You don’t want to spend the upside being grumpy and paranoid. But damn, the downside looks so inevitable and severe.

Real estate. Stocks. Crypto. Collectibles. Cars. Boats. Equipment. Supplies. Precious metals. Everything is in a frenzy of rising prices despite less real economic activity and value creation.

Money pumping by the fraudulent Federal Reserve is the primary driver. It creates not only the material conditions (more dollars chasing fewer goods), but the cultural, moral, and psychological conditioning that makes this kind of craziness possible. Everyone wants to engage in video-game like activities on their phone and watch their account balance increase. The entire world is made up of gamblers now.

And it kinda has to be. If you don’t gamble, you may get crushed anyway. People need higher returns, so they chase them. And it’s ominously fun while it lasts!

The challenge is distinguishing what’s real from fake. There is still a lot of real value being created. It’s just very hard to tell it apart from all the hype filled unsustainable bullshit. It’s also hard to know what percentage of the overall economy is being fueled by the real vs the fake. The signals are totally wrecked, as they always are when governments get involved.

I don’t know what to tell you. Some stuff is real. Most isn’t. But the unreal stuff can still keep going up for who knows how long.

I’ve spent a decade talking about and helping people to become their own credential. Understanding what signals are and the role they play in opening up opportunity is useful to life success. But too much signaling with too little substance can hurt in the long term.

If no one knows about your ability to create value you will never capture much of it. But on the flip side , if there are no accomplishments or abilities that you have that people don’t know about, you’re overexposed, and over-signaling.

Ever see one of those awful resumes (all resumes are awful, but these are even worse) that are several pages long and list every single little thing a person has ever done, no matter how unimportant? Over-signaling. It quickly becomes a negative signal.

There is a subconscious expectation that people are more than their signals. It is assumed that, as people get to know and work with you, they’ll uncover layers of value, experience, and interestingness that weren’t part of the initial signal that caused them to interact with you in the first place. If it turns out your signal was comprehensive – or worse yet, exaggerated – the growth of that relationship comes to an abrupt and disappointing halt.

Leave a few tricks in the bag.

The use of naked violence is wrong.

Hiding naked violence behind psychological torture, manipulation, propaganda, guilt, shame, fear, and claims it’s for your own good is evil.

This is the best time to be alive.

Things are dark. There’s a lot of terrible stuff creeping over the face of the earth. It’s an opportunity to level up!

You don’t grow when it’s easy.

Yes, it’s tiring and daunting to look into the bleakness and think about the trials and effort ahead. It’s easy to get beat down by it. But if you zoom out, the chance to step up and be the best, most heroic version of yourself doesn’t come often in such a big way. When it does, be thankful for it, buckle up, and go forth.

An entire album

Start to finish, nothing else

Complete immersion

Who you say you are

Who you think and want to be

Who you really are

The power of evil isn’t real.

Rather, it’s real only if we let it be real. It wins the hand only if we believe there’s something behind the bluff. But there’s not. It only derives power from our fear of it. To destroy it, we must call the bluff.

Calling the bluff reveals the weakness of evil. That is what it most fears.

Sometimes when you call a bluff you get hurt. You can get taken out by a bluff hand that gets lucky. But even then, the process of revealing the bluff takes power away from the bluffer. Even if you have to be martyred, your act of forcing the bluffer to show their hand reveals them as a bluffer and their power crumbles.

I like a chip on the shoulder.

The ignored, overlooked, condescended to decides to take it personally and prove the world wrong. That’s some good shit.

Underdogs need some edge. Underdogs are fun and inspiring to get behind.

But that chip can turn into a trap.

When you root for the underdog and you take on that chip, you’ve gotta be careful it stays fun. You’ve gotta maintain an identity bigger than the underdog’s cause. If you get to a point where you need the moment of victory and vindication – you need people to say, “Wow, you were right” – you will be a slave.

It’s probably the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to kickstarting your creative power, self-discipline, communication, and productivity.

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Conditioning is more powerful than direct teaching or persuading.

Millennials were the most schooled generation in human history. They enjoyed the least unstructured time. They were controlled, directed, and dictated to in detail nearly every hour of nearly every day from birth to their mid-twenties. They never had to learn how to be bored, solve problems with their mind alone, create their own meaning, goals, and structure. They never knew freedom or privacy as default conditions of life.

They are now ascending into the dominant role of social, economic, and political influence. Gen Xers are pretty passive and nihilistic. Boomers are extremely bossy and entitled.

I hope there is a sufficient number of people who value freedom over force to bring an end to the current totalitarianism that is growing in nearly every country. But it is very possible it is too late for the current generations. Maybe they never stood a chance. A people conditioned to find obedience to incompetent, vicious, arbitrary authority will tolerate a lot of it. Many will even demand it.

