. When our emotional mind is triggered—maybe seeing a social media post that makes our beliefs feel attacked; maybe it’s a positive response, like adorable animal videos—it’s easy to give in to it. In the negative case, perhaps we feel outrage and a need to post a comment without fact-checking their claims or simply ignoring them. In the positive case, perhaps we get a rush of joy, ignoring the fact that we’ve now been distracted for an entire hour. In either event, the content we see will be tailored to our emotional desires, resulting in us seeing less and less content we don’t like or disagree with.

Biases thrive when we cocoon ourselves within our walled gardens, carefully crafted by algorithms. So difficult can it be to venture beyond these walls that we often become immersed. Immersion is not inherently bad; it is an excellent technique for learning a new language or culture. But with learning a new culture, there’s an awareness. You’re acting intentionally and, therefore, actively participating in the immersion. Subconscious immersion can have disastrous outcomes. It’s how terrorist organizations recruit soldiers, and it’s how political organizations polarize voters.

In 2022, Salman Rushdie, an author of 22 books, including The Satanic Verses—a novel which earned him a death threat from none other than the supreme leader of Iran in 1989 for “blaspheming Islam”—was attacked and stabbed in public during an event for the Chataqua Institution in western New York. His attacker was a regular kid with a regular upbringing. However, in 2018, this individual traveled to visit his father in Lebanon for a month and was suddenly immersed in the radically pro-Hezbollah village where his father lived. After returning, he continued immersing himself online in his newfound faith and hate, seldom venturing into the physical world around him.

In Rushdie’s interview with Ezra Klein, they note that this attack was decades after The Satanic Verses and the threats that followed, and years before the attacker was born. Why then did he target Rushdie? There is no definitive answer. However, the attacker had indoctrinated himself in extremely pro-Iranian content, the chief backers of Hezbollah. Klein asks how much more dangerous his world would have been had social media existed when his life was first threatened:

Klein:

“I was struck with the thought that, for decades now, you have lived the most extreme possible version of a very modern condition, in which little scraps of yourself — scraps of things you’ve written or echoes of interpretations of things you’ve written — ricochet around an internet or a world and create this other version of you that people begin to believe in.

This happens in a very small and much less terrorizing way to people all the time on TikTok, on Facebook, on X. They say something, and soon a version of them emerges that is more real to other people than they are. Do you think this is a more common thing?”

Rushdie:

“I agree entirely with how you describe the creation of false selves by this new weapon of social media. I’ve often thought that if these things had existed in 1989, I would have been in far more danger because the speed with which material can be transmitted is so much greater and the way in which groupthink can be created and mobs can be created would have enormously escalated the danger.

…I know that there are two or three graphics containing absolutely false quotes from me — things I’ve never even come close to saying — which keep cropping up. People keep retweeting them and repeating them. And even though I have once or twice said, “Look, I never said this,” that doesn’t stop it.”

Social media is the perfect environment for giving in to intellectual laziness. A place where we can immerse ourselves in feeding on ‘scraps’. Like scavengers who feed on the carcasses of deceased animals, it’s a world where we don’t need to hunt ourselves. If we keep scrolling, our information diet is satisfied in headlines, soundbites, and 280-character snippets. Carefully curated for us so we don’t have to do it ourselves, and deliberately inflame our deepest emotions.

The Loudest Voices Win

But there is something else at play that’s more insidious: “The real name of the game is to manufacture false consensus.” — Todd Rose

On X (Twitter), roughly 80% of the content is produced by only 10% of users. These 10% are influencing the opinions of millions of people by being the loudest, most boisterous voices on the platform. The New York Times recently published an article about an X influencer, Dominick McGee. In 2024, he became the third-most influential person on the platform by posting the most inflammatory content possible, triggering emotional responses on both sides. Because we want to fit in with our tribe, we take sides. He ‘wins’ by appealing to the worst of our nature and sowing division.

The overwhelming desire to fit in with our tribe is another example of technology outpacing the advancement of our human operating system. Where fitting in once kept our ancestors alive, it often acts as a cannonball chained to our individuality, weighing down our freedom to speak up. Fear of being ostracized from our own friends or social network cripples us and we, as Todd Rose puts it, “self-silence” ourselves from saying what we really believe.

As more and more people self-silence, illusions are created where we are led to believe that what the very loud, very tiny minority is saying is what the majority of people think—What Rose calls “collective illusions.” In his book of the same name, he writes,

“Schanck showed how, even in a tiny town, people don’t necessarily know each other as well as think they do. He demonstrated how easily a small, highly vocal minority… can misrepresent and mislead the rest of the group.”

His non-partisan think tank, Populace, has shown through its research that approximately two-thirds of Americans self-silence themselves. Moreover, when they give their initial opinion, they will change that opinion once they know what the rest of the group thinks:

“We all have conformity bias… We’re hardwired to be with our groups, not against our groups. Makes tons of sense, good for survival.

…What’s super interesting is what happens when you're told that group agrees with your opinion on who’s good looking, it triggers a dopamine reward response. Remarkable. Same reward response that hard drugs activate.

…Now, when it looks like you are way opposed to your group on the subjective idea of who’s hot, it triggers this cascading error signal which disrupts memory and attention. It’s evolutionarily meant to say, stop whatever you’re doing something’s wrong. You could be in danger. Figure it out. Okay, now here’s the clever part. They get done with that wave of the study and then they literally tell the people over the intercom, ‘oh, shoot, sorry. For whatever reason, your responses didn’t register. If we give you a little more money, would you mind just quickly going through the task again? We won't show you what anybody else thinks. We just need your responses.’

And lo and behold, the vast majority of people move their subjective perception to align with the group. And by the way, then you interview them after they’re like, ‘oh no, definitely I didn’t.’ They really don't think they did.

…The way that your brain estimates group consensus…it assumes the loudest voices repeated the most are the majority.”

In the summer of 2023, Dean Phillips blew up his political career when he said the Democratic Party needed a presidential primary, citing Biden’s inability to win the 2024 election. When none of the leading prospects—Whitmer of Michigan, Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Pritzker of Illinois, and Newsome of California—refused to step in, Phillips announced his own candidacy. The result: he was eviscerated by his party for being disloyal. Governor Walz said of him, “You know, I have to say this about Minnesota: it’s a great state, full of great people. And sometimes they do crazy things… they make political side shows for themselves.”

Then June 27th, 2024, happened. And suddenly everyone was saying what Phillips had been saying for an entire year. Regardless of which side you were on, this is not how discourse should be, especially among the people we choose to run our country. Our leaders are supposed to lead. When we silence people for disagreement, we stop having important conversations. When we stop having important conversations, we give the people in power what they want: “Our silent, obedient consent.” — V for Vendetta.

Combining what Rose and Harari have both researched, there are some striking similarities:

• Rose’s research found that people who self-silence are incredibly distrusting of others: “The people who are self-silencing, only 30% believe people are trustworthy.” The same level of social trust that exists in authoritarian countries.

• Harari’s research found that when people don’t have high levels of social trust, they assume everything is a power struggle: “I think it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that if you think about the world simply in terms of power, you will tend to vote, for instance, for politicians who behave that way, and then it becomes a reality.”

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What We Can Learn from Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Republic of Letters

Where can we freely express ourselves in today’s world? Intellectual curiosity and expression of our true beliefs often take a back seat to fitting in. From the moment we enter the school system, this phenomenon begins. Who wants to ask a potentially stupid question with their whole class listening? Who wants to go up to the board and solve a problem incorrectly in front of their peers? I was certainly guilty of this. There were many occasions when I was curious about a topic, but I didn’t want to make a fool of myself and remained silent. As an aside, this is one area where I am super excited about AI: a curious student will be able to ask any question—and, crucially, learn over time to ask better questions—and not fear the reaction of their classmates.

As discussed above, this behavior persists into adulthood, to the extent that most of us prefer discussing ideas with people we agree with, even if we hardly know them. However, many people find that they can express their true views, even in disagreement, when there is trust. In fact, Rose’s research found that people who don’t self-silence are far more socially trusting, to the tune of 52%, among the highest social trust rate in the world.

Unfortunately, even if we do have a large degree of social trust, the internet is a phenomenal tool for crushing that trust. The most well-reasoned, thoughtful argument, complete with facts and even acknowledging the opposing arguments, will still be met with the most senseless, hateful comments. The speaker's intent and perspective give way to the reader's reaction (how dare someone with a different life experience challenge my worldview!).

Enter group chats. The group chat became a way for people to express their ideas with those they trust in a safe and private setting. Being part of a group chat myself, I observed many of the people in the chat expressing views they never felt comfortable posting publicly. Earlier this year, Ben Smith, chief editor and co-founder of Semafor, interviewed several tech executives, venture capitalists, and prominent podcasters about their move to group chats. He quotes Marc Andreeson as saying:

“‘They’re having all the private conversations because they weren’t allowed to have the public conversations,” Andreessen told Torenberg on a recent podcast, after joking in the name of secrecy that he’d never heard of such groups. “If it wasn’t for the censorship all of these conversations would have happened in public, which would have been much better.’”

He then quotes Noahpinion creator, Noah Smith:

“‘Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens.’”

Group chats escape the algorithms and the hordes that succumb to them.

During the Age of Enlightenment, the most prominent figures created the first long-distance group chat: The Republic of Letters. Thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries would exchange ideas about science, philosophy, government, and natural rights. Through this 300-year-old group chat, humanity gained knowledge and insights that had hitherto never existed: The scientific method and scientific infrastructure, natural rights, and governments that serve all of their citizens. The contributors used this form of communication to encourage critical feedback and stress test their ideas.

Among these thinkers and writers of the time was Jean-Jocques Rousseau. Orginally one of the key figures of the Enlightenment, he was a member of the Philosophes and contributed to the Encyclopédie—a body of writing that was devoted to science, reason, and free thought—and the was instrumental in how much of the world notates music today. However, he is also known as the “father of Romanticism”. In 1749, as a competition, the Académie de Dijon asked the question: Has scientific progress also improved our morals?

In his article, Discourses on the Arts and Sciences, Rousseau argues that technological advances have weakened our morals. That humans are inherently good and just, and that technology corrupts us. He wrote:

“…but here the effect is certain and the depravity actual; our minds have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and sciences have improved… the evils resulting from our vain curiosity are as old as the world.”

Though this paper won him first place in the competition, was widely read and well regarded, you can probably tell from where we comfortably sit as a society today, his ideas lost to humanities insatiable curiosity for discovery and progress.

However, through his and other’s writings, the Age of Romanticism was born and believers of this philosophy began to become more in touch with nature and create cultural works that were devoted to individualism and emotional expression.

Culture exists, like most things, as a pendulum. Too far to one side, it will swing rapidly to the other. We need both sets of ideas at the table. And we need an environment where we can freely express these ideas without fear of being cancelled, or having our self-worth reduced. Though he was a product of Enlightenment and an intellectual, he wrote against intellectualism and his peers lauded his writing.

Philosopher, Maarten Boudry wrote about the irony of Rousseau’s beliefs:

Rousseau’s first Discourse is one of the earliest instances of something that would come to accompany modernity wherever it gained a foothold: biting the hand that feeds you because you know it won’t punch you in the face.

The French philosopher Pascal Bruckner once quipped that “Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West.”

While I have my own beliefs on the subject, what’s far more essential is that the discourse happens between both sides. As Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote about Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend your right to say it.”

Our Vision: Health and Microcommunities

“If you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people. And if you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.” — Aaron Sorkin, Sports Night

What gives Jasmine and me hope is embodied in what we’ve learned from watching Survivor: the vast majority of us are inherently good, even when our environment incentivizes us not to be. When certain people are being loud and obnoxious—whether it’s online or in real life—most of us recognize them for what they are. Most of us want to contribute to our community, regardless of beliefs, values, and worldviews. And, when someone tells their story, we listen.

Furthermore, when we can freely express our true selves, it benefits our health! I have devoted my career to health. My experience has been that there are no bigger obstacles to improving one’s health than stress and self-doubt. Rose found that self-silencing has severe health consequences to both. Heart disease and elevated cortisol levels, combined with lower self-worth are all symptoms of holding in our ideas and beliefs.

The division we feel as a nation is an illusion of identity. We attach ourselves to labels that give us a sense of belonging and align with our overall ideals. But these labels keep us rooted to the spot and limit our agility. These are not original ideas.

• Paul Graham had the idea that we should endeavor to keep our identity small. He wrote that if we did not attach ourselves to an identity, we would be open to differing viewpoints. For example, if I identified as a Democrat, I would feel attacked when someone criticized Democrats and become defensive.

• Emmett Fox taught, “We are what we think.” He created the concept of a Mental Equivalent, the idea that we can alter our physical world by creating mental equivalents in our mind. He believed that what separates us physically are merely illusions. If we can remove the label, we can prevent our ego from needing to defend us.

• Andrew Huberman proposed that we should use verbs to describe ourselves, instead of nouns: “I am running” instead of “I am a runner.” Or, “I believe in liberalism” instead of “I am a Democrat.” The idea is that our lives are dynamic, whereas nouns are static. When we free ourselves of the noun, we can free ourselves to grow and explore our curiosity.

The Age of Enlightenment gave rise to the Age of Romanticism, and the two ideologies coexisted. Together, they blended the ideas of free expression, science, and reason with the need for emotional connection and experiencing the natural world. In a world increasingly defined by screens, algorithms, distractions, and noise, we need spaces where we can remove ourselves, be in the real world, and “surround ourselves with smart people who disagree with us.”

We need more exchanges of ideas, and less of being told how we should think and feel. Online group chats give people the freedom to unself-silence themselves, share their ideas, and learn new ones. Group chats have historically had the power to change the world. Our vision is to create an environment that fosters the creation of in-person group chats, built around health, curiosity, and dynamism.

Each of us has a story to tell, and perspectives and ideas that have developed based on that story. Perhaps if we had a safe space to share it with people who may think differently but share the same principles, we would.

“Do something wonderful, people may imitate it.” — Albert Schweitzer

p.s…

If you think I’m wrong, great! Please, respectfully, tell me why in the comments.

If you’d like to learn more about the business we're building, get in touch: Eric@luxhealthco.com

Sources of Inspiration for This Article:

Articles:

1. Keep Your Identity Small — Paul Graham

2. The Anti-Social Century — Derek Thompson (The Atlantic)

3. How Progressives Froze the American Dream — Yoni Applebaum (The Atlantic)

4. The group chats that changed America — Ben Smith (Semafor)

5. The 6 New Rules of Communicating — Ted Gioia

6. We Really Are Entering a New Age of Romanticism — Ted Gioia

7. The Ten Warning Signs — Ted Gioia

8. Are We Too Impatient to be Intelligent? — Rory Sutherland

9. Paying Attention — Tolstoyan by Jared Young

10. No, You Don’t Get an A for Effort — Adam Grant (NYT)

11. America Wants a God: Believing — Lauren Jackson (NYT)

12. Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress — Kyla Scanlon

13. Everything Feels Like it Doesn’t Make Sense — Kyla Scanlon

14. Trump, Mamdani, and Cluely — Kyla Scanlon

15. The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1 — Tim Urban, Wait but Why

16. The Gentle Singularity — Sam Altman

Podcasts:

1. Chris Sacca—How to Succeed by Living on Your Own Terms — The Tim Ferriss Show with Tim Ferriss

2. Todd Rose — Are We Living in the Truman Show? — Infinite Loops with Jim O’Shaughnessey

3. Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading | Nadia Asparouhova — The Generalist with Mario Gabriele

4. Yuval Noah Harari on What History Teaches Us About Justice and Peace — ReThinking with Adam Grant

5. The Ongoing Collapse of the Global Commons — Riskgaming by Lux Capital

6. How Can We Make the Internet Fun Again? — Riskgaming by Lux Capital

7. How Progressives Froze the American Dream — Plain English with Derek Thompson

8. Is There a Scientific Case for Believing in God? — Plain English with Derek Thompson

9. Is Pop Culture Worse Than Ever — Plain English with Derek Thompson

10. We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education — The Ezra Klein Show with Ezra Klein

11. Our Lives Are an Endless Series of ‘And’ — The Ezra Klein Show with Ezra Klein

12. Best Of: Salman Rushdie is Not Who You Think He is — The Ezra Klein Show with Ezra Klein

13. Anne-Laure Le Cunff - How to Live Freely in a Goal Obsessed World — The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

Books I Recommend:

• Abundance by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein is a terrific exposé on what’s gone wrong with the Democratic Party dating back to the 1970s and how to move forward as a country and a party that embraces innovation and building. I find myself very much in the abundance liberalism camp. We need to build more and embrace innovation. Unlike the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age, innovation not only improves society but also the planet. Innovation makes housing more dense, enables vertical farming and reduces deforestation; innovation will enable us to manufacture with harmful, toxic materials in space, instead of here on earth; innovation enables long-duration energy storage batteries, reducing our need for fossil fuels.

• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card is a book I cannot believe I waited to read until adulthood. The line between letting kids be kids and imposing constraints that breed exceptionalism (especially as portrayed in the book) is a terrific thought experiment, one I think about daily as my kids grow up—I’m excited for them to read it. It also paired extremely well with the next book:

• The End of Average by Todd Rose helped me better frame what I have long thought about places like the school system and corporate work environments. Averages are good for statistics and surveying, but are often incredibly destructive when we begin to categorize people by a number, or by the average. The models are designed for the “average” individual and to categorize them, but Rose argues there is no such thing. What cripples many on both ends of the spectrum is the pipeline: a fixed pace of learning, or a fixed career track. In both instances, the individuality and therefore creativity is stifled.

• I am currently reading Todd Rose’s newest book, Collective Illusions. Just reading the introduction and the first chapter alone give remarkable insights into how easily we as a collective can be manipulated by volume and repetition. Often times the volume and repition can come from one, lone voice.

“You can be in the most trying of circumstances, but you are always the arbiter of your own fate, you are always the arbiter of your own decisions, and you are always the arbiter of your own reality… you always have agency. And the people who use agency tend to build it as a muscle. They get used to it. And they realize the consequences when they go against the grain, when they are contrarian, tend to be a lot less than what they expect. The fear does so much more than reality when we make the right decisions in our own heads.” — Danny Crichton

Last week, in the buildup to election day, I remarked to several people about the crippling anxiety I was experiencing by rendering so much mind space to an event so thoroughly outside of my control. When self-help speakers go on stage or social media stating that we should simply “Practice focusing on what we can control,” it’s complete bullshit. We’re social; we live in a social, interconnected world. Our core operating system is designed to be aware of the world around us, to care about the world around us, to care about our tribe.

