Entropy Enthusiast
Chicago, IL
Joined November 2019
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I ran a 4:17 mile when I was in high school, which was good at the time, but gave me a great perspective shift when I realized just how far the tails were in that domain
This can extrapolated to any domain (finance, academics, etc), so let me explain:
There were a couple hs guys up to that point who had run sub 4... An 18 second difference when I had already trained consistently for 7 years prior was absurd, regardless of the mindset/beliefs/training/coaching I applied
If you extrapolate even further, 3:42 is quite literally worlds away from what I did - The difference of a couple seconds at 3:40's level is oftentimes years of training if you are even lucky enough to have the genetics capable of running that. Many normal people would tell me "wow! 4:17 is so fast, are you going to the Olympics one day?" with zero idea just how wide the spreads are
Btw: In D1 athletics, you could be a 3:56 miler in 2025 and would still not qualify for indoor Nationals
After high school is when I started to understand:
1. The average person has absolutely no idea how far the tails are in any domain
2. You MUST find what you are inherently gifted at. I was not 'gifted' in athletics - I was really good - but not Great enough to get to the next level beyond D1 (.0001% of world)
3. You have no idea who you are dealing with. You have to constantly be aware of who you're in the room with, because there are such substantial deviations in regards to intelligence that the average person cannot even begin to comprehend how smart the person across from them could actually be (When you meet these people, humble yourself)
4. In regards to 3. Just because someone is turbocharged in one domain does NOT make them balanced. Extremes on one end tend to develop inefficiencies elsewhere. There's always value to be exchanged between parties if you feel out what their strengths/weaknesses are (most ppl are oblivious of this and prefer to sit in their own curated worlds of delusion)
5. Once you truly max yourself out in a domain for a decade+, you start to naturally pattern match for absolute talent elsewhere. There are quite a few characteristics that make someone great or give them the potential to become great. I am convinced you need to experience that journey yourself and be surrounded by literal greatness to fully feel it in others - Unfortunately, it is not something you can just learn in a book
Ben Calusinski retweeted
There’s a really fascinating dynamic occurring in modern times that I don’t think we’ve fully understood yet, and that’s the hyper-individualization of belief systems as a result of social media algorithms
For most of civilized human history, societies have operated within shared religious and legal structures. These systems provided a common framework for understanding reality, determining right from wrong, keeping people within certain bounds, etc. Obviously, they had their flaws, but they also gave people a shared understanding of the world
Now we’re entering a period where the information available to the average person exposes contradictions in these inherited belief systems. You can be born into a religion or political ideology and spend your entire life believing it’s the truth because everyone around you shares that worldview. Then you get online and discover thousands of people with completely different explanations for reality, some of whom are just as intelligent and have arrived at their conclusions through entirely different experiences
But social media even takes it a step further now. The modern algorithm learns which belief systems you’re psychologically drawn toward, based on your psychology profile, and feeds you more of them
Your shadow, in a sense, becomes part of the mechanism through which your information environment gets constructed. If you have an underlying need for certainty, you’ll be drawn toward content that makes the world feel more explainable. If you have resentment toward authority, you’ll find communities that validate your distrust, etc.
Over time, two people can belong to the same religion, political movement, or philosophical tradition yet have radically different interpretations of what it actually means. Eventually, they develop entirely different worldviews while still using the same label to describe themselves
And this will compound because the algorithm is helping you construct a world view that’s increasingly optimized around your own psychological tendencies
The fascinating part is that this can happen to incredibly intelligent people. In fact, intelligence can make the process even harder to recognize because you’re better at constructing logical arguments to defend conclusions you’re already attached to. You think you’re independently arriving at the truth, when you’re participating in a feedback loop where your beliefs determine what information you consume, that information reinforces your beliefs, and your identity becomes increasingly tied to the conclusions you’ve reached
This is why the shadow work aspect is so interesting to me. Two people can encounter the exact same information and extract completely different meanings because they’re interpreting it through different experiences, insecurities, and desires. If the algorithm keeps feeding each person content that validates their interpretation, both can become increasingly convinced they’re seeing reality clearly while becoming less capable of understanding the other person’s perspective
I’m curious to see where this goes long term, because I think we’re going to see both ends of the spectrum become more extreme. People will have more information and greater ability to question inherited assumptions, but they’ll also be able to construct increasingly personalized ideological bubbles that are difficult to escape because they’re tailored to exactly what they want to believe
One of the most valuable skills in the future may be the ability to distinguish between something you believe because you’ve genuinely investigated it and something you believe because it satisfies a psychological need
There’s a really fascinating dynamic occurring in modern times that I don’t think we’ve fully understood yet, and that’s the hyper-individualization of belief systems as a result of social media algorithms
For most of civilized human history, societies have operated within shared religious and legal structures. These systems provided a common framework for understanding reality, determining right from wrong, keeping people within certain bounds, etc. Obviously, they had their flaws, but they also gave people a shared understanding of the world
Now we’re entering a period where the information available to the average person exposes contradictions in these inherited belief systems. You can be born into a religion or political ideology and spend your entire life believing it’s the truth because everyone around you shares that worldview. Then you get online and discover thousands of people with completely different explanations for reality, some of whom are just as intelligent and have arrived at their conclusions through entirely different experiences
But social media even takes it a step further now. The modern algorithm learns which belief systems you’re psychologically drawn toward, based on your psychology profile, and feeds you more of them
Your shadow, in a sense, becomes part of the mechanism through which your information environment gets constructed. If you have an underlying need for certainty, you’ll be drawn toward content that makes the world feel more explainable. If you have resentment toward authority, you’ll find communities that validate your distrust, etc.
