Being a fan or a member of a movement makes you stupid.

It can be worth it when the stakes are low.

For example, being a dedicated sports fan can be worth the price of the stupidity it brings.

You lose the ability to objectively reason about your team, your rivals, or the referees. You see things through a lens warped by your commitment to the team. Most of all, you become susceptible to getting led to delusion and false hope by whatever hopium peddler comes around. You can’t help but believe THIS will be the player/coach/manager to save us.

But you gain the escapist enjoyment of fully giving in to the experience. You get lost in it, experience as epic, inspiring, and heroic moments that a non-fan would get nothing from. You get to live a drama. Like a good movie, you want to actually feel the ups and downs as if it were your own life.

The loss of clear thinking that comes with sports fandom has a small cost. Being blind to the realities of sports doesn’t hurt you much in life.

Being a fan or dedicated member of a movement in other areas can be very costly.

If you’re too emotionally invested in a technology, brand, ideology, political party, or leader the resulting stupidity can be very costly. You can lose lots of time, money, sleep, trustworthiness, friends, opportunities, autonomy, and sanity. The blindness of a fan makes them prone to wander off cliffs.

When someone points out a flaw in the thing you’re a fan of, does it causes you pain? Is your first instinct denial or rebuttal? That’s a good sign you’re probably being made stupider and less useful to yourself by your fandom.

Critics may be wrong, and your rebuttals may be right. But if your hackles get raised before you’ve even formed a rational thought about it, it’s a bad sign.

Humor is another sign. If you can’t point out and laugh at and satirize weaknesses in the thing you like, you’re probably too deep into fandom. All movements are dangerous, but any movement that isn’t laughing at themselves a lot is especially dangerous. Self-seriousness is the path to delusion.

Hold your likes lightly.

Sometimes your inner voice tells you something.

Sometimes it’s out of left field or in the middle of a restless night.

Listen to it.

It doesn’t always make sense, but acting on what you know in your gut always leads to better outcomes than trying to overcome it with your head.

The end doesn’t come

After doing all the work

The end is the work

There’s a funny idea about courage floating around.

People get called courageous for loudly denouncing things they believe are evil. But that alone is not courage.

Yes, taking a stand against evil can be courageous. But only if it is scary, painful, and costly to do so. If there is no cost, it’s not courage.

Most of what gets called courageous has no cost and brings no pain. To denounce as evil something everyone already believes is evil, or something with no power to do you bodily or reputational harm, is not courageous.

As a silly example, calling Hitler a piece of shit on Twitter is not courageous. Everyone agrees, Hitler has no power, and nothing bad will happen to you for saying this. Calling Hitler a piece of shit on live radio in Nazi Germany in 1940 would be a different matter.

We like to credit ourselves for courage when we stand against things that cost us nothing. It feels good to pile on when something has been deemed bad in the popular narrative. Gotta make sure to get our name on the record calling bad what everyone else calls bad! But this is easy, and of almost no value to anyone. It can make us smug and lazy and self-righteous and cause us to overlook our own capacity for cowardice.

At all times in all places there are evil things praised or accepted as good. With time and distance they may be seen for the evil they are. Courage is standing against those evils when they are viewed as good by the masses and when it costs you to do so.

Damn. That puts things in a different light. Most of the “taking a stand” we think we do isn’t anything more than going with the flow, which is indistinguishable from cowardice.

By the way, you can be courageous and wrong, or cowardly and right. Just because it takes courage doesn’t guarantee it’s good. But as a general rule, acts of cowardice are far more likely to lead to something bad than acts of courage. And praising cowardice as courage is always a bad thing for social incentives.

I’ll never forget the story of the communist regime in Poland throwing in the towel and giving up because the people were “ungovernable”.

Be ungovernable.

If you don’t want to be oppressed, harassed, cajoled, propagandized, gaslit, brainwashed, abused, taxed, regulated, and coerced into submission, the only real solution is within yourself. Let your very existence be an act of rebellion.

The kind of person who just thinks different and acts in accordance with their own internal guide takes immense resources to control. Eventually, would-be rulers have to give up and go find less exhausting marks. Many people may try to oppress you. They may succeed in making your life miserable and inflicting suffering. But don’t ever let them succeed in controlling you with the ease they need to sustain it.

You belong to no man. They can cage or kill you, but they can’t tame you if you choose to remain free.

The very best podcast episodes are those that leave me feeling better than when I started listening – like I added to my understanding and value.