Focusing on, and caring, about the world around us can be destructive—especially in a world where media platforms and social media algorithms are designed to engulf us in our own confirmation bias and inflame our animosity toward people who think differently. In the wake of this election, my X (Twitter) feed was inundated with emotional outbursts; people shouting or despairing into the void. I was guilty of it as well. Having watched the party I generally support fail to learn from their repeated mistakes as they infuriatingly patronized the very people whose votes they courted from a pedestal of misguided arrogance, routinely making false assumptions about human behavior, I lamented as much on Twitter.

These outbursts are symptomatic of a learned helplessness developed over years and decades. A feeling of powerlessness to influence change. Like a lithium-ion battery needs to vent heat lest it explode, sometimes the occasional outburst is necessary. But on the whole, they aren’t particularly constructive.

Learned helplessness has the potential to exist in many aspects of our life. Feeling trapped in a toxic work culture; feeling trapped in a relationship we can’t get out of; unable to change our habits and improve our health. It’s a natural feeling. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

I’ve certainly been guilty of learned helplessness. I think it’s fair to say there are few people who’ve never experienced it. But we can minimize its frequency and severity. When speaking to Microsoft employees in 2014, Simon Sinek was asked if exiting is the best solution when you find yourself stuck in a toxic work environment. His response was this:

“Absolutely not. The best strategy is to step up; the best strategy is to be the leader you wish you had; the best strategy is to find someone you trust and say, ‘we have each other, let’s look after each other, but let’s also commit to looking after everyone else.’

…Leaders have power over us as individuals, but as a group, we control the leader. And so in toxic environments where you don’t feel safe, very often what happens is an environment of fear and paranoia is created such that the people no longer help each other; they’re too busy worrying about themself…

In The Most Important Conversation We’ll Ever Have, I discussed the importance of how we talk to ourselves. The conversation we have within ourselves to show up when we don’t want to, to lead when we don’t want to, to push ourselves when we don’t want to. I also included the Huberman Lab episode with David Goggins, which discusses willpower and the anterior midcingulate cortex—the part of our brain recently discovered to be the core driver of our willpower. This part of our brain behaves similarly to a skeletal muscle: It grows when we use it and atrophies from disuse.

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Awareness as a muscle

Awareness, like willpower, can help counter feeling helpless. Awareness gives us a perspective of our surroundings near and far, as well as what lies within ourselves. It allows us to recognize patterns. When you keep hearing the same thing over and over, you can begin to understand what happens next. This election cycle was a perfect example. Americans are frustrated. While national numbers appear to show we’ve come out of Covid reasonably well, millions of people don’t feel like they’re doing well. Who gets blamed? Incumbents. As Derek Thompson observed, it was, in fact, a second COVID election—the economic one.

“The pandemic was a health emergency, followed by an economic emergency. Both trends were global. But only the former was widely seen as international and directly caused by the pandemic. Although Americans understood that millions of people were dying in Europe and Asia and South America, they did not have an equally clear sense that supply-chain disruptions, combined with an increase in spending, sent prices surging around the world. As I reported earlier this year, inflation at its peak exceeded 6 percent in France, 7 percent in Canada, 8 percent in Germany, 9 percent in the United Kingdom, 10 percent in Italy, and 20 percent in Argentina, Turkey, and Ethiopia.

Inflation proved as contagious as a coronavirus. Many voters didn’t directly blame their leaders for a biological nemesis that seemed like an act of god, but they did blame their leaders for an economic nemesis that seemed all too human in its origin. And the global rise in prices has created a nightmare for incumbent parties around the world. The ruling parties of several major countries, including the U.K., Germany, and South Africa, suffered historic defeats this year. Even strongmen, such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lost ground in an election that many experts assumed would be a rousing coronation.”

Nelson Mandela famously said, “I never lose. I either win, or I learn.” Democrats working in national politics appear to have not taken heed of these words too well. For that matter, neither did pollsters. Both groups unequivocally lost.

But awareness also allows us to look internally. Recognizing our own patterns and habits is invaluable for building a disciplined approach to our health. Stress, for example, has a massive adverse effect on health—primarily chronic stress. This election cycle, an estimated 69% of adults felt stressed about the election. But, short of measuring our cortisol levels, stress is fairly abstract. How do you know if you’re stressed? Being aware of your patterns and tendencies. Maybe you have trouble focusing? Perhaps your sleep is suffering, or you’re waking up feeling depleted. It could be that your appetite has dramatically increased or decreased? If you know the signs, you can act quickly (similar to when you recognize that you are about to get sick) and minimize the impact.

Being mindful of how your body responds to the different foods you eat and how your body recovers from workouts are two other important ways to practice awareness. Do you feel energized or sluggish after you eat? Are you sore for a day and recover? Or are you sore for days and achy? As a personal trainer, I find it much easier to help a person who practices awareness of their own body. We can act quickly and pivot if the program is causing overtraining or is too easy. If I design a nutrition program, but the individual comes back and says they’re feeling lethargic in the afternoon, we can look for a possible sensitivity in the food they’re eating or a lack of certain nutrients in their morning.

“It’s really up to you. You just have to make up your own damn mind to either accept what I’m going to tell you or reject it.” — The Oracle to Neo in The Matrix Reloaded.

In the wake of the election, everyone on the left was doing their own postmortem on why the result was what it was. These assumptions are largely based on our own pre-conceived ideas, with little data to back them up. “Racism, sexism, people are voting against their own interests!” Maybe. But show me the data. Musa Al-Gharbi absolutely nails it with his latest article: Despite her loss, Harris did better than any Democrat since Obama in one key demographic: White people. And white men voted for Harris at the same rate as Biden in 2020.

How often do we challenge our own assumptions? Expediency and experiential biases are easy to fall victim to, trusting our own intuition over what the data is telling us or what science tells us. But these assumptions are akin to choosing a fast food or TV dinner. Here is an example that is all too common in my world: “I can’t run because my knees hurt.”

Superficially, this makes perfect sense. Why subject ourselves to more pain if our knees hurt? But why do the knees hurt? Is there a mechanical issue going on that could be solved with a proper training regimen? Perhaps the glutes and hamstrings aren’t activating properly, which means the legs cannot recycle properly, compromising the stride? Perhaps the core is not engaging, reducing the body’s ability to absorb the force of striking the ground? These are all factors at play. Maybe the answer is, no, the subject should not run. But you have to test for these problems to solve the root question. Far more often than not, the individual can run. Furthermore, when someone learns to run well, they may actually experience less joint pain than they had before running.

Critical and first-principles thinking are a strong counter to learned helplessness. In the previous example, the individual had fallen victim to a learned helplessness that they would never be able to run again.

Though I have become much more of a pragmatist, I still cling to some of my youthful idealism. One of these ideals is that everyone is capable of thinking this way, starting with recognizing our biases and seeking more information. When we can’t get to the root cause ourselves, it’s no small thing to say, “I don’t know,” and ask for help.

“The people who use agency tend to build it as a muscle.”

We are incredibly fortunate in this country to be able to assert a reasonable level of agency over our own lives. There are, of course, exceptions, and many of these freedoms had to be agonizingly fought for—and continue to be fought for—over the previous 250 years. But on the whole, we are living in one of the best times in human history to be able to exert agency over our lives. We can relocate ourselves with relative ease; we can start a business; we have a massive wealth of information freely at our disposal; and we can spend our time how we choose to.

At the same time, our attention is constantly being bought and paid for. You cannot go anywhere, physically or electronically, without being marketed to. It’s important to remember that when we use social media platforms, we are not their customers—we are their products; the advertisers are their customers. Everyone wants our attention, myself included! I’m asking for your attention to read this piece as well as my other writing. It’s up to us how we allocate the precious little time we have.

Although I am not as consistent and disciplined as I would like, I frequently revisit one of my favorite quotes, “Your success will be determined by what you choose to ignore.” from Dan McMurtrie. We have this immense amount of agency, but with it comes responsibility to ourselves. We get to choose if we’re sucked into distraction or if we are productive towards our goals. It’s not zero-sum—I enjoy videogames as much as anyone, and I certainly spend too much time on Twitter. It’s simply a matter of making time in your day to practice building your resilience to distraction and exerting your control over your desired outcome.

Working out these unseen muscles

My approach to training these four muscles—willpower, awareness, critical thinking, and agency—is primarily through the lens of health. It’s fairly straightforward. You show up, or you don’t; you are mindful of what your body is signaling to you, or you’re not; you take responsibility for controlling your outcome, or you don’t. It’s not rocket science. Fortunately, it is also not quite this binary.

Coming back to Simon Sinek’s 2014 presentation to Microsoft, he is asked how to spot a toxic leader. His response is time. You have to look, not at what they say, but at what they do, over and over and over. This is just as true for evaluating yourself. If you show up nine out of ten days, yeah, you did really well! If you showed up one out ten days?… Same thing with reducing alcohol consumption or quitting smoking. The objective is to make better decisions. But no stock goes up every day of the year, no political party wins every election, and no one is perfect with their health.

I will end with this wonderful quote about the potential and capacity to strengthen our mental muscles:

How do you strengthen these muscles in your own day-to-day life? Is there one of these that you are stronger at than the others? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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Conversations with a Personal Trainer

Many of you were dismayed about the results of the election last week. Some of you were even downright enraged to the point where I joked that I needed a punching bag for you. But you showed up anyway and did something for yourself. That’s what matters. Keep showing up. The beautiful thing about this country is that we have the freedom to vote, to speak our minds, and to have agency over our lives. We win a lot, and we lose a lot, and we keep showing up.

Worth Listening To

Danny Crichton is one of the brilliant minds of my generation. He possesses a remarkable understanding of history, risk, and human behavior that enables him to see where the puck is going before others do. In his conversation with Jim O’Shaugnessy, Danny explains how riskgaming helps people make better decisions, the different thought processes people tend to make based on their background, and how vital it is for us to be able to change our mind.

(Plus, they’re both from Minnesota, so that’s pretty cool.)

Curiosity Corner

Podcasts:

Articles:

• Thinking the Unthinkable — Tom Morgan

• Exposure to sugar rationing in the first 1000 days of life protected against chronic disease — Science

• Overnutrition causes insulin resistance and metabolic disorder through increased sympathetic nervous system activity — ScienceDirect

• Young Doctors Want Work-Life Balance. Older Doctors Say That’s Not the Job. — Wall Street Journal

• Warning: Hackers could take over your email account by stealing cookies, even if you have MFA — Malwarebytes

• The AI Machine Gun of the Future Is Already Here — WIRED

• The Educated Professional Class is Out of Touch with America — Noah Smith

• How Donald Trump Won Everywhere — Derek Thompson

• ‘Broken Since the Beginning’: What Went Wrong Inside the Harris Campaign — NOTUS

Other:

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In his book, Attia gives several examples that may seem trivial. Three of them are hiking 1.5 miles on a hilly trail, opening a jar with your hands, and being able to climb four flights of stairs in 3 minutes. Sounds simple, right? But how many people do you know in their 80s and 90s who can do these things?

I contend that everything we do begins with ensuring we strengthen and maintain a durable core that can support the movements we perform and the spine we need. In part one, I discussed how a strong, engaged core enhances each of our physical capabilities. But how? And, more importantly, how do we train our core to be strong?

A Foundational Layer of Core Strength

In Automated Processes, we discussed the importance of automating muscle activation to improve your gait and posture. We don’t want to have to think about engaging our core all the time. For instance, when we tire, it’s easy to make slight mechanical mistakes. Accidentally relaxing the core during a single weighted squat, for example, could lead to additional compression on the spine and an entire day or two of lower back pain, or worse.

How do we a) properly engage our core and b) automate its activation? Returning to our sitting example in Solving Tension-Related Neck and Shoulder Pain. Here is the 3-step process we discussed for sitting upright to minimize the tension and muscular imbalance in your neck:

Step 1: Simultaneously do the following three things: Inhale deeply, expand your chest, and roll your shoulders back. Feel your chest pulling away from your sternum in the middle of your chest. Observe how this will pull your chin upward and straighten your spine.

Step 2: While holding this position, attempt to contract the LRT muscles: Lats, rhomboids, and traps. It may be impossible at first, but that is perfectly okay. This is yet another reason why strength training is invaluable. If you can feel them, observe what they do to your scapulae; notice how they hold your shoulders back; feel how they align your cervical spine (neck) with your thoracic spine (middle and upper back).

Step 3: Exhale slowly and let your shoulders sink. However, attempt to keep your chest expanded. In strengthening our back muscles, it’s crucial we not let the chest collapse into its shortened position. The back muscles need to remain engaged and not be allowed to lengthen.

Let’s enhance this process by integrating your underlying core cylinder. This concept is called diaphragmatic, or belly breathing, and it’s the foundation of building a sturdy, automated core.

Step 1: While you’re maintaining the upright posture from before, try to mentally locate the region of your body stemming from the top of your hips to the base of your sternum and from your belly button to your spine. This is your core cylinder.

Step 2: Once you’ve located the cylinder with your mind, brace it as if you were clasping a giant belt around your waist. Avoid sucking in your abdomen. Sucking in stretches your core muscles, making them weaker and incapable of stabilizing your spine.

Step 3: While keeping your core cylinder braced, focus on your breathing. Take deep breaths in through your nose, feeling your abdomen expand, your core brace, and your chest remain still.

Step 4: Exhale slowly, keeping your core braced and feeling your abdomen collapse to its neutral position.

Step 5: Practice inhaling and exhaling for 4-6 seconds each, for 5-10 repetitions, twice each day.

If you’d like to make it more advanced, you can practice this process when you’re walking or holding a plank. As you practice, pay attention to your ability to relax your extremities—it should increase dramatically over time, making it easier for you to engage your core without having to think about it.

The Golfer, The Yogi, and The Trail Runner

As you’re developing your foundational, automated core strength, you also need a training program that suits the type of core you need. Are you at risk of falling? Maybe you need to improve your ability to stiffen your spine. It’s almost winter, and shoveling snow is a major cause of back pain. Maybe you need to strengthen your rotational and anti-rotational strength.

In a future article, I plan to discuss how to design specific training programs. But, since we’re hyper-focusing on our core muscles this week, we’ll stick to our spine and hips. A strong core can mean many different things. Where to begin is to ask yourself, “What movements do I do most often, and how do I need my spine to be able to accommodate them?”

A golfer, a yogi, and a trail runner each need to stabilize their spine and control their hips in very different ways.

• A golfer needs to have exceptional mobility through their hips, lumber, and thoracic spine to generate power while sparing pressure on the shoulders and lower back.

• A yogi needs unparalleled isometric, or static strength to hold positions for a long period of time while also having a very mobile spine.

• A trail runner needs to have outstanding control of their spine, using their core as a suspension mechanism, similar to a car, to absorb the impact of uneven surfaces.

What should their training programs look like so they have a core and a spine that can support their movements? Think about what the core cylinder needs to do in each of those activities. Because a golfer needs to build rotational strength in their core, while building anti-rotational strength to support the rotation of their thoracic spine, their program will include a lot of those movements. Meanwhile a yogi’s program may include many variations of planks as well as exercises that position their body similarly to their poses. A trail runner’s program will most likely include a lot of core exercises on even surfaces such as a stability and bosu ball.

Foundation and Materials Matter

While the core is essential for strength, posture, and preventing injury, it is primarily a tool for amplification. To conclude my skyscraper metaphor from part one, if TMDs and Braces are the core of a skyscraper, two other elements that enable the colossal structures of today are the strength of the foundations and the advanced materials.

We need to train our entire body properly to achieve our goals, whether we’re performance-oriented or simply want to be able to hike a hilly trail or climb the stairs without panting at the end. The core is not enough by itself, but it does enhance the strength of the surrounding structure if trained and used properly.

If you would like help learning how to train and strengthen your core to suit your specific goals, please leave a comment below. If you found this article helpful, please hit the like button, as it helps me grow this publication.

Curiosity Corner

Podcasts:

Articles:

• Parthenon Analogy — Ellen Fishbein

• A Transformative Experience — Ellen Fishbein

• Why Business Leaders Make Lousy Politicians — Adam Grant

• The Dangers of “Repressed Special” - Part 2 — Tom Morgan

• The New Battle for the Middle East — Foreign Affairs

• The Perverse Consequences of Tuition-Free Medical School — The Atlantic

• New! & Longer Living Through Chemistry — Gary Taubes

• Failure of resveratrol to improve metabolic health is another nail in the coffin for the alleged “anti-aging” compound — Peter Attia

• Not Typical — Farnam Street

Other:

“The mother of all proximal stability is your core… Core stability is essential for ability and performance.” — Stuart McGill, Ph.D.

On a recent trip to New York City, I marveled at human ingenuity and our capacity to build such monuments to the sky. My wife and I bought tickets to go to the One Vanderbilt observation deck, which stands over 1,000 feet above the ground. While attempting to see the Manhattan skyline on a particularly rainy night, I got curious about how we’ve been able to construct these massively tall skyscrapers. It turns out that the technology is not at all dissimilar to the engineering of the human body—specifically relating to our core muscles.

Our Core Purpose

Skyscrapers are built with two essential structures that enable them to withstand lateral forces such as wind or earthquakes. These are Tuned Mass Dampeners (TMDs) and Braces. Together these two structures stabilize a building by absorbing and dissipating force as it hits the building. What does our core do? Stabilizes our spine, absorbs energy, and dissipates it.

In our previous two articles, we focused on muscular imbalances as the source of pain and how proactive movements are a tool to counter those imbalances. At the root of all proactive movement lies our ability to stiffen and “brace” our core. If force hits us from one direction, our core allows us to counter it by stabilizing against the direction of the force, just like a TMD:

How? Our core primarily involves the muscles around our lower thoracic spine (middle back), lumbar spine (lower back and waist), and hips. When we stiffen these muscles, we create intra-abdominal pressure. This pressure creates a cylinder that holds the spine in place, enabling force to transfer between the upper and lower body and absorb force more evenly throughout the body.

What are the core muscles? Expanding on what we discussed in Automated Processes, these muscles are:

• Transverse Abdominis — Deep, underlying muscles that form a natural corset around our body, wrapping from the lower portion of our rib cage around our waist to our spine.

• Multifidus — Underlying lower back muscle that works in conjunction with the transverse abdominis to compress and stabilize the spine.

• Pelvic Floor Muscles — Underlying muscles that act as the “floor” of our core, holding our abdominal organs in place and stabilizing the lumbar spine and pelvis.

• Diaphragm — Primary muscle that controls breathing; it contracts during inhalation and relaxes during exhalation. It also separates our chest from our abdominal cavity and acts as the “ceiling” of our core.

• Internal and External Obliques — Control bending and rotation movements of our waist. They also provide lateral stability to the spine.