Over time, two people can belong to the same religion, political movement, or philosophical tradition yet have radically different interpretations of what it actually means. Eventually, they develop entirely different worldviews while still using the same label to describe themselves
And this will compound because the algorithm is helping you construct a world view that’s increasingly optimized around your own psychological tendencies
The fascinating part is that this can happen to incredibly intelligent people. In fact, intelligence can make the process even harder to recognize because you’re better at constructing logical arguments to defend conclusions you’re already attached to. You think you’re independently arriving at the truth, when you’re participating in a feedback loop where your beliefs determine what information you consume, that information reinforces your beliefs, and your identity becomes increasingly tied to the conclusions you’ve reached
This is why the shadow work aspect is so interesting to me. Two people can encounter the exact same information and extract completely different meanings because they’re interpreting it through different experiences, insecurities, and desires. If the algorithm keeps feeding each person content that validates their interpretation, both can become increasingly convinced they’re seeing reality clearly while becoming less capable of understanding the other person’s perspective
I’m curious to see where this goes long term, because I think we’re going to see both ends of the spectrum become more extreme. People will have more information and greater ability to question inherited assumptions, but they’ll also be able to construct increasingly personalized ideological bubbles that are difficult to escape because they’re tailored to exactly what they want to believe
One of the most valuable skills in the future may be the ability to distinguish between something you believe because you’ve genuinely investigated it and something you believe because it satisfies a psychological need
People dont seem to realize that in the case of rising unemployment in a correction, the Fed would continue to backstop markets, even at the expense of the consumer, because the AI trade is effectively a bet on the only plausible way out of our existing fiscal situation
The problem is that we’ve built an economy on top of a debt structure that can’t sustain itself indefinitely without some kind of fundamental shift in the underlying economics. We can continue to issue debt, expand liquidity and use the dollar’s geopolitical position to buy ourselves more time, but none of that actually solves the underlying problem
2008 was obv the turning point. QE gave us a mechanism to stabilize the system by expanding the Fed’s balance sheet and injecting liquidity into financial markets. It worked, but it also established a post-ZIRP precedent that when the system comes under enough pressure, the response is to intervene and buy time. The question is how many times you can repeat that process before the cost of maintaining the system starts to outweigh the benefits
You can already see the tension in the relationship between financial assets and the underlying currency, and in the growing concentration of asset ownership. The people who own the majority of equities are not the same people who depend on wages to sustain their standard of living. So if we get a scenario where AI drives unemployment materially higher, the Fed can potentially stabilize asset prices while the consumer economy deteriorates underneath it
Therefore, markets can recover without employment recovering
The current bet our nation and markets are making is that AI, eventually progressing toward AGI, creates enough productivity and economic output to fundamentally change the fiscal equation. If intelligence and labor become dramatically cheaper, the economy could generate enough real output to support a system that otherwise becomes increasingly difficult to finance
Ofc there’s a huge assumption embedded in this thesis (that we actually get there, and that the resulting productivity is large enough to offset the liabilities we’ve accumulated). Printing money doesn’t create the real economic output needed to service debt indefinitely. At some point, you need a genuine increase in productive capacity or a restructuring of the system
The bond market matters here too because it puts a constraint on the idea that governments can simply finance everything forever. You can create liquidity, but you CANT guarantee that investors will continue to absorb government debt on whatever terms policymakers would prefer
The U.S. is simultaneously competing with China for a technology that could reshape economic and military power for decades. That makes AI investment a national security priority, which changes the government’s incentives considerably. Even if the short-term economic consequences are painful, the cost of falling behind in that race could be perceived as much greater
So my base thesis is that policymakers will have an enormous incentive to keep the financial system functioning through the transition, even if the benefits accrue disproportionately to capital while workers absorb the immediate costs
A scenario worth considering is what happens if we get a 20-30% correction in the market over the next couple years (think 2022), before we’ve actually built the infrastructure to deal with the economic consequences of AI