That kind of episode tends to have something in common: they are time-insensitive. That is, they can be listened to any day, week, month, or year and the content will be no less relevant. They don’t have anything to do with current trends or events, and there’s nothing “must listen now!” about them.

A few days ago, I wrote about the long-term internet vs the short-term internet. You could think of the former as a lake or pool, while the latter is a stream. There is so much good stuff to be found plumbing the depths of this vast pool of information and ideas. And the stillness of the pool seems to allow for better focus and higher quality yield than the constant rushing of the stream, which is never the same from moment to moment.

Days when I’m super plugged in (or “very online” as I’ve heard some say) to Twitter or recent, trending type podcast episodes about current events, I can get a surge of “stuff is happening” excitement. But it’s directionless and overly general. I feel like lots of somethings are going on in the world at large, which gives the illusion of import or progress. But nothing specific is happening in my own life or mind. It’s like a hit of abstract momentum that creates the mental rewards of real momentum but without anything left to show when the hype wears off.

Being plugged in to the “action” is like living in LA when you want to be a screenwriter. It’s enough to trick you into thinking you’re really close to doing big things, because you’re in close proximity to other people doing things. But it’s a lie. A person living in LA not writing scripts is no closer to being a screenwriter than a person living anywhere else and not writing scripts. The difference is, when you’re not in LA, you feel your need to make progress, so you’re more likely to start writing. When you live in LA, you feel like you are making progress even when you aren’t, so you’re more likely to do nothing.

The stream is not bad. It’s interesting and fun and sometimes useful. A good meme or piece of satire is dependent on the stream, and can genuinely make your day better. Laughter and shared kvetching with friends about what’s passing in the stream can be a valuable part of a rich life. But it’s dangerous. So much moves by so fast, it’s easy to get stuck watching it and siphoning that secondhand energy instead of creating your own.

The pool, on the other hand, is calm. It just sits there. Vast and quiet. It doesn’t do anything. You have to actively engage and explore it to find stuff. It has a whole different pace – a pace that forces you to create momentum, since it has none you can live vicariously through.

If I stick to the pools for the first several hours of the day, it makes popping into the stream from time to time later less of a snare. If I get my own momentum going and put in the work, the stream is more likely to be useful.

I guess TLC was right about all that chasing waterfalls stuff.

Only an individual human can make themselves better or worse by the choices they make.

Technology opens up previously impossible choices. It increases the area of expression for what’s inside us. Sometimes what it reveals about us is dark and disturbing. We are capable of a lot worse than we like to imagine, and technological change – just like changes in cultural norms and economic conditions – provide new opportunities to see what we are and are not made of.

Many of us are not capable of using new technology in a life-giving way. At least not early on, when protective norms and market incentives haven’t formed around it. But banning or restricting tech with violence will not improve who we are or reduce our evils. They will still exist and still do damage, only in less visible ways. And the use of reactionary violence in opposition to tech is more dangerous than the tech itself.

Understand the dangers and risks and changes technology brings, but know it’s not creating new evil. It’s only revealing what we already are. Treating the symptoms won’t stop the disease.

Yesterday I saw a video going around of a “Karen who attacks lady then plays the victim”. It appeared to show some kind of altercation at a store, followed by a woman collapsing on the floor and crying and begging and pleading the person recording to turn off their camera.

The idea of the video and general sentiment in response was basically, “This annoying, meddling person does something bad and then pretends like she’s the one suffering. How pathetic. She got what she deserved being exposed like this on camera.”

I have no idea what actually happened or whether and to what extent various parties deserve blame. It’s none of my business and I don’t really care to know. But I did find it a little troubling that there seemed to be universal glib dismissal of any potential suffering experienced by this woman being filmed for several minutes for the world to see, whether or not she had it coming.

How many times have you heard someone say, “Thank god social media didn’t exist when I was a teenager”? It’s a funny but true statement about lack of privacy and lack of grace that comes with it. People are stupid sometimes. People are weak sometimes. People are dicks sometimes. People lose it sometimes. Is it a good thing for those people to have every single one of these instances streamed in real-time with the potential to go viral and ruin their entire life forever? Would you want the dumbest or rudest thing you’ve ever done to be trending on Tik Tok or Twitter?

The mere possibility that every salty interaction with a waiter could be being filmed by a fellow diner is a kind of psychological torture, or at least stress enhancer, running in the background at all times.