But even if it’s too late for anyone 20 or older, it’s not too late for the next generation.

Even if we cannot act or speak in a way to break the mental bondage of the bootlickers of today, we can build the mental, social, and economic tools to leave our kids so that when this generation wanes in power and they take the lead they will have something to work with.

We can uncondition them. Deschool them. De-slave them. Give them maximum mental and physical space so that they grow up in freedom as much as possible. People who grow up in freedom find tyranny to be unnatural and intolerable. That does more to stop it than preaching and political movements.

Create the conditions of freedom for yourself and your generation, sure. But realize it’s usually too late to unplug someone from the matrix of control beyond their 20’s. Whatever you create, keep in mind it might not be realized until the next generation. Set them up for autonomy.

A remnant. A resistance. A dispersed, silent, unknown brotherhood of humans who do not support the oppressive, deceptive, abusive, bootlicking narratives and policies of the day.

It always exists. Always.

Populism is a mess. Constitutional attempts to restrict it are weak. To quote Mises, the “Planned Chaos” of governments is taking a toll.

A lot of people seem to be searching more ancient traditions for sense and stability. They long for a clearly structured world that harmonizes with the hierarchies in nature and human nature. Some of them long for a king.

I respect the sentiment, but it eats its own tail.

Understanding the problems of democracies and bureaucratically managed populist programs is important. More voices having a stake in controlling others is not an effective way to curb control of others. It only feeds and fragments it.

I also appreciate the recognition of objective aspects of reality. As Thomas Sowell might say, we need a “Constrained Vision” that recognizes realities like scarcity, ignorance, and natural human desires. We cannot wish away bad things or bad people. We cannot wish away differences between people, even those that seem to create uncomfortable inequalities in the outcomes of their lives. To do so is not only inhumane, it is deluded. It cannot succeed, and running counter the the structure of reality will only end in more pain than what you seek to solve.

I don’t disagree with the idea of regality. The ideal of a noble being with authority, respect, responsibility, and dominion.

Where it is misguided is when it seeks to find this in any earthly being outside of oneself.

The calling of a human is to be and become that king. To provide the kind of leadership and structure to your family and voluntary relationships that you are the earthly king of your own mind, body, spirit, and domain.

To seek this in another human is to abdicate your own duties and responsibilities. That is the same folly the would-be kingmakers see in the populist mobs. You cannot outsource your reign. You must find how to properly align it with God, other people, and reality.

It’s too easy to see the truth in the pattern of kingship and miss the application of that pattern. The pattern maps onto you, not anyone else.

I’ve always found that being open and generous pays off in myriad ways, while penny pinching is very costly.

There are more direct and obvious ways in which being generous pays off. You build social capital, and then others are more likely to be generous to you. But thinking in terms of direct quid pro quo is limiting. And if you’re keeping a tally, you’re losing nearly all the benefits of generosity.

Being generous cultivates a mindset and outlook on the world. An abundance mindset changes everything. You enjoy every day more. You see more possibility and opportunity. You get excited about the unknown things that might come back as you spread good will.

It may sound woo woo, but it’s real. Your brain is trained by your repeated actions. Repeatedly being generous trains you to believe on a deep level that this is not a loss and you will have enough. You lose some fear, gain some joy, and begin to see more clearly and have more fun.

Abundance-minded people tend to be more productive, creative, and interesting. They win more, in part because they believe they will, in part because those around them are more inclined to help them win.

The hardest part about decision making is that you already know the answer.

It’s always down there, inside you somewhere. You know it. And somehow, you know you know it.

Finding it, being honest about it, and sticking with it despite all the noise and confusion and arguments about more complex alternatives and concerns over reputation and fears over your future is the hard part.

That fact that you already know means you can’t defer to or rely on or blame anyone else. You’ve gotta find it. Listen to it. And act on it. Without shame or remorse.

If you were in the deepest reaches of space, engulfed in millions of cubic miles of darkness, a pinprick of light would still penetrate it. It could not be extinguished by any quantity of darkness.

Light can disperse darkness but not the other way around. Light can also spread. Fire lights other fires, a beam can bounce and reflect off of other objects. Darkness cannot reproduce itself, it can only occupy space left behind by vacating light. It is a borrower, a usurper, not a creator. Light has a source, darkness is devoid of source; it is the absence of source.

Darkness is always lurking, ready to overtake any place where light goes out. When times seem darkest it’s not because darkness has increased, but because lights have grown dimmer.

That’s good news. It means every time you are the tiniest light, you are reducing the darkness. It can be beat back, but only as light increases.