We’ve had corrections like this plenty of times before. The difference now is that when companies are forced to cut costs, they have a technology that can actually replace a growing percentage of their workforce. And because everybody is so heavily invested in the AI trade, they have an even bigger incentive to make it work. They can’t just sit around burning cash and hope valuations recover - just look at what tech is doing right now even at ATH’s
So they start cutting employees and replacing them with AI even faster than now. But unlike previous recessions, when the economy eventually recovered, there’s no reason to hire all those people back if the models can do the same work for a fraction of the cost. The economy can recover without employment recovering proportionally
Now the problem is that we’ve accelerated the timeline of something that’s ALREADY happening. The models keep getting better, companies keep finding more ways to automate, and we have a large number of people entering an economy where their previous skills are becoming less valuable. But we haven’t built the systems to deal with what happens when a significant percentage of the population is no longer needed in the labor market
Ideally, AI capabilities and economic output continue growing while we gradually figure out how to distribute the gains. Different ownership models, tokenization, some form of UBI, whatever that ends up looking like. But a premature correction could force the transition to happen much faster than the institutions responsible for managing it can adapt
Ofc this is a main reason why the Fed will continue to backstop the market at all costs, since the entire market is organized around AGI solving the debt crisis at this point, but it really makes you think “what if we have a 2022 prolonged scenario again?” The odds of this hypothetical increase a bit more with even more liquidity sucked out by frontier IPO’s approaching
A scenario worth considering is what happens if we get a 20-30% correction in the market over the next couple years (think 2022), before we’ve actually built the infrastructure to deal with the economic consequences of AI
We’ve had corrections like this plenty of times before. The difference now is that when companies are forced to cut costs, they have a technology that can actually replace a growing percentage of their workforce. And because everybody is so heavily invested in the AI trade, they have an even bigger incentive to make it work. They can’t just sit around burning cash and hope valuations recover - just look at what tech is doing right now even at ATH’s
So they start cutting employees and replacing them with AI even faster than now. But unlike previous recessions, when the economy eventually recovered, there’s no reason to hire all those people back if the models can do the same work for a fraction of the cost. The economy can recover without employment recovering proportionally
Now the problem is that we’ve accelerated the timeline of something that’s ALREADY happening. The models keep getting better, companies keep finding more ways to automate, and we have a large number of people entering an economy where their previous skills are becoming less valuable. But we haven’t built the systems to deal with what happens when a significant percentage of the population is no longer needed in the labor market
Ideally, AI capabilities and economic output continue growing while we gradually figure out how to distribute the gains. Different ownership models, tokenization, some form of UBI, whatever that ends up looking like. But a premature correction could force the transition to happen much faster than the institutions responsible for managing it can adapt
Ofc this is a main reason why the Fed will continue to backstop the market at all costs, since the entire market is organized around AGI solving the debt crisis at this point, but it really makes you think “what if we have a 2022 prolonged scenario again?” The odds of this hypothetical increase a bit more with even more liquidity sucked out by frontier IPO’s approaching
One of my favorite things is meeting really unique minds from around the world and discovering that we’ve arrived at similar truths despite coming from completely different backgrounds
At first, it’s cool when you meet someone who’s exceptional in a domain like physics, for example, and you realize they’ve independently arrived at something you’ve also discovered through your own experiences. But then it keeps happening across different fields, with people who’ve lived completely different lives, and you start noticing a pattern
The further someone progresses in a field, the more certain truths they seem to discover about themselves and the world. And what’s fascinating is that these truths often extend far beyond the field itself
It makes you realize that a lot of these truths aren’t specific to any one discipline, instead they’re properties of reality that you can discover from different directions if you go deep enough. There’s something uniquely satisfying about this that seems to keep getting even better the more unique ppl you meet
At a certain level of wealth, you start to understand that money is being used for something very different than what most people imagine
The average person thinks about the material things and experiences they can buy, which obviously are fun, but aren’t nearly as fulfilling as people project onto them. The interesting thing about a lot of the OG business guys is that they’re using money as a way to create energy, test ideas, and learn about the world. Money essentially becomes a data point
For example, you have an intuitive bet that something could work, so you put resources behind it and see what happens. Obviously, not every bet pays off financially. But even the bets that fail can teach you things you otherwise wouldn’t have learned