• Rectus Abdominis — Outermost layer of the abdominal muscles, commonly known as the “six-pack abs.” These muscles control our ability to flex our lumbar spine and tilt our pelvis up and down.

• Erector Spinae — Lower back muscles that work with the rectus abdominis to help extend the spine and stabilize it in an upright posture.

There are also two muscles not typically included as part of our core. However, I will never design a core routine that does not include them because of their importance to the stabilization of our spine and hips (yes, this is a hill I’m willing to die on). These two muscles are our:

• Latissimus Dorsi — Originating on the lower thoracic and lumbar spine, the lats are essential for stabilizing our spine when our arms are away from our body and maintaining an upright posture.

• Gluteus Maximus — Originating on the pelvis and sacrum, which is the lowest part of our spinal column and connects our spine to our pelvis, the glutes are essential for stabilizing our hips and lumbar spine.

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Stability as a Mechanism for Strength and Injury Prevention

In college, I had a roommate, Mike, who was a competitive hockey player. If you know much about playing hockey, you know how strong your core needs to be in order to be successful. Something we enjoyed doing, like the testosterone-inflated teenagers we were, was running down our long hallway at each other, ramming our shoulders into each other. Although I was 30 pounds heavier than Mike, he knocked me on my butt almost every time. Why? He had an exceptionally strong core, and he knew how to use it. When we ran into each other, it felt like I had just run into a tree trunk.

When our core muscles stabilize our spine, it amplifies more than just our stability itself. Having a stable spine also increases each of our physical outputs: power, strength, speed, agility, balance, endurance, and proprioception—our awareness and control of our extremities.

Say you want to train for a marathon. You’re a decent runner, but five miles in, you experience stiffness in the neck and shoulders. The next day your knees and lower back are aching. The shoulder stiffness and the knee pain are very much linked. We often make what are called micromovements—especially when we begin to tire—which use and waste energy. Micromovements that often occur when running are the shoulders and upper back tense and contract. The tension will have a cascading effect on the lower body manifesting in the shortening of our stride. Shortening of strides means you have to take far more strides to cover the same distance. You might also notice a slight rotation of the hips with each stride, as well as becoming more flat-footed. Both of which will put increased pressure on your knees and lower back.

When the core muscles are engaged, the amount of micromovements we make drastically decreases. As our spine stiffens, we can maintain a more upright posture, and energy travels through our body far more efficiently. When we run, our shoulders should remain very relaxed. A strong, engaged core creates the necessary spinal stiffness that allows our chest and lats to control the elbow drive, as opposed to swinging the entire arm, preserving energy and preventing tension and injury.

Breathing to Engage The Core During Exercise

“Exhale during exertion, inhale while loading.” This is something I routinely coach in training sessions and applies to nearly every strength-training exercise. Why?

Our diaphragm is both a part of our core and responsible for respiration. If we solidify our core, our diaphragm can also do a significantly better job managing our oxygen intake and carbon dioxide expulsion. If you’re performing a pushup, inhaling on the way down stiffens your spine so that you can maximize the force generation in the proper muscles—your chest—when you push up. And, just like our running example, it will help you keep your shoulders and arms relaxed.

In part II, we’ll discuss how to apply this to your daily life and the different types of core strengthening you can do!

If you enjoyed this post, please hit the like button and share it with a friend.

Conversation with a Personal Trainer

While speaking with a client earlier today, I asked how his lower back pain had been feeling lately. For over a year, he had been experiencing pain in his upper SI joint, which connects the sacrum to the pelvis. During this time, we’ve been heavily focused on strengthening his core.

He replied that he hadn’t felt the pain for a long time, and he’d completely forgotten about it. This demonstrates the importance of having a strong, engaged core.

Worth Listening To

It is no small thing to say Stuart McGill is one of the people I have learned the most from regarding posture, spinal health, and core strengthening. Much of what many of you hear me discuss in training comes from reading and listening to his work. That each of us has the opportunity to freely listen to his wealth of knowledge in a podcast… what a world we live in.

Curiosity Corner

Podcasts:

Articles:

• PBMs: The Powerful Companies Driving Local Drugstores Out of Business - The New York Times

• The high-return activity of raising others' aspirations - Tyler Cowen

• Federal Trade Commission Announces Final “Click-to-Cancel” Rule Making It Easier for Consumers to End Recurring Subscriptions and Memberships — Federal Trade Commission

• The kids aren't entitled, they're suffering — Adam Singer

• Do U.S. Ports Need More Automation? — Construction Physics

• Beyond the headlines: evaluating exercise as an equivalent to medication for the treatment of depression and anxiety — Peter Attia

• EVs are Just Going to Win — Noah Smith

• US Government Says Relying on Chinese Lithium Batteries Is Too Risky — WIRED

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Why is this framing so important? You are likely sitting while you read this, so let’s start there. Here is an exercise you can do to test your awareness of your body and ability to mentally contract your muscles:

Step 1: While sitting, try to contract your glutes by squeezing your butt.

Step 2: Now, stand up and try to contract your glutes.

Did you notice a difference in the strength of the contraction? This is because the gluteus maximus’s primary action is to pull the hips forward, or what’s called hip extension. When we’re sitting, our hips are flexed, putting the gluteus maximus into a lengthened, weakened position.

Last week, we discussed how muscular imbalance is a common source of neck pain. What causes muscular imbalance? Frequency of use.

Take our sitting example. When we sit, roughly half of the muscle groups around our hips shorten and contract while the other half lengthen and weaken. Previously, I discussed “dead butt syndrome” where the glutes lengthen and deactivate as a result of prolonged sitting. Conversely, the hip flexor muscles each shorten and contract. Over time, this imbalance will create an “anterior pelvic tilt”. In other words, the hip bone will begin to tilt forward because of the tension placed on it by the hip flexors and the lack of strength of the glutes to counteract them. The glutes are not being used, while the hip flexors are being used constantly.

The key piece of this formula is that the glutes have lost the contractile strength—their ability to shorten—and cannot hold the pelvis in balance. If we go back to our earlier exercise, let’s add a third step:

Step 3: While you are standing, place your hands on your hips. Now, contract your glutes and feel what it does to your pelvis. You should notice that it flattens. With your glutes contracted and your pelvis level, what is happening to your spine? Are other muscles engaging as well?

Muscular Adaptation

Our body adapts to the movements we do most often. As Stuart McGill suggests, someone who practices yoga should never lift a heavy load where they’re compressing their spine:

“This is why I say, ‘please never mix up deadlifts and yoga.’ If you adapt your spine to be very flexible, you adapt the type X collagen holding the type I and type II, the heavy, grissly collagen, and the elastic collagen, all those fibers together. A powerlifter wants those to be stiff and tough… But a yoga master, that would be the kiss of death. They want nice, pliable, flexible spines.

… The powerlifter bends forward and crushes the disc bulge posteriorly; but when the yoga person, or a very flexible spine, when they bend backwards, the collagen under compression buckles. So one gets a disc bulge from extension and one gets a bulge from flexion.

Don’t mix up the adaptation schedules. If you want to be a powerlifter, train your hip mobility, shoulder mobility, but torso stiffness. Versus the yoga master, please stay away from the heavy loads.

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Let’s go back to our example of the hip flexors and sitting. The diagram below shows each hip flexor muscle. We know that if we sit too much, these muscles shorten. Observe the Psoas. It originates on the lumbar spine, the lower back, and comes down to insert on the femur. If this muscle shortens, what will happen to the muscles in our lower back?

Origin, Insertion, Action and Progressive Lifting

Now we get to the even more fun stuff! Every skeletal muscle has an origination point, an insertion point, and an action it performs—what is referred to as O.I.As.

• Origin: the point on a bone where a muscle originates.

• Insertion: the point on a bone where a muscle inserts.

• Action: The movement(s) that muscle performs. Usually, it involves pulling from the insertion to the origin.

One example is your bicep. Your bicep consists of two muscles that originate on the scapula and join together to insert on the radius in your forearm. Here is how you can practice your neuromuscular strength of your bicep:

Step 1: Place your left hand on your right bicep. Keep your right arm and shoulder relaxed.

Step 2: Squeeze your right bicep and observe it pulling your forearm up toward your shoulder.

Step 3: Slowly relax the bicep and feel your elbow extend back into a relaxed position. Repeat several times and even try adding a small amount of weight.

This is a version of what is called a “proactive” movement. You are controlling the muscles to move your joints. This increases the stability of the surrounding joints, increasing strength and reducing the risk of injury. Conversely, if you’ve ever seen someone performing a bicep curl where they are throwing their entire body into the movement, that is a “reactive” movement. There is no stabilization involved, so no one particular muscle is dominant. This puts an enormous strain on the tendons and ligaments of the surrounding joints.

In summary, if you know where a muscle originates and inserts, you’ll know its action. If you know its action, and can control it, you will greatly improve your training. If you sit for long periods of the day, you’ll know which muscles you need to strengthen and which to stretch in order to counter the effects of sitting. If you know which movements you perform the most, you can create a routine uniquely beneficial to your body.

If you struggle with neck pain, lower back pain, or would like help improving your body’s movements, please send me an email at eweiner@envisionfitnessmn.com to schedule a virtual one-on-one meeting.

Next week, we will apply this concept to the core muscles and how much of a difference it can make to your physical strength and health.

Curiosity Corner

• Podcasts:

• Articles:

  • Lux LP Letter (Q2 of 2024) - Lux Capital

  • Let’s Pause to Appreciate the Remarkable U.S. Economy — Noah Smith

  • It’s the Creator’s Economy, Stupid — Hamish Mckenzie (co-founder of Substack, this platform)

  • The Age of Depopulation: Surviving a World Gone Gray — Foreign Affairs

  • I Appreciate You — Adam Singer

  • The New Culture War Is Real Vs. Bogus — Ted Gioia

  • "Accelerating Wisdom" Episode 8: New Frontiers — Tom Morgan

I can also say that in the past 14 years of working one-on-one with individuals, I have only witnessed the prevalence of NBSP go up. This is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Muscular imbalance

In short, NBSP comes from an imbalance in the musculoskeletal chain. Every skeletal muscle (the muscles that support our body when we move) in the body works with other muscles to support daily movements.

Think of something basic, like walking. It may seem inconsequential; we do it every day with little thought. But how many people do you know who experience knee pain? Hip pain? Lower back pain? A poor gait can directly cause these problems. In many cases, the hamstrings and the glutes do not provide enough of a pull to help us ‘glide’ over the ground. As a result, we end up with a more flat-footed ‘clomping’ gait. This, in turn, puts far more pressure on joints like the knees, hips, and lower back.

The same principle applies to the shoulder girdle, which are the bones that float over your rib cage and allow for mobility of the arm and shoulder, which is a focal point of NBSP.

How does this imbalance cause NBSP?

Most causes of NBSP are lifestyle-based. There are many exceptions, which I won’t go into much because there are people far more qualified to discuss them than me. Some of them include structural issues such as scoliosis (lateral curvature and/or rotation of the spine) and kyphosis (forward curve of the upper thoracic spine), both of which I am afflicted by. Impact trauma, whiplash or other acute injuries, herniated discs, and degenerative conditions can also cause NBSP.

As for lifestyle-based factors, you can guess the culprits: We sit too damn much, we stare at screens too damn much, and we are too damned stressed. We know these things. But what is actually happening to our body?

If you’ve ever been in a situation where you have a colleague who neglects a big portion of their job, forcing you to do both your work and theirs, this is very similar to how the muscular chains in our body operate with poor posture.

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Here are a series of bullet points of what happens to our upper body when we sit too much:

1. Our head lurches forward. Gravity pulls straight down regardless. Every inch the head lurches forward from its neutral position adds an additional 10-12 pounds of downward force on the neck—imagine putting a 20lb weight on your head and carrying it around! This puts tremendous strain on three of the primary muscles that support your neck: Upper Trapezius, Levator Scapulae, and Scalenes.

• When a muscle is stressed, do we want that muscle to be contracted or lengthened? We want both—a balancing act; we want that muscle to be elastic. But with our head lurched forward, we are only applying a stretching force on those 3 muscles. What’s going to happen?

• The Upper Trapezius and Scalenes will become overstretched and lose their ability to shorten. In other words, the muscles will weaken. But they also have the important role of holding our head up. You can see the dilemma.

• The Levator Scapula is trickier. It originates on the cervical spine and inserts on the scapula, which floats in our body. As lengthening force is applied, it will actually pull our shoulder blades up! Now we have serious problems with our shoulders and middle back because there are other muscles, like the lats, that are attached to the scapula. These muscles now have excessive tension placed on them, so they will lengthen and weaken.

• Lastly, the muscles that flex our neck (pull our chin to our chest), our Sternocleidomastoids, get stuck in a shortened, tightened position—much like our hip flexors from prolonged sitting. This exacerbates the tightness of our neck by pulling harder on the other three aforementioned muscles.

2. Our shoulders and upper back round forward. While you’re reading this, observe how you are sitting. What are your shoulders doing? A common cause of NBSP is that the shoulders round forward, creating a significant imbalance in our upper body muscles.

• The shoulder is comprised of two joints: The acromioclavicular (AC) joint and the glenohumeral (GH) joint.

• The acromioclavicular joint is where the clavicle meets the acromion (the upper, outer-most edge of our scapula). You can find it by tracing your clavicle to the shoulder and feeling the bony point at the top of your shoulder.

• The glenohumeral joint is where the humerus's (our upper-arm bone) upper head meets the “socket” of our scapula, called the glenoid cavity.

• The GH joint is primarily what we’ll be focusing on since this joint is one of the joints in the body that degenerates the quickest from the frequency of use, combined with lifestyle factors. When our shoulders round forward, this is typically the joint that suffers the most. How?

• There are three key muscles that are severely impaired when the GH joint rolls forward, especially in tandem with the head and neck lurching forward: The lats, middle traps, and rhomboids. Each of these muscles will get stuck in a lengthened, weakened position.

• As you’ll read below, these three muscles are essential for maintaining good posture and preventing NBSP.

• Lastly, three major chest muscles—pec major, pec minor, and serratus anterior—each shorten. Much like the hip flexors and sternocleidomastoids, they lose their elasticity. But what’s more problematic is that these shortened muscles then pull on the GH and AC joints, amplifying the stress on the neck and back muscles.

How can we solve NBSP?

There is power in knowledge. Knowing what is precisely happening to our body can help us channel our focus and our training. The first thing I try to impart to everyone I work with is to develop neuromuscular control—the ability to contract a muscle with your mind. It takes time, patience, and focus. But eventually, like I mentioned last week, you chip away enough, and suddenly, you can feel your glutes pulling you forward when you walk or your lats pulling your shoulders back. Before long, it becomes automated, as I discussed in Automated Processes.

To solve NBSP, we need to develop the awareness and control of the muscles needed to stabilize our posture.

When discussing lower back pain, there’s a term called “dead-butt syndrome”. In short, when we sit too much, the glutes don’t do anything, so they become dormant. This cascades into more problems that physically alter the angle of the pelvis, which in turn puts an enormous workload on the lower back muscles, which are not built to handle that amount of stress.

The upper body does something similar, and I would like to coin a new term: “Dead-lat syndrome”. (I would like to call it dead-LRT syndrome because technically it’s the lats, rhomboids, and traps that all go dormant. But it’s not as catchy. Anyway, I digress.)

The lats, rhomboids, and traps all work to stabilize the scapulae, shoulders, and spine, remaining in their neutral positions. Here is an exercise you can do on your own to engage all three. You can do it anytime, anywhere, and as often as you like:

Step 1: Simultaneously do the following three things: Inhale deeply, expand your chest, and roll your shoulders back. Feel your chest pulling away from your sternum in the middle of your chest. Observe how this will pull your chin upward and straighten your spine.

Step 2: While holding this position, attempt to contract the LRT muscles: Lats, rhomboids, and traps. It may be impossible at first, but that is perfectly okay. This is yet another reason why strength training is invaluable. If you can feel them, observe what they do to your scapulae; notice how they hold your shoulders back; feel how they align your cervical spine (neck) with your thoracic spine (middle and upper back).

Step 3: Exhale slowly and let your shoulders sink. However, attempt to keep your chest expanded. In strengthening our back muscles, it’s crucial we not let the chest collapse into its shortened position. The back muscles need to remain engaged and not be allowed to lengthen.

Each repetition should take you about six to eight seconds, and I recommend performing about three to five reps at a time.

Conclusion

This is not the solution for NBSP, but it’s a hell of a good start. I routinely perform this step-by-step process and many of you reading this are familiar with it from your time working with me. This process will help you build neuromuscular awareness of what good posture should feel like.

The muscles mentioned in this article need to be strengthened and become more elastic. It takes time. If you suffer from NBSP or any form of muscular pain, be patient with yourself. Again, as we focused on last week, chip away a little bit at a time. When you look back, you may just be amazed.

Other Learning

• Podcasts:

Articles:

• I Should Have Been Braver — Ruxandra Teslo

• Make-Work is not the Future of Work — Noah Smith

• High-Intensity Interval Training and Cognitive Function in Older Adults: Promising but Limited Findings — Peter Attia, M.D.

• The Biggest Man-Made Disaster Ever? — Kyla Scanlon

• The Mr. Beast Memo is a Guide to the Gen Z Workforce — Kyla Scanlon

“Connecting to what makes you different from everyone else is your life’s task.”

— Robert Greene

Worth Listening To

Robert Greene has spent his career cultivating a fascinating perspective on life. He has written extensively about finding our life’s task, the meaning of power, and how to master skills. Each of these conversations covers different topics, and both are exceptional. Robert’s retelling of his experience suffering a stroke (Huberman Lab episode) and nearly dying in 2018 was especially remarkable.

Links:

• Invest Like the Best

• Huberman Lab

Heroes and Failure

“What do I uniquely have to offer the world? What do I do different from everyone else?” These questions routinely drift across my mind. While the underlying theme is powerful, the world is so saturated with information that these questions become crippling. Instead of drifting from one end of my mind to the other, they remain rooted to the spot, like a ship stranded at sea.

Many of you have been reading my work since I first began ten months ago. You’ve likely noticed my absence in your inbox these past three months. “Self-consciousness is the enemy of all creativity.” I’ve repeated that statement to myself over and over, often to no avail. I reckon it’s much like the individual who wants to become healthy. They read similarly powerful quotes about health, expecting it to change their behavior. But ultimately we are responsible for changing and improving our own behavior.

So here I sit, writing to you once more. Hopefully, if you are struggling to remain consistent with your health journey, it will provide you with a spark to light your fire.

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A Small Ask

I am currently in the process of rebuilding Envision Fitness’s website. The owner of the company building my site told me I needed to get more reviews and success stories.