This is why I’ve never really understood the mindset of treating every bad purchase as a failure, scam, etc. I’ve bought courses when I was younger that, in retrospect, weren’t worth what I paid for them. But I still learned how the person sold to me, what made me susceptible to their pitch, what projections I had onto them, and what weaknesses in myself I needed to understand. I also got a much better sense of how that person operated and where energy was flowing in the market. By actually buying into the ecosystem, I could understand it from the inside in a way I couldn’t just by observing it
And this isn’t about convincing yourself that you never lose. You obviously can make bad decisions, get manipulated, or waste money. The point is that you can extract information from an experience even when the financial return is negative. Sometimes the most valuable thing you learn is about your own judgment
It’s the same with investing. You wouldn’t say the stock market is a scam because you took a position and lost money. You’re making a bet under uncertainty, and the goal is to get good enough at identifying opportunities that your positive outcomes outweigh your losses over time
This is a much more interesting way to use money that is unfortunately not talked about enough
Something I’d really caution intelligent guys on with ‘self-work’ is not to dismiss it as woo-woo just because you can’t logically explain it
You can construct a narrative in your head for why you’re right about everything, why other people are ignorant, and why your overthinking is actually a sign that you’re smarter than them. BUT you still have to live with the experience of being yourself
And if you’re chronically anxious, constantly overthinking, and not enjoying your life, what exactly have you gained by being intellectually ‘superior’ to someone who’s genuinely happy?
I used to fall into this myself. You look at people who seem to be living more freely and tell yourself they’re just ignorant, and eventually reality will catch up with them. And sure, sometimes it will. But if you spend years being miserable while waiting for some black swan event to prove you right, what have you actually gained? Even if it happens, you’re still left dealing with the consequences
This is where the ego gets really clever. You can become so attached to the possibility of being right that you start getting a little dopamine hit from constructing arguments that validate your worldview. But none of that changes your actual experience. You’re still miserable, except now you’ve convinced yourself there’s a good reason for it
The point of intelligence is to use that intelligence to create a life you actually enjoy living
The more I’ve worked through my own internal blockages, the more energy, ideas, focus, and spontaneity I’ve suddenly had available
What’s incredible is it’s not even like I’m forcing myself to work harder either, It’s almost the opposite. There’s less resistance between having an idea and actually acting on it, because I’m no longer operating from this place of obligation where my identity requires me to achieve something
I think there’s a huge difference between doing something because you feel like you have to, because you’ve identified yourself as someone who needs to succeed, and doing something because you genuinely want to express yourself through it. I now realize that the first comes with a lot of internal friction. The second feels much more free-flowing, and the amount of output you can generate from that place is honestly incredible
And there’s a whole process to getting there, because you have to start seeing through the identities you’ve built your life around. But once you do, you start getting back energy that was previously going toward maintaining those identities and fighting yourself
The funny thing is, I never did any of this to make more money or become better at business, for example. I was just trying to get closer to the truth about myself. But the further I got, the more everything else has followed
Which has made me realize that a lot of people are trying to solve an output problem by adding more discipline, systems, etc. when some of the biggest gains might actually come from removing the internal resistance that’s preventing them from operating freely in the first place
All these workshops, courses, and coaching on how to do x y z are useless if the vessel (you) that has to implement them and iterate on the fly is ‘faulty’
The more I’ve worked through my own internal blockages, the more energy, ideas, focus, and spontaneity I’ve suddenly had available
What’s incredible is it’s not even like I’m forcing myself to work harder either, It’s almost the opposite. There’s less resistance between having an idea and actually acting on it, because I’m no longer operating from this place of obligation where my identity requires me to achieve something
I think there’s a huge difference between doing something because you feel like you have to, because you’ve identified yourself as someone who needs to succeed, and doing something because you genuinely want to express yourself through it. I now realize that the first comes with a lot of internal friction. The second feels much more free-flowing, and the amount of output you can generate from that place is honestly incredible
And there’s a whole process to getting there, because you have to start seeing through the identities you’ve built your life around. But once you do, you start getting back energy that was previously going toward maintaining those identities and fighting yourself
The funny thing is, I never did any of this to make more money or become better at business, for example. I was just trying to get closer to the truth about myself. But the further I got, the more everything else has followed
Which has made me realize that a lot of people are trying to solve an output problem by adding more discipline, systems, etc. when some of the biggest gains might actually come from removing the internal resistance that’s preventing them from operating freely in the first place
All these workshops, courses, and coaching on how to do x y z are useless if the vessel (you) that has to implement them and iterate on the fly is ‘faulty’
The stronger sense of ‘self’ you develop, the less it feels like you want to judge people, BUT the more you also realize how important accountability actually is
When you start recognizing behaviors in other people that you once had yourself, you develop a much deeper understanding of why people do what they do. You can clearly see how much of it is unconscious and how trauma/conditioning compound over time
That naturally makes us less judgmental. However, something I’ve been noticing is there’s a difference between understanding why someone behaves a certain way and excusing the behavior itself
We need less judgment of people, but NOT lower standards for their behavior
If you understand everyone so deeply that you can explain away everything they do, you eventually lose the ability to hold anyone accountable. People don’t necessarily learn just because you understand them. Tbh, most people aren’t interested in learning at all…
This all comes down to sharing your actual opinion, even when it’s uncomfortable. You can’t be open to every possibility to the point where you stand for nothing. You need boundaries and to actually enforce them, otherwise people will quite literally keep doing whatever they want
Most people aren’t even consciously trying to take advantage of you, which is a whole other topic
The goal of this type of work seems to be understanding people well enough that your judgments become more accurate, less reactive/personal, while still being firm about what you will and won’t accept
I worked/traded in 20 different countries for ~2yrs to see what it was like
Met many of these nomad types, they were disproportionately women (23-33yrs old)
What I will say is there's certainly a huge personal benefit to being well travelled, beyond the obvious fun, novelty, and adventure. HOWEVER, it became very apparent to me there was something severely wrong with anyone who lived this life for more than a couple years, especially the closer they got to ~30... I see the problem akin to the really odd millennial contingent with a disturbing Disney-park obsession, except nomads tend to have slightly more IQ points, affording them at least some form of a basic contracting gig
Anyways, many of the women nomads would fill their days with 'work,' which consisted of some type of useless freelance design job or HR-type role, where they would hop on pointless calls that ended with absolutely nothing getting done and even more confusion than when the call started
When they weren't 'working,' it would be a continuous loop of backpacking sidequest trips to spots they found on TikTok or Instagram, hanging out/sleeping with hostel friends they would never see again, or performative coffee shop reading/working
There was an incredible amount of emotional baggage that the women nomad types carried as well, likely related to the absurdly high body counts they amassed across the globe (who would've thought)
The story eventually became so predictable that whenever i'd meet someone who told me they were "travelling to find themselves," or something along those lines, I would ensure the convo ended within the next couple minutes
met a german girl in bali.
27, travelling solo, quit her job to “find herself.”
no house, no savings, still paying off her student loans.
told me she doesn’t want kids because she wants to see the world first.
her biggest achievement this year was watching the sunset in 8 different countries.
instagram sold her a lifestyle she can’t afford.
i wish her the best.
One of the funniest things about intelligence is that you can logic yourself into almost anything, including misery
You can construct a perfectly coherent narrative for why your life is the way it is or why something won’t work. And you can keep doing that indefinitely because there’s always another argument you can make
But at some point, you’re just using your intelligence to avoid experiencing reality directly
I like to look at this thru the lens of sports. You can understand the physics of throwing a football, analyze technique, and explain exactly what makes Tom Brady great. But none of that makes you Tom Brady. There’s a difference between understanding something conceptually and actually embodying it
And it seems this is a distinction that a lot of intelligent people struggle with. They become so good at understanding things that they start confusing the ability to explain something with the ability to actually live it
Which is why I put so much weight on direct experience. Does someone actually have the life you want? Are they genuinely happy, or do you just like the projection of their life? You can learn a lot from what someone says, but eventually you have to look at how they actually live
The people I tend to respect most have a certain gravity to them. They’re not constantly trying to convince you of something or construct an argument for why they’re doing well. They’ve built a life they actually enjoy and you can feel the difference
Even if some random guy knows less than you, but spends most of his days genuinely content, what exactly have you gained by being intellectually superior to him while making yourself miserable?