If you work or have worked with me at Envision Fitness (even in a virtual-only capacity), I would greatly appreciate a Google Review (Link) and/or a success story about your time working with me. You can send your success stories to me at eweiner@envisionfitnessmn.com.

Thank you!

Have you ever failed to reach a goal? Did you accept that you failed to reach whatever that goal may have been? Or, did you make excuses for why you didn’t attain it? Most importantly, did you learn something about yourself in that moment?

Each of us may have similar goals. As you may imagine, I hear a lot of people tell me they want to lose weight or tone their body. This is great but superficial and not very helpful in understanding our true motivations—what lies under the surface. The real goals sit there. Most of the time, our goals stem from a place of insecurity or vulnerability. I was a particularly scrawny kid with no exceptional athletic skills. This insecurity is part of the reason I became a personal trainer. Go figure.

But the reality is that, that scrawny, unathletic kid still bothers me. I used to punish myself for it, spending hours upon hours at the gym lifting as heavy of weights as I possibly could until I hurt myself. At the time, I didn’t know where this obsession came from. I just wanted to lift heavy things and “be bigger”. It took a lot of time to journey inward. Interestingly, much of that process came from external sources: listening to many of you explain your goals revealed much about myself as well.

As a society, we are unbelievably dismal at understanding ourselves. Our time spent reflecting on our emotions, on our choices, and on the stepping stones we’ve collected has been replaced with staring at our screens. But the answers we seek always lie under the surface.

In my previous post, I mentioned the ancient Greek concept of a Tabula Rasa—that we are born as a blank slate, with no preconceived notions or opinions of the world. Robert Greene says that as we enter the social realm, we begin losing our true identity. Rene Girard’s mimetic theory, that what we want is not what we really want but rather a desire to mimic others, exemplifies the extreme example of identity lost. Social pressures compel us to conform to certain behaviors and desires.

To a large extent, conformity is necessary and evolutionary. Walking naked down Main Street shouting, “I’m being true to myself!” probably isn’t the best idea if you’re objective is to remain part of the tribe.

But there is always a balancing act:

Last year, I wrote about embracing imperfection as a means of getting things done and to avoid overthinking and stagnation. This was something I needed to reread to help me start writing again. I want to take this concept one step further and suggest that perhaps we should even set out to embrace the possibility of failure.

Think about heroes. What do heroes do? They fail. A lot.

“The quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little, and it will fail, to the ruin of all.” Fortunately, we’re not embarking on a quest to destroy the evil dark lord, Sauron, and save the world. But there is value in embracing our own hero’s journey. In fact, people who embrace their own life as a hero’s journey find more meaning and significance in their lives.

Many kids aspiring to be great athletes consider Roger Federer among their heroes. In his speech to Dartmouth’s graduating class, he had this to say about failure:

“In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches. Now, I have a question for you: What percentage of points do you think I won in those matches? Only 54%. In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play. When you lose every second point, on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot. You teach yourself to say it’s only a point… When you’re playing a point, it has to be the most important point in the world. But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you.”

If you invest in the stock market, it’s a very similar story. Between 1951 and 2023, the S&P 500 finished up 53.6% of the days and down 46.4% of the days. But, similarly, the S&P finishes up for an entire year 80% of the time.

Therein lies the solution. If failures comes roughly every second turn, knowing that it will come significantly lessens the impact of the blow. Not every workout has to be a perfect workout; not every meal needs to be perfectly balanced; not every day has to be perfect. We chip away, little by little, and eventually we’ll look back and realize how far we’ve climbed.

When we want to quit, we have our direction to guide us—a purpose. We understand what lies under our surface. Frodo’s journey in the Lord of the Rings is relatively straightforward; it was chosen for him. Our path’s are much trickier in that we must both set our own direction and implement our own sense of urgency. But in the wise words of Gandalf the Grey, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

I could have given up on this newsletter entirely. Each day I don’t write, each week I have not written to you is a day and a week of failure. But just maybe I can hit that 54 and 80 percent.

Other Learning

Articles:

• Fela Kuti in Prison — Ted Gioia

• To Lead a Meaningful Life, Become Your Own Hero — Scientific American

• Exploring Happiness, Sex Changing, Hero’s Journey — Rob Henderson

• Luxury Beliefs are Status Symbols — Rob Henderson

• Minneapolis' Natural Upzoning Experiment - Zak Yudhishthu

• Skilled Immigration is a National Security Priority — Noah Smith

• America’s Supply Chains are a Disaster Waiting to Happen — Noah Smith (Guest post)

• How to Read Plato — Ted Gioia

• "Accelerating Wisdom" Episode 2: Revealing Attractors — The Leading Edge by Tom Morgan

• The Cult of Blind Ambition — Hot Takes by Adam Singer

Podcasts:

Other:

• Reimagining how to serve authors and readers better. Respecting the reader’s time and determining how to help authors best.

• What do Shakespeare, Hermann Hesse, and Peter Thiel have in common?

• The amazing thing about podcasts is that you learn about things you never knew existed. This conversation, like last week’s W.L.T., diverges from what I usually post here. But I absolutely loved this conversation, and I’m convinced you will too.

  • After listening, I signed up for Ellen’s Muse By Mail service.

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What Do You Think?

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I remember being asked this question every year through elementary and middle school. I’m betting you were asked the same question. I’m also willing to bet you had no idea about the infinite possibilities that exist in the world. How could you? For most of us, smartphones didn’t exist as kids. Now, we have a world run by apps.

It is impossible to know what you don’t know—that too is infinite. Even at 33 years old, I am still figuring out what exactly I want to do in the world. But I frequently come back to two words: Something different.

There is a significant difference between the skills we acquire and the attributes that shape who we are. Our attributes—how coachable we are, how curious we are, how we carry ourselves, our temperment—influence our ability to learn skills, but they are abstract and immeasurable. Perhaps we’d be better off asking kids something more abstract, like, “What do you see yourself doing in the world?” From a very early age, I knew my answer would have been “Helping people.” How that would manifest itself, I would have never known 25 years ago. What about you? Did you have a more accurate answer? What do you think?

Skill Acquisition

“Slow down, focus on your breathing. Do you feel the difference?” Sound familiar? For many of you, this is a phrase you hear me say often during your training sessions. One of the most important things that happens to your body when you exercise—specifically, strength training—is the development of neuromuscular control, a fancy way of saying your brain’s ability to contract and relax a particular muscle.

This is a topic I covered back in February in my article, Automated Processes, which I recommend reading if you haven’t already. My objective is to take that concept and tie in another similar idea.

What happens when we begin to learn a new skill? We’re terrible! We absolutely suck. Understandably so. Would we expect someone to come in on day one and be as good at our job as we are? Yet many people expect perfection of themselves when they come to the gym for the first time. Conversely, if someone knows they won’t do well the first time, they may not show up at all because they fear failing.

“There’s really one way to get confidence, and that’s to earn it. Any kind of confidence that’s not earned is probably better defined as ego. One of the things you get from having done it is the sense that you can do it.” — Ryan Holiday

This is not unique to exercise. After graduating college, I became interested in learning about philosophy. I purchased every book I could find and afford on Amazon, from Cicero to Plato to Aristotle to Machiavelli; the list goes on. However, there was one small problem: I was a frightfully slow reader. As a result, I suffered the consequences of both aforementioned plights.

Throughout high school and college, I never enjoyed reading—Spark Notes and I spent a lot of time together. Yet somehow, I convinced myself that not only reading, but understanding history’s greatest thinkers would be easy. I expected perfection. I soon found that my reading and comprehension skills came nowhere near matching my expectations of where they should be. Fear set in that I wasn’t smart enough to understand them and did what most people do a month after starting their exercise journey: I gave up.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Willpower was the focal point of Andrew Huberman’s discussion with David Goggins, the subject of my article, The Most Important Conversation We’ll Ever Have. Huberman mentions a part of the brain called the Anterior Midcingulate Cortex (aMCC), which, like a muscle, grows with resistance training. However, this resistance training does not come from lifting weights; it comes from doing things we don’t want to do. Our willpower can grow and shrink, just like our biceps.

Many people, myself included, want to learn a new skill. What we don’t want is to feel like failures. The amount of time people apologize to me for not achieving perfection on an exercise is astounding. It’s perfectly understandable; I was guilty of it with my personal trainer. We don’t like being bad at things—especially in front of others.

But failure is the prerequisite to success. The enemy is not to try in the first place. To say to yourself, “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

Climbing Over Walls

Every exercise has a “sticking point”—the point at which the exercise is immensely difficult. If you get low enough in a squat, you’ll immediately feel that sticking point when you push back up. If you get low enough in a bench press, you’ll feel it several inches above your chest. If you don’t get enough range of motion, you won’t reach that sticking point, thus missing a crucial part of the exercise. But getting low enough is uncomfortable.

Similarly, learning a new skill has many sticking points. To get past these sticking points, we have to get uncomfortable. Coming back to Andrew Huberman, he used the cold plunge to describe how he views each sticking point as a wall to climb over:

“I think of everything in life as it relates to the stress system as coming at you like a wall… The way I approach cold is, I look at the cold plunge and I think, ‘How resistant am I psychologically to getting in it?’ And usually it’s ‘very’. I’m not excited to get in. I’m excited about the feeling I know will exist when I get out. So I think of getting in as the first wall. It’s like climbing over a wall.

…Ultimately, we are all highly individual in terms of how we react to stressors in a given moment. And what I find is that there’s tremendous learning in noticing stress coming towards us; us confronting that stress, getting past that stress; and then moving through it and then when I get out, I always feel much better.

…The ability to notice how stress hits you… and to stay calm and ride through that in a safe way is a skill that is invaluable.”

Application of Sticking Points

My wife and I recently discussed our personal growth goals over the years. I mentioned to her that this year, there have been two meaningful skills I’ve worked to improve:

1. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT): I first heard of DBT in 2022 while listening to Josh Wolfe and Derek Thompson. This year, I have invested time in developing this skill. DBT is centered around a technique called Wise Mind. It splits the mind into the “Emotional Mind” and the “Reasonable Mind”.

The emotional mind is often your first reaction to a situation—Walking into a room and seeing that your toddler peed on the floor, for example, yields a very powerful emotional response…

On the flip side, the reasonable mind responds slower but allows you to step back and process the situation—if another human is involved, often from their perspective. In my toddler example, the reasonable mind may be able to conclude that the toddler had filled their diaper and could not express this in time for the parent to change it.

Employing this tactic was incredibly difficult at first. But, like all things practiced, it got easier. And it works just as well for exercising as it does for kids. When I can resist the initial emotional tidal wave of wanting to be lazy, I will often think more reasonably and get off my ass.

2. The more transformative change has been to ask myself: “If this person agreed with my worldview, would I value what they have to say?” I have learned much more from expanding the foundation of information I consume. The most recent example was Peter Thiel, whom I mentioned last week. My former self had no interest in hearing anything he had to say because of his beliefs. Here’s the problem: he’s a brilliant thinker. His idea that “competition is for losers” is something I believe every aspiring business owner, leader, or creative person should internalize in their own work.

Does listening to Peter sway my worldview? Not in the slightest. I disagree with almost everything he believes in. But am I better off because I listened to his ideas? One hundred percent.

The Key Issue

This brings us to my final point. In my first Envision Endeavor article, I highlighted Arthur Brooks’ discussion with Dr. Peter Attia. According to Arthur’s research, one of the macronutrients—the fundamental elements—of happiness is purpose. We each have a purpose for living and living well. But finding that purpose is not easy. In fact, according to many philosophers dating to Plato’s Republic, most humans live in unreflective states of being, living day-to-day without taking time to reflect on themselves and the world around them.

How do we do something about that? There is a lot of wisdom in simplicity:

“Humans are… biological beings who are perfectly free to think and act in all sorts of ways—including ways that undermine their own well-being. They’re perfectly free to fail. They’re perfectly free to ruin their lives and make themselves unhappy. What they aren’t perfectly free to do is live well. To live well they need to exercise their autonomy in specific ways. Not just any choices will do… It’s not enough simply to believe you’re doing what it takes to live well because your beliefs about well-being can be false. We see the results all around us: the world is full of unhappy people. None of them wants to be unhappy. They’ve nevertheless made themselves unhappy through choices they’ve freely made.” — Ask Aristotle

I prefaced this article by saying that, as a kid, had the question been, “What do you see yourself doing in the world?” my answer would have been to help people. How that would manifest itself, I would have never known at the time. It took many stepping stones along the journey to get here, and among the stepping stones were many dead ends.

As you conclude reading this article, how would you reflect on your mission? How often do you reflect on whether your day-to-day life aligns with your mission? Do you believe how well-aligned your actions are with your mission influences the decisions you make regarding your health? What do you think?

Other Learning

Podcasts:

Articles:

• Quiet Compounding — Morgan Housel

• How Monster Beverage is Fueling a Renaissance — Kyla Scanlon

• Letter to a Friend Who is Thinking of Starting Something New — Sari Azout

• The Great American Poisoning — Justin Mares

• Experts vs. Imitators — Shane Parrish

• Why the U.S. CHIPs Act Matters to the World — Kyle Chan

• The Triumph of Electromagnetism Over Thermodynamics — Noah Smith

• Marketing Lessons from Religious Institutions — Adam Singer

• Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine — WIRED

• Nutrition & Health News This Week — Unsettled Science by Nina Tiechholz and Gary Taubes

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I’ve been a fan of Ted’s writing for months and have since subscribed to his newsletter. He is a wonderfully brilliant thinker, educator, and futurist. His conversation with David Perell demonstrates the value of reading, studying, exercising critical thought, and being disciplined. This is one of my favorite conversations I have listened to and I hope you enjoy it.

• What makes Breaking Bad such a standout show

• The value of reading for understanding culture

• Being anti-formulaic (movies, tv show, pop music) and creating micro & counter-cultures

• This episode gives a wonderful alternative take on writing and creating than much of what I’ve listened to and share with you. I’m not sure I’ve listened to anyone with such a remarkable, encyclopedic knowledge of history, philosophy, and art.

Overriding Our Brain’s Predisposition

Several years ago, I discussed the powerful impact our mind has on our body with a client. He’s been practicing clinical neurology and psychology for over thirty years, so I pay close attention to every detail when he speaks about the brain and behavior. While discussing both of our own struggles with consistency and exercise, he said the human brain has evolved to “be lazy.” To conserve energy, our brain naturally chooses the path of least resistance. Therefore, if you want to succeed in various endeavors, you must often go against your innate laziness. Why?

While the brain is only 2% of our overall body mass, it consumes an enormous amount of our overall energy, roughly 20%. A well-known part of the Theory of Evolution states that survival is based on the fittest. But the term “fittest” doesn’t necessarily mean athletically fit. It also encompasses one’s ability to endure challenges such as famine. In this scenario, conserving energy could mean the difference between life and death.

Social fitness is another evolutionary factor. How well did you fit in with your herd? Alone, you were an easy target and likely a predator’s dinner. In a herd, your odds of survival were far greater—I often joke that you don’t need to be the fastest, you just have to be faster than the person next to you. You were rewarded for confirmation and status quo biases. In other words, fitting in helped keep you alive.

Broader Implications

Today’s world looks very different than our hunter-gatherer ancestor’s world. Yet, our brains have not evolved much in the previous 40,000 years. In a world where we spend far more time sitting, far more time staring at screens, and far less time fearing predators, we have moved the goalpost on rewards while our natural instincts have remained the same.

Why is this important? Kids come into this world unforgivingly curious to the point where they would accidentally kill themselves trying to stick a knife either in their mouth or an electrical outlet (I’ve had to put a stop to both eventualities with each of my kids). But at some point, they go to school, and for most, the priority shifts. It becomes about fitting in. At the risk of sounding stupid in front of their peers, many stop asking, “Why is this the way it is?” or, “How does that work?” Many kids stop raising their hands.

In season 2, episode 9 of The West Wing, President Bartlet is preparing to talk to 6,000 kids about landing a robot on Mars called Galileo V. The episode spends much of the time trying to come up with a “broader theme” for the kids. After losing contact with the robot, C.J. Cregg, the White House Press Secretary, convinces Bartlet to do the talk anyway:

“We have at our disposal a captive audience of schoolchildren. Some of them don't go to the blackboard or raise their hand because they think they’ll be wrong. You should say to these kids, ‘You think you get it wrong sometimes? You should come down here and see how the big boys do it.’ You should tell them you haven't give up hope, and that it may turn up. But in the meantime, you want NASA
to put its best people in a room and you want them to start building Galileo 6.

Some of them will Iaugh and most won't care but for some, they might honestly see that it's about going to the blackboard and raising your hand. And that's the broader theme.”

Fitting In Equals Average Returns

The downside to this behavior is it lingers into adulthood. Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Most people die at 25 and are buried at 75.” How often do the adults around you change? How often do their opinions change? How often are they willing to take a risk and be wrong about something?

Conversely, a kid’s true nature is to ask questions ceaselessly. It is only when that curiosity is usurped by fear that, for most, their behavior begins to change. That fear is dominated by a desire to fit in.

When we stop asking questions, we stop looking for solutions. When we stop seeking solutions, we amalgamate ourselves with our surroundings.

Rene Girard is famous for his work on mimetic theory and desire. He reasoned that humans don’t want things of our own free will but rather as a result of our desire to mimic others—precisely why social media influencers are such a lucrative investment for companies. Social media itself is perhaps the greatest example of this. In 2004, Peter Thiel famously became the first outside investor in Facebook (and for a 10% stake in the company) because he saw that our desire to copy each other would now be played out at a massive scale.

Another way to look at mimetic theory is, “I’m going to follow this path because this is how everyone else does it, and this is how it’s always done.”

One solution to mimetic theory is having an appetite for risk. How often do we find ourselves passionate about a particular activity, wishing we could turn it into our livelihood? How often do we sacrifice that desire in favor of the safe, predictable route? What if, during our days of insatiable curiosity, we had inquired about how to take measured risks? What if, instead of fearing being wrong, we learned failure is not just okay, but in many instances, it’s a necessary stepping stone to our success?

And it’s not just us as individuals. The same problem exists in companies. In this week’s Worth Listening To episode, Ted Gioia and David Perell discuss the “flattening of our modern culture” and the increasing pervasiveness of formulas governing our lives, from movies to books to media. Ted argues that legacy giants want predictable returns on their investments rather than taking risks. The problem is that we, the consumers, get predictable, boring content—same stories, different characters.

As these behemoths have established dominance over the media landscape, they have lost their appetite for taking risks. They instead fall back on genres or franchises—formulas—well past their prime, just as they did in the late 1950s. Clinging to their glory days, these companies sacrifice authenticity, creativity, and novelty in the pursuit of profit and industry dominance to the detriment of their audience. A case in point is the immense drop-off in quality Disney has produced with the latest Star Wars and Marvel movies.