The point is NOT to abandon your intellect btw. It’s to use it as a tool to create a life you actually want to experience
You can always find another argument. The mind never runs out of material
At some point, you have to stop trying to think your way into the experience and actually experience it. Otherwise, all that intelligence is just theory
The purpose of understanding reality is ultimately to live better within it
The people I respect most are the ones who can talk big, but are equally willing to submit themselves to reality and find out whether they’re right
Something else I’ve been thinking about is whether your ego influences how you interpret your experiences AND possibly determines what you’re able to extract from them in the first place
The way I see it, whatever becomes your dominant personality structure, whether that’s arrogance, insecurity, the need for validation, etc. becomes a kind of filter through which you process your intuitive signal. You still have all these experiences and all this information being integrated below conscious awareness, but the meaning you derive from it is constrained by the framework you’re operating within
And the interesting thing is that you don’t consciously choose most of these filters. They develop through some combination of genetics, upbringing/experiences, and eventually become so automatic that you mistake them for the way reality actually is
What’s also fascinating is that contemplative traditions seem to converge on something quite different as the end goal: approaching yourself and the world with greater openness, curiosity, and less attachment to your existing identity. You’re still able to recognize other people’s intentions, but you’re less compelled to interpret everything through your own needs and assumptions
And even from a purely strategic standpoint, this makes sense to me. If you’re constantly filtering your experiences through the need to feel superior, be validated, or extract something from the external world, you’re potentially discarding an enormous amount of information that doesn’t fit your existing framework
Whereas if you can observe things with genuine curiosity, without immediately needing them to reinforce your identity, you give yourself access to a much broader range of information and experience. And ironically, that might also be what makes you happier, because you’re no longer dependent on the external world constantly confirming the person you think you need to be
Obviously, this is a hypothesis, and I don’t think we have the science to establish the full mechanism I’m describing. But I find it interesting that the process of becoming less identified with your ego might simultaneously improve your ability to perceive reality accurately and make you less dependent on it behaving a certain way
The unconscious and intuition are fascinating to me, because it seems as if the conscious mind is operating on a much smaller subset of your total available intelligence
Which means if you can find a way to unlock more of its wisdom, it has the capacity to drastically change your life
What most ppl don’t seem to realize is that all of your experiences are being compressed into language and narratives in your mind that allow you to consciously reason with them. BUT that representation is incomplete. You actually have an enormous amount of information stored across your experiences that you can’t necessarily articulate, but that can still influence your perception and decisions
I like to this of this akin to an LLM operating within a narrow context window. If you’re talking to someone about the stock market, your thinking is naturally constrained by that topic, and you’re less likely to pull in something you learned from an entirely different domain that might actually be relevant. The information STILL exists, but your conscious attention isn’t accessing it (my hunch is that it’s energetically costly to context switch, but that’s a topic for another day)
Intuition seems to be one way that this broader intelligence expresses itself tho. Your brain can integrate patterns across experiences without you having to consciously retrieve and reason through each one. The result is a feeling or a sense that something is right or wrong, even when you can’t fully explain why via the ‘rational’ mind and language
You see this in elite athletes all the time, chess masters, the best traders, etc… When a hockey goalie like the guy below has milliseconds to react to a puck, there’s no time to consciously calculate the optimal response. The thinking mind is simply too slow. The athlete has to trust a much more deeply integrated form of pattern recognition that has been developed through thousands of hours of experience
And I think this generalizes far beyond sports too. There’s a time to slow down and think deliberately to plan a general path (think: technique to play goalie position), but there’s also a time when continued analysis actually interferes with your ability to act on what you already know (game)
I often wonder if we’ve all become so identified with the conscious mind in this day and age of “information abundance” that we mistake its limited, verbal representation of reality for the totality of our intelligence
If intuition can truly integrate more of your experiences than you can consciously articulate, then learning to access it is quite literally the single greatest thing you can do for your life (and everyone around you too)
The unconscious and intuition are fascinating to me, because it seems as if the conscious mind is operating on a much smaller subset of your total available intelligence
Which means if you can find a way to unlock more of its wisdom, it has the capacity to drastically change your life
What most ppl don’t seem to realize is that all of your experiences are being compressed into language and narratives in your mind that allow you to consciously reason with them. BUT that representation is incomplete. You actually have an enormous amount of information stored across your experiences that you can’t necessarily articulate, but that can still influence your perception and decisions
I like to this of this akin to an LLM operating within a narrow context window. If you’re talking to someone about the stock market, your thinking is naturally constrained by that topic, and you’re less likely to pull in something you learned from an entirely different domain that might actually be relevant. The information STILL exists, but your conscious attention isn’t accessing it (my hunch is that it’s energetically costly to context switch, but that’s a topic for another day)
Intuition seems to be one way that this broader intelligence expresses itself tho. Your brain can integrate patterns across experiences without you having to consciously retrieve and reason through each one. The result is a feeling or a sense that something is right or wrong, even when you can’t fully explain why via the ‘rational’ mind and language
You see this in elite athletes all the time, chess masters, the best traders, etc… When a hockey goalie like the guy below has milliseconds to react to a puck, there’s no time to consciously calculate the optimal response. The thinking mind is simply too slow. The athlete has to trust a much more deeply integrated form of pattern recognition that has been developed through thousands of hours of experience
And I think this generalizes far beyond sports too. There’s a time to slow down and think deliberately to plan a general path (think: technique to play goalie position), but there’s also a time when continued analysis actually interferes with your ability to act on what you already know (game)
I often wonder if we’ve all become so identified with the conscious mind in this day and age of “information abundance” that we mistake its limited, verbal representation of reality for the totality of our intelligence
If intuition can truly integrate more of your experiences than you can consciously articulate, then learning to access it is quite literally the single greatest thing you can do for your life (and everyone around you too)
Being aware of your projections is really important because they influence how you perceive people and how you behave around them
The more aware you become of your projections, the more freedom you will have to see people clearly and your life will quite literally change in front of your eyes
One form is projecting a certain state onto someone. Everyone knows the classic wifi-money guru example where they do this all the time with Lamborghinis, designer clothes, attractive women, etc. The reason it works is that people (often young guys) project what they imagine it feels like to live that life onto the external things they’re seeing. They don’t actually know what that state feels like, but the projection alone is enough to change what they want and how they behave in pursuit of it. Essentially, it’s attention arbitrage
HOWEVER, the more important form I want to talk about is projecting onto people themselves irl. As a guy, when you interact with someone who has a lot of money, power, or intelligence, it’s easy to unconsciously elevate them above yourself. You start responding to your idea of who they are rather than seeing them as reality
Obviously, external differences are real. If you’re talking to Elon Musk, there’s probably a lot you could learn by shutting up and listening. But that doesn’t mean he’s a fundamentally different category of human being. You can respect someone’s capabilities without turning them into someone you need validation from (you’d be surprised how much respect ppl give you when you naturally do this)
The distinction is understanding that you’re on equal ground as a human being, even when you’re nowhere near equal in external accomplishments, which requires HUMILITY
I think people who’ve done genuine self-work start to understand this intuitively. They can recognize themselves in other people without needing to diminish them or elevate them and then they can naturally empathize while maintaining boundaries
Because projections distort both sides of an interaction. You can turn someone into a figure they never actually were, or reduce them to what you think you can get out of them. In both cases, you’re interacting with your own (ego) construction of that person rather than the person themselves
Drop your ego and interact with ppl out of pure wonder for once… it’s truly amazing what happens to your life as a result
One thing I’ve been experimenting with recently is dual awareness, and I think there’s a lot more depth to this than people realize
Attention is arguably the most finite resource we have, because wherever your attention goes is where your energy gets directed, and wherever your energy gets directed is where output is created
At a macro level, this is pretty obvious. Attention attracts money, which is why distribution is so valuable in business. But the same dynamic plays out at a much more local level, even in everyday interactions
For example, when you’re talking to a group of people, it’s very easy to unconsciously fall into someone else’s state if you don’t have a strong sense of self. Instead of maintaining awareness of yourself while also being present with the other person, your attention collapses into them. You start orbiting them to various degrees, and you might not even realize it’s happening until afterward, when you wonder why you behaved the way you did
Some people are exceptionally good at pulling attention toward themselves, especially when they have charisma, status, or some form of power behind them. And this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good people or that their way of being is worth adopting either. It just means they have a stronger gravitational pull in that interaction
You see this in business negotiations all the time too. The person with more power often controls the environment, the framing, and the flow of attention. There’s a reason negotiations happen on someone’s yacht or in their offices rather than on neutral ground. Before a word is even spoken, the environment can already influence how people perceive themselves in relation to the other person
The interesting thing is that this happens EVERYDAY to varying degrees and most of it is below conscious awareness. You can leave an interaction thinking it was fine, without realizing how much your attention was directed by the other person
And I think the real skill here is learning to maintain a strong internal reference point while remaining fully aware of the person in front of you. This is NOT withdrawing from the interaction or becoming rigid. You’re able to give someone your attention without unconsciously surrendering your own
Attention is also where your agency lives. If you can’t direct it deliberately, other people and environments will do it for you, whether you are aware of it or not. And over time, that has a pretty significant effect on who you become, what you believe, the decisions you make, etc…