But as long as people continue going to see them, why change? Except they aren’t. At least not as often as they used to…

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Systems of Reward Have Changed

In 1997, a struggling Apple brought Steve Jobs back to run the company. He then gave perhaps the best marketing speech of all time, launching its “Think Different” campaign, leading to Apple becoming the biggest company in the world less than two decades later. In it, he said:

“Apple isn’t about making boxes for people to get their jobs done, although we do that well. We do that better than almost anybody, in some cases. But Apple is about something more than that. Apple at the core, it’s core value is that we believe people with passion can change the world for the better. That’s what we believe… And that those people who think they are crazy enough to change the world are the ones who actually do.”

The outliers, the “ones we can’t ignore,” are those who challenge and reject status quo bias and alter our collective thinking as a society.

From 1843 to 1869, John Stuart Mill published some of the greatest literary works on individual liberties, individual rights, individual exceptionalism, as well as human happiness, and women’s rights. His ideas challenged the status quo of the time and became a bedrock for the defense of many of the freedoms we now take for granted, such as freedom of expression and speech:

“There have been, and may again be, great individual thinkers, in a general atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that condition an intellectually active people. Where any people has made a temporary approach to such a character, it has been because the dread of heterodox speculation was for a time suspended. Where there is a tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed; where the discussion of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity is considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find that generally high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of history so remarkable.”

Asked why he chose biographies as his vocation, Andrew Roberts answered:

“Because it concentrates the mind on one person. You emotionally connect with that person. You either love them or you hate them. It’s the great men and women theory of history, of course, and I do believe in that because I think that although of course there are enormous historical movements that happen, you know, the decline of magic and the rise of science… those come about as the result of millions, indeed billions of people.

You can’t look at something like the invasion of Russia in 1812, or Churchill’s decision to fight on and not make peace with Hitler in 1940 and not recognise that the individual does play an absolutely central role in some of the major world-changing decisions.”

Recent history has demonstrated that we are now rewarded for thinking differently and challenging society to move forward. And it’s the individuals—us—who make it happen, whether within our own community or society as a whole. We are rewarded for challenging our own mind’s predisposition for laziness.

Tabula Rasa

Very recently, I was exposed to my own confirmation bias. It’s no understatement to say I detested school. The confinement, the structure, the constraints, the external pressure, and the unrelenting urge to fit in. So, when I learned that the education system was a relic, unchanged from a time when corporations wanted kids trained to work in factories, unable to rise above their station, I said to myself, “Yes, that makes sense!” Only, that’s not at all the intent with which the school system was designed. It sounds good in a soundbite, but it’s factually inaccurate.

Aristotle, his students, and the stoics who followed centuries later believed each of us is born with a blank mind called a tabula rasa. We have no biases whatsoever. We learn and are shaped through our experiences alone. But what if we could create a blank slate as we age by repeatedly challenging what we think we know?

In school, we learn models: How to write, how to read, how to multiply and divide, and how to form a hypothesis and conduct an experiment. Models are great for establishing a baseline and, as another client said to me, forming useful constraints. But as the great physicist and educator Richard Feynman said, “The greatest discoveries, it always turns out, abstract away from the models.”

What the Hell Does This Have to Do With Health?

“Eric, you write about health. What the hell is this?” Rest assured, I’ve asked myself this question quite a few times while writing this piece.

At the outset, physical health wasn’t anywhere near my conscious mind. However, I realized there is a definitive crossover. Our health — how we feel, how much energy we have, how healthy we are — is a barometer for how willing we are to challenge our own laziness, especially when it’s something we don’t want to do. Moreover, our desire to copy others is frequently what gets us into trouble with exercising! “I want to look like them.” Why? That is never going to happen. Look like you and embrace the hell out of it.

If we can recognize, on a very conscious level, our own predisposition for laziness, we can do something about it. We can override the “I don’t want to work out today” feeling. Not everyone will. But at least we can have the same starting point, knowing what we’re up against: ourselves.

Conclusion

My question to you is, how often do you go against your initial impulse? “I should work out, but I really don’t want to.” Or, “I should really cook, but I can so easily have pizza delivered right to my door.”

A favorite saying of mine comes from Jerzy Gregorek, a Polish immigrant to the United States who struggled with alcohol abuse before taking up weightlifting and winning four world weight-lifting championships(!!). His personal motto is, “Easy choices, hard life; hard choices, easy life.”

We are each capable of pushing ourselves to think more critically, learn from different perspectives, challenge ourselves and those around us to think differently, and live healthier and happier lives. But it often takes overriding our evolutionarily predisposed tendency to conserve energy. As my client said to me, we have to override our brain’s desire to be lazy.

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• Tyler Cowen - Hayek, Keynes & Smith on AI, Animal Spirits, Anarchy, & Growth — Dwarkesh Podcast

• Andrew Roberts - SV’s Napolean Cult, Why Hitler Lost WW2, Churchill as Applied Historian — Dwarkesh Podcast

• Patrick Collison (Stripe CEO) - Craft, Beauty, the Future of Payments — Dwarkesh Podcast

• What’s Wrong with Writing Education? | Ana Lorena Fabrega — How I Write

• Microplastics Are Everywhere. How Dangerous Are They? — Plain English

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• Peter Shares His Biggest Takeaways on Muscle Protein Synthesis, VO2 Max, Toe Strength, Gut Health, and More — The Drive

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• How I Went From Left to Center-Left — Slow Boring by Matthew Yglesias

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• Pop Music: The TV Dinner of Our Cultural Diet — Hot Takes by Adam Singer

• A Bull Market in the Humanities — Luke Burgis

• Is Silicon Valley Building Universe 25? — The Honest Broker by Ted Gioia

We moved!!! Thursday was our final day at 7900 Excelsior Blvd. It’s been an extraordinary 7.5 years. To this point in my life, it’s the longest stretch of time I’ve done one thing in one place without stopping. Many of you reading this are a big reason why. I cannot thank you enough, and I am eager to continue serving you in our new location.

Beginning June 1st, we will be operating out of the Kilo Collective! The Kilo Collective is owned by Holly Janiszewski and is a gym for independent health professionals to use to run their businesses. Not far from our old location, our new address will be 10921 Excelsior Blvd, Suite 101, Hopkins, MN 55343. If you would like more information, please reach out to me directly at eweiner@envisionfitnessmn.com.

Worth Listening To

• The liver is the only vital organ for which we have no synthetic way of keeping alive (lungs have a respirator, for example).

• The liver is not meant to store fat. It is a processing center for the foods you consume. But this is very different than simply avoiding fatty foods. When the liver cannot keep up with demand, excess calories (usually carbs) are stored as fat, often in the liver.

• Fructose, especially liquid fructose, has incredibly dangerous effects on our liver and metabolic health.

Conversations with a Personal Trainer

A number of conversations over the previous two weeks have revolved around a core passion of mine: Education. Specifically, schools, how we learn, getting the most out of kids, critical thinking, shifting educational pursuits, and the future of higher education. One such example that struck me was a discussion of a student who felt a need to take an advanced class for a subject they had no interest in, which subsequently led to the student cheating in that class. Why do we place value on taking advanced courses for subjects we have absolutely no interest in? Is it all about checking boxes?

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Do We Really Need Supplements?

Whether you believe they are essential or think they can’t be trusted because the FDA doesn’t regulate them (they actually do), supplements are everywhere. Moreover, they are an important part of the dietary ecosystem. The purpose of this piece is two-fold: If you find yourself distrusting of supplements, to help ease your fears. If you’re overly zealous about supplements, to somewhat curb your expectations.

I personally fall somewhere in the middle and endorse what Andrew Huberman frequently says on his podcast: “You have to first change your lifestyle habits, then change your eating habits, and then you can begin to look at supplements.” Yet, many times I see this process done in reverse, as though supplements are some magical panacea. They are not. But they do serve a purpose.

What are these supplements I’m talking about, and why should you care? A supplement is meant to enhance or plug a gap in something. The supplement industry did over $177 billion in revenue in 2023, $95 billion (54%) of which was in the United States. In 2017, over 57% of adults in the United States took at least one supplement. That number grew to 80% for adults over 60. Do our diets really have that many holes to fill?

My own experience tells me that yes, we have many gaps in our regular dietary consumption — even amongst “healthy eaters.” Take protein, for example. It is extremely hard to get an adequate amount of protein if you are trying to build or maintain muscle. In Part 1 of this series, I stated that, at a minimum, we should consume 1.5 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. For a 150-pound individual, that is 102 grams of protein per day.

If you can drink a low-calorie shake (protein shakes are approximately 100 calories per serving) while getting 25 grams of protein, that strikes me as a no-brainer. Those 25 grams of protein are nearly a quarter of a 150-pound individual’s daily requirement.

Similarly, the average American should consume approximately 30 grams of fiber per day. Meanwhile, the average daily consumption is closer to 16 grams. We can fill that gap with more vegetables, fruits, seeds, legumes, and whole grains, absolutely. But what if you’ve tried that approach and you know that’s not going to happen?

Most of you reading this live in Minnesota. What about vitamin D? Vitamin D is best absorbed through UVB rays from the Sun and is poorly absorbed through food. When taken with a meal, supplementing vitamin D actually provides better absorption than the vitamin D that is in our food.

And let’s not forget the importance of fish oil. As I mentioned in Part 3 of the Nutrition Series, fish oil contains mostly EPA and DHA, two Omega-3 fatty acids that you cannot get in your diet without eating a lot of fish.

These are examples where supplementation works. But there is still a need to be diligent in your decison-making process when buying supplements.

Not All Supplements Are Created Equal

While the FDA does regulate supplements, they are not under nearly as much scrutiny as pharmaceutical drugs. There are two major risk factors with supplements: What is on a nutrition label is not necessarily what is in the product, and the level of toxins that may be found in that product (lead and cadmium are big ones).

Imagine you purchase your favorite coffee drink on your way to work. However, when you take off the lid you notice it’s only filled three quarters of the way. This is what sometimes happens with supplements. A label will claim it has 5mg of melatonin while only possessing 3.5mg.

Fortunately, there are ways to ensure you’re getting the best quality possible. Several companies exist whose primary purpose is to test supplements to measure their quality. I use Labdoor for nearly every supplement I consume.

One fascinating observation is that these testing companies seem to improve the industry's behavior (every free marketer’s dream). When I began using Labdoor three years ago, more than half of the products I reviewed on their site rated below a B-. Because of the scores, I even changed the Omega-3 supplement I was taking. Now, many of the same products from the same companies rate much higher, especially in the Omega-3 category.

There is still a lot of trust involved on the part of us, the consumer. Trusting the labs that conduct the actual test, trusting Labdoor or its competitors, and trusting the supplement companies to maintain their level of quality after receiving a score. I would argue that we do the same thing every day with the food we buy. Unless we grow or make our own food, we are putting trust in the quality and sourcing of the product’s ingredients (i.e. “natural flavors” — what is that?).

With that in mind, I use four criteria when deciding which supplements are right for me:

1. Do I actually need it? Could I get this nutrient in my diet? Is it a product my body naturally makes?

2. Do I trust the product? Have I checked to see if what is on the label is actually in the product?

3. Does it fit in my budget? Supplements are expensive and the they add up quickly. Is the cost worth it?

4. Do I notice a difference? Have I seen a change after taking it for a month? If I stop taking it, do I notice its absence?

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The result has led me to six supplements I take regularly, ranked top-to-bottom in order of my priority:

• Protein powder — Legion Athletics

• Omega-3 fish oil — Nordic Naturals Amazon

• Prebiotic Fiber — Supergut

• Vitamin C & D — Emergen-C Amazon

• Multivitamin — Legion Athletics

• Creatine — Optimum Nutrition Amazon

Protein, fish oil, and fiber are my staples, which I consider an extension of my daily food consumption. Meaning, I take them every day. I have tried to remove multivitamins and vitamins C and D. However, I am notoriously bad at eating enough fruits and vegetables. Plus, thanks to having kids in daycare, I have been sick more in the previous year than any year I can recall in my life. Thus I have reintroduced Emergen-C and a multivitamin into my daily routine.

A word of caution with any vitamin C supplement: I like to mix Emergen-C with my afternoon tea. However, vitamin C begins breaking down at temperatures as low as 158 degrees Farenheit. So I now ice my tea before mixing in the Emergen-C.

If you are reading this thinking, “Why don’t I just take what he takes?” please don’t do that. Each of us has very different nutrient requirments based on numerous factors such as our resting metabolic rate — how many calories we burn in a day — our daily activity level, and our current nutrition routine.

In a World Absent of Scrutiny, False Promises Run Rampant

Regardless of what any label claims, there is no single product, or even a cocktail of products that is a substitute for putting in the work and making habitual changes little by little. Dietary supplements fill a hole in our nutrition much like supplemental insurance covers expenses that traditional insurance may not cover, or a storage unit may supplement the lack of space in one’s home.

Anecdotally, in 2010 I fell victim to the notion that supplements possessed some magical properties. I had just begun my strength training journey as a scrawny 18-year-old and wanted results quickly. I had read about the supposed benefits of “green coffee” and “acai root” and how they could help you reduce belly fat while building muscle. When something seems too good to be true, it all too often is. Several months and a few hundred dollars later I had finally learned my lesson the hard way.

How Do You Know Which Supplements You Should Take?

Like most things, getting started is often the most challenging part. If you are considering the addition of supplements to your health routine, it can be enticing to load up on eight different products all at once. The problem with that is, how on earth are you going to know which ones are actually benefiting you?

Instead, why not get your vitamin and mineral levels tested? Why not take the time to observe what you eat on a daily basis and find out where the gaps are? Information gives you tremendous power over which moves to make.

Finally, there is one caveat to any supplement you decide to take. It takes time. No matter how much protein you ingest, your body can only build muscle so fast — and while protein will help you build muscle, too much will also lead to significantly increased body weight. If you are vitamin D defficient, depending on your level of defficiency and your dosage, it could take as little as four weeks, or as long as twelve weeks to see a change. Like exercise and nutrition, the people who get the best results are the ones who remain consistent and don’t give up.

If you are interested in learning more about supplements, and which ones may be right for you, please leave a question in the comments, or send me an email at eweiner@envisionfitnessmn.com.

Other Learning:

Podcasts:

• What America’s Bold New Experiment is Missing — Plain English w/ Derek Thompson

• Controlling US Inflation, Global Trade, and the Future of India and Japan — Econ 102 w/ Noah Smith and Erik Torenberg

• What’s Wrong with Writing Education — How I Write w/ David Perell

Articles:

• A New Centrism Is Rising in Washington — David Leonhardt

• The Rise and Importance of Secret Congress — Matt Yglesias & Simon Bazelon

• From Boredom to Fascination: My Journey with Education — Hot Takes by Adam Singer

• Why Creatives Will Win by Thinking Small — The Honest Broker by Ted Gioia

• Social Capital 2023 Annual Letter — Chamath Palihapitiya

• Seven reasons America is headed for a more conservative decade — Noah Smith

• The Death (again) of the Internet as We Know it — Noah Smith

• At Least Five Interesting Things to Start Your Week (#38) — Noah Smith

Worth Listening To

• If you’ve ever thought of owning your own business, this episode is absolutely incredible. Sean discusses his experience with negotiating, having people who believe in you (and people you believe in who don’t yet believe in themself), how to engage with the community, and much more.

• My favorite interviewer interviewed one of the most interesting polymaths in the world today. The result is a remarkable conversation.

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Conversations With a Personal Trainer

These conversations spanned over the course of several weeks, each compounding on the previous. It began with me being asked, “What percentage of working out, both for yourself and your clients, is about the present versus about the future?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer. But the next session with this particular client, I came back with, “40% present, 60% future.” But I quickly added that it likely depends on an individual’s goals and where they are in their life. For example, my guess is a 20-year-old may be 20% present and 80% future-oriented. Conversely, an 80-year-old may be 80% present, 20% future-oriented.

These conversations took place four and three weeks ago, respectively. Together, they sparked the following idea: Planting a tree often takes a long time to bear fruit. The best things for us often take a while to take shape: changing lifestyle habits, investing for our financial future, starting a new relationship. But we don't enjoy the present if we get too caught up in the future. How do we find balance?

Our Present Impact on Our Future Self

Most of the decisions we make on a day-to-day basis are single-player. Even when others are involved, we still choose how we engage with our environment. In a recent discussion with a client, I asked what makes Shakespeare so extraordinary. Why are his plays taught in nearly every high school English class? The ensuing discussion, primarily about human tragedy, reignited an observation I’ve made in my career working with hundreds of people up close: The tragedy of human nature is, while our decisions throughout life are single-player, the value we place on both the opinions of others (validation) and the lives of others (social media) often supersedes our own self-interest.

That these tendencies extend to our health likely goes without saying. In my own case, I can’t spend a few days scrolling Instagram without developing an acute inferiority complex. In Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, he refers to something called internalized disorders, where people express anxiety or depression inwardly as a sense of hopelessness. It’s a far cry to say I have what would classify as a disorder. But after a few days of scrolling social media, many of the symptoms certainly arise, if only temporarily. These symptoms culminate in a general disinterest in the things I usually find immense joy in: exercising, writing, walking, and being present with my family.

This brings us to the central theme of this week’s article. If most of the decisions we make — especially regarding our health — are single-player, why do we give such vulnerability of our mind to others? Others whose opinions we have no control over nor an ability to know their innermost thoughts. We have our own minds to learn and understand and no one else’s (frustrating as that may be for some).

Finding Your Why

In February, I wrote about how we should focus on playing our own game. The idea was that we would see better results for our health and happiness if we embraced our journey and did not compare ourselves to the people around us. When we make an investment, there are two important factors: first, we expect a return on that investment, and second, it’s single-player. These two factors are essential to understanding our investment in our health.

In many instances, the expected return of an investment is far off in the distance — often years or even decades. When we invest in a financial endeavor, it’s years before that investment pays off; when we invest our heart and energy in a relationship, it takes time before we know if that person is ‘the one’; when we invest in our kids’ futures, it’s decades before we know if we truly did a good job or not. All of these decisions, while reliant on others, are made by us alone. Should we expect immediate returns if your health is also an investment? Should we allow others to shape our road for us?

In his conversation with Patrick O’Shaughnessy, Tim Ferris says,

“You have to be very careful about being shaped by your audience. If you allow yourself to be purely shaped by your audience feedback, you will be a comic caricature of your most extreme behaviors and beliefs. And, if you sustain that long enough you will become the mask that you are wearing. Then you’re fucked.”