One of the most interesting things happening in markets right now is that as the cost of producing things continues to approach zero, the value of being able to produce things is going to change pretty dramatically
For example, if you wanted to build a software product 5 years ago, you needed some combination of engineering ability, capital, time, and other people. Now you can have an idea, sit down with AI, and build something that actually works
Obviously it’s not going to be as good as something built by an exceptional team in a lot of cases, but that’s not really the point. The point is that the barrier to entry is collapsing, and the number of people who can produce something of value is going to increase dramatically
And this applies to basically everything. Software, content, research, marketing, operations, etc. One person can increasingly do what previously required an entire organization
If everybody can produce things, then the ability to produce things becomes less of a differentiator. And when the market gets saturated with products, content, and services, the question becomes who can actually recognize what is worth producing in the first place
AI DOES NOT automatically give you good judgment. It also doesn’t mean you understand a market, that you know what people actually want, that you have good taste, etc
In fact, I think the ability to avoid bad ideas is going to become increasingly valuable as the cost of executing them falls
If it takes you 6 months and a team of developers to build something, you’re naturally forced to think pretty carefully about whether it’s worth doing. If you can build it in an afternoon, you can produce an endless amount of things that probably shouldn’t exist in the first place
So now you’re operating in an environment where the limiting factor isn’t necessarily your ability to execute. It’s now your ability to decide what deserves your execution in the first place
And I think this is where things like taste, intuition, market understanding, and judgment become really interesting. Because these are the things that determine which of the thousands of possible things you could build are actually worth building
The other component is distribution. You can have a great product, but if nobody knows it exists, it doesn’t really matter. And as more people gain the ability to produce good products, getting those products in front of the right people becomes increasingly competitive
So you have this weird dynamic where the cost of creating something is collapsing, but the scarcity of attention, trust, and good judgment isn’t necessarily changing at the same rate
And I think the people who understand this early are going to have a pretty significant advantage
Which also means that the advantage increasingly comes down to the quality of the person directing all of these capabilities. What they notice, what they care about, how they think, what they understand about people, and ultimately, what they decide is worth doing
Thus, the future is for those with the greatest human capital… not specialization anymore, but ALL AROUND intelligence
One of the more interesting things happening on X over the past year is the increasing number of major figures like Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang becoming active on the platform
Most people look at this and assume it’s about personal branding, promoting their companies, building a closer relationship with their audience, etc…
And that’s certainly part of it, but there’s a much more interesting layer to what’s happening
These guys understand that we’re moving into a world where capital, information, and influence are becoming increasingly interconnected. And when you consider the amount of money that’s flowing through markets influenced by information on this app, having the ability to shape the narrative becomes exceptionally valuable
Capital is one advantage. Distribution is another. But ATTENTION is increasingly the moat
If this is where the people deploying capital, forming opinions, and identifying opportunities are spending their time, then having a presence here gives you a direct line into the environment where those decisions are being made
And the interesting thing is that this goes far beyond traditional marketing
Paying people to promote your company is one thing. Building a network of influential people who consistently reinforce a particular narrative is something else entirely
Because once you have enough distribution, you don’t necessarily need to convince everyone of anything directly. You just need to introduce an idea into the right networks and let it propagate
Different people interpret the idea differently, repeat different parts of it, and incorporate it into their own understanding of the world. Eventually, it can influence what people invest in, what companies they build, what they believe is possible, and where capital flows
The incredible part is, if you have enough influence, capital, and distribution, you can start creating the conditions for the outcome you want to predict
An idea begins as a narrative. The narrative influences people’s decisions. Those decisions direct capital and resources. Those resources help produce the outcome that the original narrative anticipated
What started as a prediction becomes partially self-fulfilling
And when you have enough influence over the distribution mechanism itself, you can potentially accelerate that entire process
This is why I think the implications go far beyond personal branding or conventional marketing. We’re moving toward a world where the ability to influence the flow of information can directly influence the allocation of capital and, eventually, the direction of reality itself
The really interesting part is that nobody along the chain needs to understand the entire process for it to work. Each person just needs to respond to the information in front of them and make decisions accordingly
At sufficient scale, the aggregate effect can be ENORMOUS
And this is where influence starts to resemble a form of mass hypnosis. Not in the sense that everyone is consciously manipulated, but in the sense that you can shape the information environment people inhabit, influence what they pay attention to, and alter the range of outcomes they consider possible
Someone like @elonmusk understood early-on how invaluable it is to be the person who can introduce an idea into the system and influence the conditions under which everyone else makes their decisions (main reason he bought this app)