He soon after says,

“As soon as we start doing this, instead of me following what I’m most interested in, we’re dead. This is like a lemming transmogrifier. As soon as you step into this slipstream, you are coming to groupthink and group pressure. And you’re going to become something you don’t want to be. You’re going to make yourself very hard to disambiguate from other people, so I constrain that.”

A massive part of this endeavor is writing what’s on my mind and synthesizing what I’ve learned into concise thoughts — particularly as it relates to health. As a client recently described, it’s a creative outlet. Yet, with each passing week, the pressure to write what others want increases (even though this is mostly made up in my mind, it’s still a significant roadblock).

This is where the parallel to embarking on a health journey exists. There are a lot of unknowns when starting. What to eat? How much to eat? What exercises to do? How often? When looking for guidance, it can be very easy to fall into the trap of copying others or simply becoming overwhelmed.

While they may seem very different superficially, they are actually quite similar. If exercise strengthens the muscles, writing strengthens and clarifies the mind. Without pursuing what interests me, I may as well be writing to please everyone. The results would be terrible since writing is already hard enough for me. Likewise, copying someone else’s health routine will most likely yield similarly bad results. Without knowing your own why, what keeps you going when an obstacle presents itself?

In both instances, knowing your core why enables you to create a process revolving around this North Star.

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Making Better Decisions

In Think Twice: The Power of Counterintuition, Michael Mauboussin argues that it is better to understand one's decision-making process than to worry about the outcome. In Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts, Annie Duke makes a very similar argument:

“What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of ‘I’m not sure.’”

I can certainly attest to these statements. When I began investing in stocks, I bought without much, if any, in-depth research on the actual company itself. But it was highly recommended by a ‘guru’ online, and how could it possibly fail?! Here’s the problem. If you’re copying someone else, how do you know if it’s working? In 2017, I was teaching myself how to buy and sell stocks. Late that fall, there was speculation Canada was going to legalize recreational marijuana sometime in the second half of 2018. So, I put about 50% of the value of my brokerage into cannabis stocks. The problem was that this wasn’t an original idea, and I knew nothing about the actual companies.

It was great for about a year. With everyone flooding the market with the same “original” idea, the stocks skyrocketed. Basic supply and demand. Only there’s a saying in the stock market that I didn’t understand at the time: “Buy the rumor, sell the news.” Because I was copying everyone else, I didn’t have a process. It’s easy to play armchair quarterback and say, “Why didn’t you sell?” To which I would reply, that’s precisely the point. I eventually sold for a modest gain, significantly less than the paper value a month or two prior and less than had I simply put that money in the S&P 500. This is why process matters.

Similarly, many people who come and see me at Envision Fitness for their consultation have first had a negative experience trying to improve their health. Too often, it’s a previous injury at another gym. But most commonly, it’s a lack of results on one’s own — whether it’s not knowing which exercises are best or needing extra accountability. And, as we’ve discussed before in this newsletter, it’s very understandable. There is simply too much noise and too many people telling you what you should do because it worked for them. Not to mention, not many people genuinely enjoy exercising.

How do you create a process? Some brilliant individuals do this for a living, many of whom I routinely quote in this newsletter. I highly encourage reading their work and listening to their conversations on podcasts. However, I think the best place to start is by asking yourself what you're seeking, admitting what you don’t know, and asking more questions (hopefully, this newsletter is helping to answer some of those questions for you).

Going back to my conversation with a client about making decisions based on the present versus the future, you need a balance of both that works for you. Factor it into your process. “If I make X decision, what do I want the Y outcome to be?” If you really don’t want to do something in the present, you may find having a future-oriented process incredibly useful. That process could be as simple as a post-it note on your refrigerator reminding you how good you’ll feel after: “Your future self will thank you.” Or it could be a goal posted on your refrigerator: “Your future self wants you to lose 20 pounds. Put down the ice cream!” (Yes, that last one was aimed right at myself.) And on the days you do want to do that thing, your process will help make the most of it in the present. If you really want to work out but you only have 30 minutes, your process will keep you efficient.

Do you use processes in your day-to-day life? Do they help you make better decisions?

Final Thoughts

I will end on this note: Your health is single-player. As much as the people closest to you may love you, they cannot do the work for you. Too many people fail to get out of their own way when it comes to their health. I’ve seen it happen many times, and I’ve also been guilty of it. If we want greatness for ourselves — to feel energized, wake up excited for the day, and be self-determinant and independent as we age — we have to do the work. For our future selves and our present.

But we are also in this together if we choose to be. Therefore, it is never a bad thing to ask for help. As Sean Feeney said in this week’s Worth Listening To episode, sometimes internal belief takes belief from an external source. And just maybe that belief can be the spark that inspires someone to change the trajectory of their life.

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Other Learning This Week

Podcasts:

• AI and Jobs, Google and HubSpot, Risk of World War 3 — All-In Podcast

• Inflation, AI, Future of Defense Technology — All-In Podcast

• Josh Waitzkin on Beginner’s Mind, Self-Actualization, Advice from Your Future Self — Tim Ferris

• In Conversation with Sharyl Sandberg — All-In Podcast

Articles:

• No One Knows What Universities Are For — Derek Thompson

• Americans are still not worried enough about the risk of world war — Noah Smith

  • Noah uses the history of precursor wars leading to WW2 to explain what’s happening now. This is an incredibly thorough and well-researched article.

• Five things to be optimistic about in America today — Noah Smith

• Sizing up the New Axis - Noah Smith

• Daniel Kahneman’s Final Exploration of Human Error — Rob Henderson

• Silencing the alarm over a recent paper on dietary protein and atherosclerosis — Peter Attia, M.D.

• Why Everything is Becoming a Game — Gurwinder

On Twitter (links included on pictures):

Embarking on this nutrition series journey has proved far more daunting than I initially intended — the major reason for the delayed posting these past few weeks, in addition to severe imposter syndrome setting in. Yet, despite my previous lack of comprehension, this endeavor has entirely changed or enhanced my understanding and approach to different elements of nutrition. Hopefully, it has done similarly for you.

In preparation for this edition and studying fatty acids, I quickly realized how little I knew. There were several important factors I got wrong in my article, Strong Opinions Weakly Held, which I have corrected both in this article and that one. Furthermore, I used to think of fats as extremely binary: Saturated fats, bad; unsaturated fats, good. In reality, it’s a lot more of what Donna says about comparing diets to economic theories in the West Wing:

“It’s like with diets. How there are all these different diet theories all completely contradictory, when most doctors agree that the healthiest advice is just to eat a variety of foods in moderate amounts.”

As you read on, consider: What does your current consumption of dietary fat — the amount of calories you consume that come from fat — look like? How much saturated fat do you consume? How much monounsaturated fat? And how much polyunsaturated fat?

Worth Listening To

• Both of these episodes are excellent. Dr. Attia and Dr. Patrick ask very different questions, and together, they brilliantly articulate the importance of Omega-3s and other fatty acids.

• For reference, Dr. Bill Harris’ research is one of the key reasons we know as much about Omega-3 fatty acids as we do.

• The Show Notes from “The Drive” episode are exceptional if you’d like to explore the fatty acid rabbit hole.

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Conversations With a Personal Trainer

This particular conversation took place last Tuesday, April 2nd, with a client I’ve known for over two decades. When I was in middle school, he was a mentor to me as Lake Harriet’s assistant chess coach. I’m not sure why it took me this long to ask, but I asked why he loves chess so much. In short, it became his refuge as a kid and still remains so. To this day, he is still heavily influential in the Minnesota chess world.

It was incredibly insightful on his part. And an idea sparked: I’d venture to guess many of you have a similar activity in which you find refuge. Chess certainly was for me, too. More recently, it’s been strength training. But they both have something in common in that they fit my introverted preference for the solitude of my own thoughts.

What do you find refuge in as an adult? When you need to escape from the world for a brief time, what helps you?

Fatty Acids — Why Are They So Damn Important?

For years, I used to pour olive oil on everything—extra virgin, cold-pressed, organic olive oil. I would use it for cooking and include it in my breakfast and dinner. Why? Monounsaturated fat. A common mistake I made was equating monounsaturated fats with omega-3 fatty acids. Monounsaturated fat— the fat we find in olive oil and various other foods — is an Omega-9 fatty acid known as Oleic acid.

While Oleic acid provides necessary health benefits and will be a key component of this piece, I wasn’t consuming the nutrients I thought I was. And while olive oil contains some Omega-3 fatty acids, the amount is very small. Moreover, the Omega-3 in question is mostly comprised of Alpha-Linolenic Acid (ALA), which, while necessary, is again not what I was after.

What was I looking for? Eicosapentaenoic acid and Docosahexaenoic acid, or as we commonly know them, are EPA and DHA. These fats are incredibly hard to come by in our food sources. The only natural foods containing high levels of both are seafood, especially fish. The reason is that one species in particular synthesizes EPA and DHA: microalgae. What eats the microalgae? Fish.

As an aside, if you eat meat and/or seafood, the food that animal ate matters, as Robert Lustig pointed out in his discussion with Andrew Huberman:

“Let’s talk about steak. We love our marbling. You can cut our US Grade A steak with a butter knife… It turns out that marbling is intromyocellular lipid. That animal has metabolic syndrome. The American, corn-fed animal. Because that corn is filled with branch-chain amino acids. That’s what’s in protein powder. If you’re building muscle, that’s ok. You have a place to put them. But if you’re not, you consume those excess amino acids, they’re going to go to the liver, they’re going to be deaminated, and they’re going to end up as branch chain organic acids. They’re going to flood the mitochondria. The mitochondria aren’t going to be able to deal with the volume. So they’re going to divert the excess and turn that into fat. So now you’ve got triglyceridemia and chance for fatty liver disease and inuslin resistance. What kind of meat you eat has a lot to do with your metabolic health.

Why do I mention EPA and DHA? Let’s go back to what fatty acids are and their importance to our vitality. Fatty acids make up the membrane of every cell in our body. They determine what gets into a cell and what goes out. Here’s an example from Bill Harris’ conversation with Peter Attia on how certain fats, like oleic acid from above, help reduce our LDL cholesterol:

“When you take in the omega-6s or the omega-9s, you replace some of the saturated fat in your cell membranes. When you consume less saturated fat, you’re reducing, to an extent, the amount of saturated fat in your membranes and that has an effect on the physical, chemical fluidity of the membrane.

There is, buried within all of our cell membranes, hundreds and thousands of these receptors, proteins, that are sitting right in the middle of membranes. One of these is called the LDL receptor — low-density lipoprotein. Which is the primary lipid particle that carries cholesterol in our blood. And that receptor is sitting there in the liver membrane. And if you remove saturated fat, or lower the amount of saturated fat, it changes the properties of the membrane. So that LDL receptor is more efficient at removing LDL particles from the blood. That essentially lowers your cholesterol level…

It’s the LDL that’s effected by the saturation of fats.

Fatty acids also play vital roles as an energy source (the mitochondria in our cells are how our body metabolizes fat for energy), are necessary for the absorption of certain vitamins (fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin D), and certain fats, such as omega-3s, are crucial to metabolizing and reducing triglycerides — high triglycerides (hypertriglyceridemia) is a leading cause of high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, hardening of the arteries, and contribute to metabolic syndrome.

So, we have this extremely complex and multifunctional nutrient. More confusingly, there are many different types to keep track of in our diet. Omega-3s (EPA and DHA, in particular) are such an important subject because they are so hard to acquire in our diet. The average American diet includes 150mg of combined EPA and DHA, compared to 80-100 grams of total fat consumed. That’s roughly 0.16% of our dietary fat from EPA and DHA.

This is a big part of what I got wrong in my former nutrition model. I incorrectly assumed EPA and DHA were superior to the other fatty acids. In reality, each fatty acid is equally important to our overall health. But because we consume so little of these two, they get far more attention. Fish oil supplements, for example, are sold at just about every grocery store in America and generated $2.29 billion in revenue in 2022.

What are these different fatty acids, and why are they so important to include in our diet? Below is a list of each family of dietary fatty acids, what they do, and where we can find them in our food.

Omega-3 Fatty Acids: Polyunsaturated Fats

• ALA is an Essential fatty acid, meaning our body cannot produce it on its own and needs to consume it through the diet.

  • Benefit: Reducing triglycerides and overall cholesterol. A reduced risk in all-cause mortality.

  • Found in: Nuts, seeds, oils, plants (especially prominent in chia and flax seeds.)

    • It’s worth noting our body does convert some ALA into EPA and then DHA, but the amount is insignificant.

• EPA

  • Benefit: Reduces blood pressure, triglycerides, and risk of coronary heart disease. Is also anti-inflammatory and has been shown to reduce symptoms of depression. In women with menopause, it also reduces the frequency of hot flashes.

  • Found in: Cold-water fish, krill, algae

• DHA

  • Benefit: DHA is a prominent component of the brain, specifically found in our brain’s gray matter, and is vital for cognitive function. It also helps improve cardiovascular health and is an anti-inflammatory.

  • Found in: Cold-water fish, krill, algae

Omega-6 Fatty Acids: Polyunsaturated Fats

• Linoleic Acid (LA) — An essential fatty acid, LA is considered by many to be unhealthy and a contributor to inflammation and heart disease. However, a counterargument is that this is because our diet is simply much too high in LA. In moderate amounts, it does the opposite.

  • Benefit: Important for cognitive development and heart health.

  • Found in: Nuts, nut oils, vegetable oils, seeds, and seed oils

• Arachidonic Acid (AA) — Last week, I briefly mentioned prostaglandins. AA is responsible for the creation of prostaglandins. Too much AA can increase inflammation, but on the whole, they are necessary for our immune system and fighting infections.

  • Benefit: Pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory in relation to pain management and our immune system

  • Found in: Fish, meat, and eggs

Omega-9 Fatty Acids: Monounsaturated Fats

• Oleic Acid

  • Benefit: Reducing total cholesterol, improving heart function, anti-inflammatory

  • Found in: Especially prominent in olive oil as well as nuts.

Saturated Fatty Acids

• Saturated fats are the fat we should be especially cautious about consuming in large quantities. Too much saturated fat has a far greater impact on raising LDL cholesterol than eating dietary cholesterol. However, consuming small amounts of saturated fat is beneficial to the health of our brain and heart.

• Found in: Animal products as well as oils and butters.

Trans Fatty Acids

• Trans fats are the most dangerous fat for our body. They pose almost no benefit and significantly contribute to heart disease, increased LDL cholesterol, and insulin resistance.

• The real danger lies in the fact that trans fats are in almost all of our highly processed foods. Industrially processed oil manufacturers, for example, often add a hydrogen atom to the oil to preserve it, which creates trans fats in the otherwise healthy oil. Hydrogenated vegetable oil became an industry favorite for many of our favorite snack foods.

• How to spot trans fats: If you read a label that says “hydrogenated” or “partially hydrogenated,” that product has trans fats in it, even if the label says otherwise.

• Trans fats can also be created by heating unsaturated fats at too high of temperatures. For example, sunflower oil is inherently healthy. But because it’s largely comprised of polyunsaturated fats, it oxidizes very quickly when heated, creating these trans fats.

• Trans fats are found in almost no natural foods, with the exception of trace amounts in dairy products.

Why Does This Matter?

What are we supposed to do with this information? How should we alter our fat consumption to optimize our health? The single most staggering fact that stood out to during my studying was the staggeringly low amount of EPA and DHA (as I mentioned above, just 0.16% of our overall fat consumption) in our diets. According to this review, that number should be 650mg of combined EPA and DHA per day, at a minimum. And that number is substantially higher if you have metabolic dysfunction such as diabetes, high triglycerides, or high cholesterol — closer to four grams per day.

Additionally, two variables remain: How much fat should we consume each day? And the choices we make in selecting which fatty foods we consume. How much we consume is largely dependent on our total caloric intake and the percentage of calories from fat.

Application

Here’s how you can determine how much fat you should consume:

1. I always recommend starting with protein first. As we discussed in Part 1 of this series, your protein intake should range between 1.5 and 1.7 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. If you’re 200 pounds, that’s about 145 grams per day, or 580 calories (145 x 4).

2. Second, determine your resting metabolic rate (RMR) — how many calories your body burns each day while at rest. The most accurate way to do this is through a resting metabolic assessment, though it can also be determined through in-body scales. Let’s assume your RMR is 1,600 calories/day.

3. We then come to a fork in the road: If your goal is to lose weight and improve body composition (higher muscle-to-fat ratio), your caloric intake should hover close to or slightly above your RMR. If your goal is to maintain or gain weight, your caloric intake should be significantly greater than your RMR.

4. Let’s assume this same 200lb individual wants to lose weight and their caloric intake recommendation is 1,700 calories per day.

   1. 580 is from protein, or 34%.

   2. This person is in relatively poor physical shape, so their fat intake will be higher — Usually, between 35-40% of your caloric intake will come from fat in this case. That would put their fat intake between 66 and 76 grams, or 595 and 680 calories worth of fat.

5. Where should that fat come from? The bulk of it ideally should come from monounsaturated fat. Of the 66-76 grams, roughly 40-50% of it should be monounsaturated. At the low end, that would be about 26 grams; at the high end, about 38 grams. Another 30-40% should come from polyunsaturated fat, broken up between omega-6s and omega-3s.

   1. I will note that the conversation between Attia and Harris got interesting on the topic of omega-6s. Attia argued that because we ate very little of them historically, we don’t need much today. Harris says omega-6s are fine, and we should focus solely on increasing our omega-3 intake.

   2. My conclusion is they are likely both right. With that in mind, let’s split the 30-40% of polyunsaturated fats evenly between omega-3s and omega-6s (15-20% each). That would put each one at 10-15 grams.

   3. Saturated fat should be approximately 10-20% of total fat intake, putting it at 7-15 grams. For context, a 6oz steak has about 10 grams of saturated fat.

Influencing Behavior

In the two weeks it’s taken me to write this article, I have already altered my behavior in a number of ways:

• I’ve doubled my Omega-3 supplementation — I now take one serving of each of these two supplements each day:

  • Nordic Naturals — 1,100mg of EPA and DHA

  • Kori Krill Oil — 800mg of krill oil; 140mg of EPA and DHA

• Salmon is becoming more of a staple in my household this year — our goal is to have it at least once a week.

• I keep my Saturated fat intake very low at less than 10% of my overall fat intake each day. That comes to about 10-12 grams each day.

• Because of the prevalence of hydrogenated oils in packaged food, I eat almost no highly processed foods on a regular basis.

• Lastly, I’m no longer nearly as concerned about cooking with olive oil since its large amounts of antioxidants stabilize it at higher temperatures. However, because of its high calories, I sadly no longer pour it on everything.

How will this information influence your own behavior?

If you would like to learn your specific Resting Metabolic Rate, you can learn more about our metabolic testing services at Envision Fitness by going to our website.

Other Learning This Week

• I Receive a Letter from a High School Student — Ted Gioia

• The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn't Happening at College — Ted Gioia

• Are smartphones harmful to youth mental health? Experts torn on Jonathan Haidt’s book — NBC News

• The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust - Derek Thompson

• The [almost] unbelievable effects of a high maximal aerobic capacity on all-cause mortality - Peter Attia

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“We’re blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We’re not designed to know how little we know.”

Daniel Kahneman

Worth Listening To

This week’s Worth Listening To episode challenged much of what I thought I knew about the gut. In going down the rabbit hole of digestive health and our gut microbiome, I realized just how true the above quote is. Much of what I had previously learned from nutrition courses, nutritionists, and articles were either wrong or barely scratched the surface.

• The major flaw in high-fat, low-carb diets (keto, for example)

• Incredible benefits of fermented foods (major caveat: the microbes have to be alive; alcohol does not count)

• Where fiber plays an important role

• Dangers of chemicals, industrial cleaning agents, and potential benefits of being a little dirty.

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Conversations With a Personal Trainer

Here are two of the many wonderful conversations I had last week:

Conversation 1: “Sometime in the last 5-7 years, I’ve felt this duty to teach kids how to think critically.” I had a magnificent conversation with this client about critical thinking (he teaches high schoolers). It was on the day Daniel Kahneman passed away, and since he was on my mind, we discussed the potential dangers of heuristics and taking shortcuts.

The second conversation involved one of the best short videos I’ve watched, which you can find at the bottom of this edition. It demonstrates the value of thinking for yourself. Plus, I learned the term “Socratic questioning,” which was very cool.

Both conversations were wonderful reminders that many shortcuts often lead to short-lived results. Cheating on a test may give you a good score, but you haven’t gained the knowledge to make an informed decision; cheating on your health may help you lose weight, but you haven’t developed the habits to lead a healthy lifestyle.

The Insidious Nature of Gut Inflammation

I will likely forever reference Kyla’s article about language, words, and distrust. The more we hear the same words over and over again — like hearing a well-told joke the first time, and then the tenth — the less impactful those words become. When you hear the word inflammation, what comes to your mind?

I’ll be the first to admit I used to discount inflammation as overused and meaningless— a term marketers love to use to sell products. Wow, was I wrong. Although perhaps overused, inflammation wreaks absolute havoc on the body, including being a leading contributor to metabolic diseases, the key focus of today’s piece.

To illustrate the varying pervasiveness of inflammation, think of the last time you took ibuprofen. Why did you take it? Whether it was for a headache or back pain, the reason is the same: inflammation. In both cases, your body releases prostaglandins to heal the affected site. While vital for healing, an excess concentration of prostaglandins can indirectly cause inflammation and pain. Ibuprofen is an NSAID or non-steroid anti-inflammatory drug that targets the compounds that release prostaglandins, thereby reducing inflammation and pain.

Gut inflammation works differently. Think of your digestive tract, specifically your large intestine, as a giant ecosystem, like a forest. A thriving forest is home to millions of living organisms, from plants to bears and everything in between. For this ecosystem to thrive, it needs balance.

Throughout the 20th century, wolves were hunted to near extinction in Yellowstone National Park. As a result, the elk population ran rampant. Elk fed on the land uncontested, preventing new trees and plants from growing, leading to significant downstream effects. In the 1990s, the federal government released 30 wolves in Yellowstone National Park. Almost three decades later, Yellowstone’s ecosystem has largely been restored.

If we don’t have the necessary nutrients in our diet, the mucus lining our intestines weakens, and our intestinal walls become permeable, allowing waste to seep into the body. The ecosystem falters. In Yellowstone, this meant the destruction of much of its vegetation and the departure of entire species. In our bodies, it means a significantly greater risk for metabolic syndrome, diabetes, certain cancers, and cardiac disease.

A Giant Ecosystem Within Our Gut

Our gut microbiome is an ecosystem comprised of various bacteria, viruses, and other living organisms. These organisms live within our body’s sewer system and play an essential role in absorbing nutrients, preventing disease, strengthening our immune system, and sending signals to the rest of our brain through what is known as the gut-brain axis. What sustains a healthy microbiome, and why is sustaining it vital for our health?

Our gut eats what we eat. But just as protein is vital for muscle protein synthesis, fiber is the necessary nutrient for our gut to thrive. Why?

There are two different types of fiber: soluble and insoluble. Dr. Robert Lustig summarizes their role brilliantly:

“You eat 160 calories of almonds, how many of those do you absorb? 130. You eat 160, you abosrb 130, where’d the other 30 go? Turns out the fiber, both soluble and insoluble fiber, forms a gel on the inside of your intestine. The insoluble fiber, the cellulose forms a fish net, a lattice work. The soluble fiber, which are globular, plug the holes in that fish net. Together, they form a secondary barrier. And that prevents absorption of those 30 calories. So yes, 130 get absorbed, but many of them don’t. They end up going further down in the intestine to the next part, called the jejunum. And that’s where the microbiome is… we’re always eating for 100 trillion. They have to eat. What do they eat? They eat what you eat. The question is how much should you get versus how much should they get. Well if you ate almonds, they’re getting those 30 calories. Because of the fiber.

Soluble fiber, in particular, is vital for its role in producing short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs). SCFAs are metabolites, meaning they are necessary in the process of converting the food we eat into energy. There are three key SCFAs our microbiome produces, if we feed it properly. Each one plays a vital role in our body:

• Acetate plays a crucial role in enabling our body to metabolize fats.

• Propionate is important for the production of glucose by the liver.

• Butyrate is the big one. It acts as an anti-inflammatory for our gut and protects the mucus layer, and thus, waste in our gut leaks into our body. As a result, it serves a major role in preventing colon cancer.

Is Eating More Fiber Enough?

You may be reading this thinking, “So, all I have to do is eat more fiber?” To some degree, yes. However, there is a major flaw with this reasoning and something I learned in the research for this piece. Because of the reduced fiber intake of North American diets — not to mention our heavy reliance on antibiotics — it’s estimated we have significantly reduced the amount of the necessary microbes for optimal gut health. According to both this 2022 study and this week’s recommended podcast episode, diets low in fiber over long periods of time can result in a depletion of these microbes.

How do we replenish these microbes? It takes time. Think back to the wolf example in Yellowstone National Park. The wolves began eating the elk, the elk population decreased, vegetation began to grow, birds and beavers returned, water levels rose, fish returned, and suddenly you have a balanced ecosystem. That is, if “suddenly” means more than 25 years.

Fortunately, it shouldn’t take you quite that long. But it’s important to know that results will happen gradually. Furthemore, not all fiber is created equal. Certain fibers play much greater roles in the production of SCFAs. Meanwhile, healthy bacteria in our gut are needed to ferment the carbohydrates we eat into these SCFAs.

Answering the Pre and Probiotic Debate

If this is all incredibly confusing for you, good. I enjoy having company in the Thoroughly Confused Club. Fortunately, all we need to know is what on earth we’re supposed to do about it.

You’ve likely heard of prebiotics and probiotics. The supplement industry has made enormous noise about both. In 2022, the prebiotic industry generated over $11 billion in revenue, while the probiotic industry generated a staggering $62 billion.

What are they, and why are they generating so much attention?

• Prebiotics are fiber. Specific kinds of fiber that help produce SCFAs. The most common and highest-quality prebiotics are found in plants, nuts, and legumes.

• Probiotics are the microbes that live in our gut. With the help of the prebiotics, they feed on the food you eat to produce those vitally necessary SCFAs.

We need both. Prebiotics create the necessary environment for probiotics to survive and thrive. While we’ve discussed fiber and its role as a prebiotic, how do we get more probiotics? Fermentation.

Fermented foods are an incredibly good source of those microbes we need. Foods like yogurt, unpasteurized cheese, kefir, sauerkraut, kombucha, and pickles. However, for these probiotics to help, they have to be alive. What do all of these foods have in common? They need to be refrigerated. If you buy fermented foods in cans or bottles (alcohol), the microbes are dead and won’t help your gut.

My wife and I recently bought tea. It’s delicious. But on the package, it says probiotics in big, bold letters with a line underneath, “Supports Healthy Digestion.” Umm… no. I don’t think so. That goes to a much larger issue about labels and companies being able to say whatever they want, but we’ll leave that for another time.

How much fiber and fermented foods do you need? The general recommendation for fiber is 15 or 16 grams per 1,000 calories you consume. For most of us, that’s roughly 25-35 grams per day. If your diet is low on both, start by adding both in a little at a time. I made the mistake of going overboard on my fiber intake when I started this process. Major rookie move. Unless you want to be sick to your stomach and spend much of your day on the toilet, I don’t recommend that approach. Similarly, with fermented foods, start slowly and add more over time.

In closing, our gut is little different than Yellowstone. Yellowstone needed the wolves to stem the excess population of elk just as we need prebiotic fiber and probiotic microbes to reduce inflammation in our gut. Both create a healthy, balanced ecosystem. It took Yellowstone more than 25 years to begin flourishing. How long will it take you?

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Other Learning

First, I want to say farewell to Daniel Kahneman. His book, Thinking Fast and Slow, remains one of my favorite books, and his conversations on various podcasts have further helped me avoid the pitfalls my former self was prone to. You can find more here (his 4-part conversation with Annie Duke, Michael Mauboussin, and Josh Wolfe is among my top all-time favorite podcast conversations):

• Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate who upended economics, dies at 90 — Washington Post

• Daniel Kahneman Doesn’t Trust Your Intuition — Re:Thinking w/ Adam Grant

• Risk, Bias, and Decision-Making: Defying the Odds — Lux Capital’s Securities Podcast (4-part series)

  

More Learning…

• 12 Things I Learned from René Girard - Ted Gioia

• A.I. Leaders Press Advantage With Congress as China Tensions Rise — New York Times

• At least 5 interesting things for your weekend — Noah Smith

• On Twitter:

  

“What we have learned is that if you give an enriched source of essential amino acids, more protein, you can actually make the adult look just like the 16-year-old… What we now know is that if you have a requirement that is about twice the minimum RDA — so if instead of 0.8, it’s 1.6 grams per kg — we can get the 65-year-old to respond the same as the 16-year-old as far as muscle protein synthesis.”

Don Layman, Ph.D. in this week’s Worth Listening To episode.

Worth Listening To

Between his podcast and his newsletter, Peter Attia, M.D. publishes some of the best nutrition and health-related content out there. One of the first things he says in this episode is he despises the “religion” of nutrition, and focuses solely on its biochemistry.

• Fatty acids (eating fat) used to be considered the enemy (think food pyramid). Wrong. As we’ve learned, glucose (sugar) is the real enemy.

  • Excess carbs must be disposed of or it becomes toxic to the body. If left in the body, it will damage every part of the body (diabetes) — hence the need for insulin.

• **Keep questioning nutritional dogma** — we used to think trans fats were better than natural fats (i.e. margarine vs. butter)

• Protein turnover and requirements per day — each person’s body has to make ~300 grams of new protein per day, while the average American only consumes ~80 grams per day (1:07:00)

• Plant-based protein requirements vs. Meat-based protein (Quality of protein matters much more as we age)

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Why We Need More Protein Than We Think

Throughout the brief history of this endeavor, we’ve largely discussed behavioral approaches to being healthier, from Arthur Brook’s approach to happiness to Adam Grant’s embracing of imperfection to David Goggins's approach to having an inner dialogue — and very deliberately. In my experience, most people fail to reach their goals because of their own mentality. That includes me.

What if you are doing all the right things, but still not getting the results you should be? You’re working your butt off, showing up, but results are spotty. You’re doing the hard part! Showing up. But your routine likely needs some fine-tuning.

At the beginning of 2024, I wrote about several key elements of nutrition. Over the course of the next few weeks, I will be writing several deep dives into each one. Today, we’re beginning with the nutrient most people don’t come close to getting enough of while also being among the single most important nutrients for health: protein.

The “Bro” Mentality of Protein

Often, when I ask, “Are you getting enough protein?” I feel as though I sound like this. Fair enough. Protein often gets dismissed as trivial because who wants to look like a bodybuilder? As Kyla discussed in her exquisite article about language, words get hijacked to shift meanings and fit narratives. Protein became the “bro” nutrient, the nutrient you need if you want to get “swol”.

It makes sense. Every market has early adopters. The early adopters of protein supplementation were bodybuilders. However, as more and more research has come out, the world is catching up to the realization that protein is vital — especially as we age. In 2010, the entire sports supplementation market was valued at $2.7 billion, and protein wasn’t even among the top 5 most popular supplements. In 2022, it was $25.7 billion, the #1 most popular supplement. That number is expected to more than double by 2030 to $52 billion.

Hidden Workers

Why is protein such a big deal? Protein is simply a block of amino acids. We should focus our attention on amino acids, but unless you took an organic chemistry class, this is where it gets unbelievably confusing.

There are 20 amino acids. Our body produces 11 of them (nonessential amino acids), but we must consume the other 9 (essential amino acids), or we’d quite simply… die (hence why protein is an “essential nutrient” for which we could not live without). So, if you’re reading this, you’re obviously still alive and at least consuming the minimum amount required! Thank goodness for that.

This is so important because when we eat different proteins we’re getting different amino acids. It’s not just about our skeletal muscles, though. Although it is a big part of it. Here’s an example:

Collagen is a protein that strengthens our bones, tendons, ligaments, and skin. What amino acids make collagen protein? Collagen contains 19 of the 20 amino acids, but three make up the bulk of the protein: Arginine, Glycine, and Proline. What do they do?

• Glycine is the most prevalent. It is the do-all amino acid that plays a significant role in producing antioxidants and creatine, improving our sleep, and converting fat to energy.

• Arginine helps with healing wounds, boosting our immune system, and producing nitric oxide, which is vital for our cardiovascular health.

• Proline is vital for our cardiovascular health as well. It helps our arteries maintain elasticity, thus regulating our blood pressure.

Another example is Whey protein, one of the two dairy proteins (the other being Casein). Whey protein is the most commonly used protein for protein powders. Why? It’s comprised mostly of Leucine. Leucine is an essential amino acid and vital for the structure and repair of muscle proteins. It is also important for regulating blood sugar levels and oxidizing omega-3 fatty acids for energy.

If your objective is to build muscle, which protein source would you rather ingest more?

Why Protein Matters

Our muscles are literally proteins built together. If amino acids are individual Lego pieces and proteins are small sets of Legos built together, then our muscles are giant combinations of Lego sets (can you tell I love building Legos?). In our first 25 years of life, building muscle is much easier for both men and women because insulin and testosterone do much of the work for us. However, sarcopenia, the process by which our body naturally loses muscle, begins in our early 30s. By the time we turn 40, building muscle becomes increasingly difficult. Even more when we reach 60 and sarcopenia accelerates. We want to hold on to every bit of muscle we can for our metabolic health and to prevent frailty that can lead to injuries. How do we retain as much muscle as possible?

We know the benefits of exercise. But exercise itself is inherently catabolic, meaning exercise causes your muscles to break down. What is often overlooked is the role of protein. If you aren’t getting a sufficient amount of protein in your diet, instead of repairing and building muscle, you will actually lose muscle. You may get stronger in the short term because you’re increasing your neuromuscular strength — the signal from your brain to contract and relax a muscle — but the physical muscle will not grow.

This is why almost every professional athlete is weaker at the end of their competitive season than at the beginning. They are exercising so rigorously and for so long that no amount of protein can keep up with their physical demands.

Every single protein in our body has a half-life. As proteins age, they degrade and break down while new proteins take their place — a process called protein synthesis. As discussed in this week’s Worth Listening To episode, our liver protein’s half-life is the shortest, turning over almost daily.

Our muscle proteins are a bit different. On average, every three months, our muscles will be comprised of entirely new proteins. This is called muscle protein synthesis (MPS). However, as we age, this turnover process happens much slower, hence why sarcopenia exists.

How do we maximize our muscle protein synthesis? Strength training is a big factor, as the force required to lift weights accelerates the need for MPS. But protein is an equally essential factor.

Layman says it best in his interview on The Drive:

One of my pet peeves in nutrition is people refer to protein as a percentage of calories. Protein is not a percentage of calories, it’s an absolute number. You need to decide what you’re going to build your diet around. The issue with protein being an absolute number, if your calories go down — say you’re a 75-year-old woman and your calories per day is now 1,200 calories — you still have a 100 grams of protein requirement. So now your protein needs are 35-40% of your calories… You have to think about protein first.

In other words, we should be building our diets around protein, then calories second. As opposed to how I was taught over a decade ago that it was all about the calories.

Something I learned from this episode that I had never heard before is that, in addition to muscles being important for preventing injuries and our metabolic health, it is also vital for the health of our organs. Our organs turn proteins over much faster than our muscles. If we take care of our muscles, they will have an ample supply of amino acids our body can then use to replenish our liver, our heart, our kidneys, and every vital organ in our body. Absolutely fascinating!

How Much Protein Do You Need?

The daily recommended daily allowance (RDA) for protein is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. If you’re 150lbs, that’s 68kg, so your RDA would be 54.5 grams of protein per day.

But that number is absolute nonsense.

Every individual I respect in the nutritional realm says we should be consuming at least 1.5 grams of protein per 1kg of body weight. Layman says 1.6 grams per kg. This study, measuring MPS and protein turnover responses to ingesting essential amino acids, came to the conclusion that 1.6 grams per kg is also the proper amount. I even recommend pushing to 1.7 grams per kg if you need to build muscle. So, for that same 150-pound individual, it’s actually between 102-115 grams per day of protein that they should be building their diet around.

That may seem like a daunting task. But think of starting a new training plan and applying the same things we talked about in our Checkpoints and Constraints series. It’s going to take time to get where you need to be; you don’t have to go from 50 to 110 grams all in one day. Here’s an example:

You’re currently at 50 grams per day of protein. Let’s say you’re daily recommendation is 110 grams of protein. You can apply the same checkpoints and constraints as you may to your training plan:

• Constraint: Start by aiming for at least 20 grams of protein in every meal you eat. If you eat at least three meals a day, that will get you to 60 grams — already a 20% increase!

  • Over time, you can try to get to 30 grams per meal or even as much as 40.

  • The important thing is the constraint you set for yourself, pushing yourself to get to that overall number.

• Checkpoint: One small checkpoint is starting with 60 grams of protein per day. Breaking it up into three, 20-gram meals. Each meal is one checkpoint per day, and every day you make it to 60 grams is another. If you can do that every day for a week, two weeks, four weeks, then go to 70 grams. And keep working your way up towards that 110 grams.

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My own daily target is 165 grams per day. It’s difficult, but not if you chunk it into smaller pieces. Here’s how I break my day down so I get enough protein:

• My mornings always start by blending a scoop of Legion Whey protein powder and two scoops of Supergut’s fiber shake powder. Combined, that gives me 37 grams.

• Later in the morning, I have my daily serving of almonds, another 6 grams.

• At midday, I almost always have three eggs with cheese and two slices of Dave’s Seed Bread, which gives me another 35 grams (18 from the eggs, 7 from the cheese, and 10 from the bread).

  • So far, we’re up to 92 grams.

• After my workout, I have another scoop of protein powder, which gives me another 22 grams.

• Then, throughout my afternoon training schedule, I typically have a homemade protein smoothie, which is another 40 grams — most of which comes from Greek Yogurt.

  • Now we’re up to 154 grams, and I have plenty of flexibility with dinner, which often ranges between 15 and 40 grams.

It’s very possible to get enough protein if you’re deliberately aiming for a certain number. The best part is that if your protein comes from different sources, you’re getting all of the amino acids you need, plus other important nutrients that we’ll cover in the upcoming weeks, such as fiber, omega-3 fatty acids, and vitamins and minerals.

You can find lists of proteins everywhere, but my essentials are:

• Meat: Chicken, turkey, and beef (Jasmine and I avoid eating pork at home)

• Dairy: Eggs, Greek yogurt, and milk

• Legumes: We make hummus (chickpeas) every week. Lentils are also terrific, though not a staple for me.

• Nuts: Remember that fat is the primary nutrient in nuts, not protein. Watch how much you consume overall, or the calories add up quickly.

• Green, Leafy Vegetables: Spinach and arugula are our staples. Plants do not provide as many essential amino acids as animals, but they do provide some.

• Powders and ready-made drinks: My personal favorite is a protein shake, primarily because there is a 0% chance I would hit my daily target without it. We always keep protein powder (22 grams), Chobani Completes (20 grams), and Core Power chocolate milk (26 grams) in our house.

If you’re struggling to see results in your training, consider how much protein you are consistently getting every day and where those sources are coming from. Are you getting enough?

If you need help building your nutrition regimen around protein, you can schedule a complimentary virtual consultation with me to get started!

Other Learning This Week:

• Podcasts:

  • Plain English w/ Derek Thompson — How to Have the Hardest Conversations

  • Plain English w/ Derek Thompson — Should the U.S. Ban TikTok?

  • Plain English w/ Derek Thompson — The Dark Side of the Internet’s Obsession With Anxiety

  • Invest Like the Best w/ Patrick O’Shaughnessy — Danny Meyer, The Power of Hospitality

  • Invest Like the Best w/ Patrick O’Shaughnessy — Cyan Banister, Investing for a Higher Purpose

• Articles:

  • David Frum (The Atlantic) — Miranda’s Last Gift (tissues required)

  • Noah Smith — At least five interesting things for the middle of your week (#31)

    • India’s extraordinary reduction in poverty and more.

  • Noah Smith — Are “Luxury Beliefts” a Real Thing?

• On Twitter:

  • Packy McCormick — What a week for the optimists

  • Trung Phan — Neuralink patient “uses the force” to play chess

“Your job is to make a unique contribution. Live a life of purpose… So that, after you’re done, everybody says, ‘the world was better because you were here.’” — Jensen Huang

Worth Listening To

Although these discussions had little to do with health, I kept listening over and over… and over some more. I am currently listening to the first one (again) while typing.

• From the first video: “I never look forward from where I am. I go forward in time and look backward. The reason for that is it’s easier. It’s how you solve problems. You figure out what is the end result you’re looking for and you work backwards to achieve it.” (!!!)

  • If you recall my final post of 2023, 2024: What We Take with Us, I highlighted my favorite podcast episodes of the year. One of them was this incredible episode in which you have Daniel Kahneman, Michael Mauboussin, Annie Duke, and Josh Wolfe discussing pre-mortems — going forward to where you want to be, then looking backward, then asking, “What do I need to do to get here.”

  • You have these four incredibly intelligent people saying this, and now you have the founder and CEO of the third-largest company in the world (by market cap) saying the same thing — clearly, there is something here worth applying.

From the second video:

“People with very high expectations have very low resilience. Unfortunately, resilience matters in success. I don’t know how to teach it to except for, I hope suffering happens to you… I use the words pain and suffering in our company with great glee… You want to refine the character of your company. You want greatness out of them. And greatness isn’t about intelligence; greatness comes from character and character isn’t formed out of smart people, it’s people who’ve suffered… I would wish you ample doses of pain and suffering.”

I’ll end this segment by concluding: Today’s piece is largely about self-reflection. Taking the time to, a) look forward to where you want to be, b) look backward from there to now, and c) ask what steps you need to take to get from here to there. That content like this is free for us to consume to help us on our journey… it blows my mind.

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Other Learning This Week:

• Podcasts:

  • Tech’s Vibe Shift, TikTok Ban Debate, Vertical AI Boom, Florida Bans Lab-Grown Meat & More — All-In Podcast, Ep. 170

    • Their conversation on social media (40:38) is so incredible (Chamath was at the core of scaling Facebook), and important for today’s article below.

  • Derek Thompson: From Acting to the Eminem of Macroeconomic Analysis — “How I Write” with David Perell

  • AI’s Influence on the Economy with Nathan Labenz — “Econ 102” with Noah Smith and Erik Torenberg

• Articles:

  • Trump Just Rug-Pulled the China Hawks on TikTok — Noah Smith

  • You Aren't Upset Enough About the War on Hyperlinks — Adam Singer

  • The Morning: Should China own TikTok? — NYTimes

  • The Morning: Who Needs Affirmative Action? — NYTimes

  • What just happened in San Francisco politics? — Noah Smith (Guest post by Armand Domalewski)

• On Twitter:

  • Fred Rogers on noise & reflection — Our world is so noisy, and self-reflection is incredibly difficult.

  • Cognition AI Releases DEVIN — Enabling everyone to be their own software engineer and creator

Conversations With a Personal Trainer

A fundamental belief I have is that we are far more likely to act when we understand the why. This belief is the core thesis behind offering metabolic testing at Envision Fitness. It was therefore enormously exciting to hear how much value one of you received in going through the results of your test, and what they mean for your nutrition, lifestyle, and exercise planning.

Going into the test, I knew he wasn’t terribly excited. He didn’t think he would learn anything he didn’t already know.

During his review he told me, “This was way more valuable and useful than I expected. Thank you for pushing me to do this.”

Being Healthy in an Age of Social Media

“The Greatest Form of Manipulation is to Convince Someone They Are in Control.” — Robert Green

Last year, I was attempting to figure out how to grow the Envision Brand and was thoroughly stuck. The answer was obvious, but I had resisted for oh so long: Social Media. To grow your brand, you need to be on social media. You need to make people aware you exist.

As we’ve discussed many times in the past weeks, maximizing your potential requires you to leave your comfort zone and do hard things. There is no other way. So, finally, on September 25th, I embarked on a new endeavor with this post on Instagram. It coincided with several other major endeavors, such as beginning this newsletter in early December. “It’s about the long game,” I kept telling myself. Much like starting a health journey, I knew it would take time to see results.

At first, it was almost fun: taking pictures and videos during training sessions, learning how to use Canva, and studying how hashtags work. Again, just like learning to work out for the first time, I was extremely inefficient. Some days, it would take me almost an hour to crank out one post and corresponding story. Nonetheless, it was still enjoyable.

However, I soon found myself remembering why I had largely avoided social media since college.

Taking Time to Reflect

Do you ever spend time sitting quietly and reflecting on your emotional state? I never seriously had in the past. This Blaise Pascall quote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from Man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” springs to mind. At first, Instagram didn’t seem to have many adverse effects. I would only use it on my desktop since I refused to download the app — The only social media app I would allow on my phone was Twitter. The beauty of using the desktop version was zero scrolling. I never scrolled. I uploaded my files, edited them in Canva, posted them, and closed the tabs. The end. But Meta is very clever. To post a story, you need the app. So, I capitulated and downloaded the app.

Scrolling is the worst. Not to mention the colossal time suck, as someone who already struggles with imposter syndrome, it’s easy to fall into doom loops of watching people only show their best selves (although yes, I do enjoy blooper videos). Like the crux of last week’s piece, social media brings my “fuck this” voice to the surface. Not to mention the ads. Every single one seems to be telling you there is something wrong with you and you must buy our product to fix it.

My wife, Jasmine got caught in this, and it was awful to see. Ozempic ads, Monjourno ads, weight loss ads, it was ceaseless. And no, not because she was searching for them. In the latest episode of the All-In podcast, they discuss the TikTok bill trudging its way through Congress. One of the things they debate is the degree to which these apps can ambiently listen to us. In other words, these apps that make money by targetting us with ads not only track the links we click and the searches we make but also the conversations we have.

While the discussion did leave room for the possibility that we’re not being listened to 24/7, the consensus was that we are. It’s also worth noting all four of these men have spent decades working in tech and Chamath was instrumental to Facebook being what it is today.

Our Headspace is Precious

How damaging were these targeted ads? Almost every day, Jasmine said, “I’m one day away from going on Ozempic.” She was miserable. I didn’t initially put two and two together, but eventually, she handed me her phone. Every three posts was an ad for weight loss! It was ridiculous. I immediately showed her how to block these specific ads. Within three days, she was feeling much better about herself.

But ads aren’t the only destructive, manipulative force on social media. Like being back in high school, social media is a game of social hierarchy. You’ve got 100K followers? You must be really important. You post videos showing off your six-pack and “10 Ab Exercises Everyone Should Do,” you must know what you’re talking about.

Meanwhile, instant notifications when someone likes our post create an obscene system of instant gratification that gets the user to keep posting and continues this feedback loop.

We’ve seen the damage this has had on our youth. Jasmine and I have discussed the restrictions we plan to impose on social media use with our own kids many times. But we’re still manipulatable as adults, too.

It’s Not All Bad

With all of that being said, I own a business. I would like to grow and scale it into new streams of income so that my income is not solely dependent on my time. But that is impossible if no one knows who I am. Moreover, social media has many positives as well.

On Twitter, I’ve read numerous posts of people cold DMing others to get jobs. This recent example was extremely heartwarming. In times of crisis, social media is invaluable for many people to check on their loved ones. And, my personal favorite, social media is an exceptional tool to learn new things. There are few places where people of all skill sets post their knowledge and expertise for us to consume freely.

It’s a terrible Catch-22: Social media can cause immense psychological distress, yet it’s essential for keeping up with the present zeitgeist, staying in touch with friends and family, building a network, and, yes, increasing brand awareness.

Crafting A Toolkit

If you’re conscious about your health, that certainly must involve your emotional health. How do you create a filter for yourself to reep the benefits of social media without it adversley affecting your health? I don’t have a good answer. I attempt to apply the following three things as well as possible, but it’s always a work in progress:

1. I am incredibly selective in who I follow on all platforms. Furthermore, when I can, I try to always use a chronological feed, or a feed comprised only of people I follow. This minimizes the adverse effects of the algorithm.

2. Secondly, if I’m in a headspace where I am struggling to stay focused, I don’t go on social media. I only have Twitter and, for now, Instagram on my phone. And my notifications are only on for Twitter.

3. Lastly, I identify each tool for what it is. Twitter, along with Youtube, is an unparalleled ecosystem for learning and interacting with people you want to learn from. The newsletters and podcasts I’ve discovered all came from Twitter. Instagram is for work. Teaching people I wouldn’t normally meet about health, while, hopefully, growing the Envision brand.

I’m sure you use at least one social media platform. How do you use it? Have you ever gone without it for a period of time? If so, did you learn anything about yourself and your use of social media?

Worth Listening To

Yes, I’ve become a tad obsessed with “How I Write” lately… What can I say? David’s podcast is helping me along this writing journey much like I am helping you along your health journey… except he has no idea who I am. But I digress.

• Michael reminds me of the fabulous Einstein quote: “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” His objective is to get his readers to think.

• When you find a “domain expertise,” you realize how much information in that domain is crap and how much room there is for new information.

• Following the same core idea, the same thread, and doing interesting things can help you find an edge and set you apart. Like last week, “Aim not to be the best, but to be the only.”

I also have to include Kyla’s piece here because she is one of the best nonfiction writers of my generation, and this piece summarizes why:

• Kyla Scanlon — Why We Don’t Trust Each Other Anymore

  • Her breakdown of the economy through the lens of language is exceptional, and like much of the content I share with you, she leaves the reader with cause for optimism.

  • Her argument — that our attention is constantly being manipulated and commoditized through confusing and often meaningless language — is simultaneously why I love my work at Envision Fitness and began writing on Substack.

    • We live in a world where our attention and focus are persistently being stripped from us without our being consciously aware. If I can help people like you and me avoid the oncoming tidal wave that’s a massive victory.

  • While she primarily focuses on the economy, her message is equally pertinent regarding our health. We see words; we’re bombarded with headlines to grab our attention; But we’re often only left in a state of greater confusion.

Then there is third part, the other part of the economic reality, the attention economy, in which our eyeballs are very expensive commodities. We have commoditized ourselves to the point where we sort of are what we consume. We’ve assetized our feelings too to give them “value” on a sociological marketplace. Of course we don’t trust.

It doesn’t help that we are using language to come up with words like “doom spending” (the idea that “it’s just easier to spend money on things that will bring you immediate fulfillment”) or things like quiet quitting which shapes the narrative in a weird way because like hello? What does that mean?

But it’s deeper than that.

• It’s the teens being told to become specialists by the age of 18 so they can be cookie cutter perfect for college.

• It’s the cars becoming monochromatic. Safety is found in standardization.

• It is adjacent to the hyperoptimization required to exist in some elements of the digital world, as Rebcecca Jennings explored in Everyone’s a Sellout Now. She writes

“The commodification of the self is now seen as the only route to any kind of economic security.”

Strikingly similar to what it means to be healthy, no?

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Conversations With a Personal Trainer

I met with this particular client three times this week. She deals with terrible, chronic neck pain. She also recently started running during the day to escape from her computer and move more. She told me when she runs, her neck hurts less.

On Thursday, she told me she hadn’t been running all week, and her neck had also been hurting. I suggested she go for a run later in the day.

She came in Friday morning and said she ran yesterday. I asked how her neck felt. With a big smile on her face, “So much better!”

Little consistencies go a long way.

Constraints: An Optimal Tool for Optimizing Health

If you’ve been listening to each week’s “Worth Listening To” episode(s), a common thread emerges. Whether the focus is on writing, nutrition, fitness, or happiness, each individual has a similar framework involving constraints. One observation is that, while different in application, their intended use is the same: better results.

It wasn’t until writing this newsletter I realized how many crossovers there are between, well, everything. Each week, you and I face a choice: There is always a part of me that says, “fuck this, what is the point?” Always. And I’m sure you can relate. That voice may never go away. But with each passing week, when we stay consistent, that voice gets slightly quieter. Like my previous edition about David Goggins and our internal dialogue, each of us faces a similar choice with our health.

How we suppress that “fuck this” voice is where most of us get tripped up. Just look at the fitness industry: In 2019, approximately 80% of January signups quit within their first five months. While that is staggering, it’s not surprising either. Learning a new skill is hard. Writing does not come naturally to me at all. As Kevin Kelly says, “I am a reluctant writer.” And he is one of the most prolific writers of all time! Why do I do it?

David Perell put out an excellent tweet which sums up why:

It’s a way of learning new things, connecting the dots, ensuring I remember where those dots originated from in the first place, and making room for new ideas. Like exercise, I do it because it’s good for me, and I feel better afterward.

Where do constraints fit in? Naval Ravikant has an exceptionally fitting quote about his morning workout routine:

“I do 20 minutes of cardio first thing in the morning, before I eat. It’s a great way to get the blood flowing, and it also helps me think better throughout the day.”

“The daily morning workout. That has been a complete game-changer. It’s made me feel healthier, younger. It’s made me not go out late…It’s pretty much every day. There are a few days where I’ve had to take a break because I’m traveling, or I’m injured or sick or something. I can count on one hand the number of breaks I take every year.” - Naval Ravikant

20 minutes every morning before eating and before working. Forcing yourself to accomplish your objective in a restricted amount of time.

The constraints that help me a) exercise and b) write this newsletter are very similar. Time. Prior to Covid I would spend two hours, or more, at the gym almost every day (What I could do with that kind of time now…). But, much of that time was wasted. Taking long rest breaks, getting water, and yes, the greatest destructor of all productivity, scrolling. Now, time is far more salient. I need constraints, or nothing gets done. Here is how I try to structure my day:

• Earliest available 30-minute window in the morning: Complete at least 15 minutes of cardio.

• Between 11am-11:30, read.

• Between 11:30-12:30, work on my newsletter.

• One hour before my first afternoon appointment, leave for the gym and strength train for 45 minutes.

Each window is very strategic:

• Cardio in the morning increases circulation and wakes me up (and will hopefully boost my atrocious VO2 max score).

• Reading takes my mind away from training and helps me pivot my focus.

• Working daily on the newsletter helps prevent my “fuck this” voice from winning.

• Strength training in the mid-afternoon gets me back into training mode.

Within each constraint, there are smaller constraints and checkpoints to help chunk each task. However, there is just one catch.

While these are my ideal constraints, I am far from perfect at accomplishing them. Case-in-point, I’m sending this newsletter out on a Sunday when another constraint I try to employ is my Friday deadline. Further still, while writing this, my wife is watching “Wonka” on Netflix and I just took a 10-minute detour down the rabbit hole of Googling Timothy Chalamet. Less than ideal.

However, these constraints are slowly taking shape, little by little. Three weeks ago, we discussed building your own time budget to spend more time on your health. This is mine. Where do you build constraints into your life to stay consistent and prevent your “fuck this” voice from winning? Where can you improve?

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Other Learning This Week:

• Securities by Lux Capital — Pivitol Pivots

  • An incredible piece on American foreign policy.

• David Brooks — Chicken Littles are Ruining America

  • The danger of doomers on both sides and finding a middle ground.

• Adam Grant — No, You Don’t Owe Me a Favor

  • Generosity is because not we want to, not for a favor in return.

• Noah Smith — Defending the status quo is not environmentalism

  • Real environmentalism vs. “Not in My Backyard (NIMBY)” environmentalism.

• Jerusalem Demsas — The Culture War Tearing American Environmentalism Apart

  • Minneapolis’ 2040 plan.

• Tim Urban — Wait but Why: A Short History of My Last Six Years

  • The process he went through to write his recent book, What’s Our Problem?