The idea that people with a monopoly on violence and no accountability – police – should be surveilled while on the clock is a very good one. Sure, it probably adds some stress to their job, but it’s well worth it considering the high stakes and track record of cops with power operating in secret. But what about a grandma at the grocery store on a bad day? Or a dog owner who accidentally runs into a cyclist while not paying attention? Is it a good thing for people in every social setting to have the looming fear of being surveilled and having that footage go global in an instant before they even have a chance to apologize, explain, or make things right?

It feels like a callous and cruel way for humans to live and interact with one-another. The stakes are too high. People lose their ability to be human and show compassion.

I noticed in the video as this woman was moaning and sobbing on the floor begging for mercy many people stood around her at a safe distance. Even people who arrived late and never witness her alleged instigation and knew nothing except that a woman was sobbing on the floor simply stared and did nothing. Not one person got down on their knee, or put their arm around her and tried to calm or comfort her. Maybe she’s a big baby. Maybe she’s been conditioned to be a victim. Maybe she’s been made helpless and taught to demand safe spaces. Who cares? She’s still a human suffering. Yet no one wanted to hazard the attempt to help her out.

I suspect the fact that cameras were rolling had a major chilling effect on any such human responses. When the camera is on, you have to think twice. You can’t just follow your human instinct. You have to step back and try to figure out who will be perceived as the “bad guy” when this video is posted and shared. Do you want to risk being seen as aiding them? What if something goes wrong when you approach? What if you end up doing something that makes you look bad?

So instead of engaging or helping, everyone becomes a spectator or documenter. Whipping out their own cameras so a circle of mutual surveillance crisscrosses this poor woman as she moans and ruins her reputation further with every second that gets recorded.

Privacy matters. Knowing you’re dealing with a real human being in front of you and not also their fans and followers online matters. Room for error and grace matter. Not being made into a spectacle matters.

If we’re always being documented by each other, we’re subjects and slaves to each other. We could use some humanity.

I was thinking about how well some writers understand the human condition and it dawned on me that they lived pre-internet. They had no access to all this information and human interaction at a vast scale through which to observe, yet they completely nailed with penetrating insight the way humans behave, even at this scale.

It made me wonder if the internet makes it harder for us to understand humanity.

Things move so fast on the internet, and incentives are so different. The world as reflected on the web is not the real world, and internet people are not real people. Sure it’s part of the world and part of humanity, but it’s a small slice. The more of reality gets filtered through it the more distorted.

The ephemeral nature of internet experience forces us to think on very tight time horizons. Pre-internet, you’d be forced to look through a broader lens. There was no way to know the immediate reactions across the globe of something that just happened today. You’d have to watch the wave unfold through time and only the stuff that really stuck would make its way into your analysis.

I wonder if there’s a way to use the internet that improves this more distanced, longer time-horizon type of experience. What if you restricted yourself to the long-term internet? The long-term internet are the parts that take longer to form (e.g. no instant trending hashtags) and take longer to vanish. There is tons of tons of amazing content on the web, but when I think about the stuff that has deepened my understanding, it’s stuff like decade old essays or lectures, century old books, or well documented and repeated research.

If those pre-internet thinkers and writers had access to all of that – basically their local library and lecture hall on steroids – it’s hard to imagine it weakening their insight. But if they were on Twitter much as I am, I suspect they’d get some of the same short-term distortions I can.

I’m not anti social media. Nor do I think people or culture were inherently better in the past. I am curious about how shifting media of communication impact our understanding of the world. People are easier to dupe with limited access to info. They also seem easy to dupe with near infinite access to info. I’m curious what kind of informational environment best fosters understanding of our own condition, and how to take individual responsibility for creating it.

When I spend more time on the long-term internet, I walk away feeling like I learned something. The short-term internet can entertain and create some useful human networks or social reference points, but I rarely feel sharper after scrolling.

There are people you just want to keep at arm’s length.

They’re not bad. They’re not at odds with you. In fact, they often seem just a little too aligned, and to say a little too much of the right thing.

You just don’t quite trust them. Sometimes there’s been no clear breach of trust, but you know with your knower that something is slightly amiss. And it is. Even if you can’t peg why.

I once broke the world into three types of people: ideas dominant, angles dominant, and hustle dominant. The arm’s length people are angles people.

Angling doesn’t mean doing something bad. You can work angles to do good or bad, just like you can hustle or pursue ideas for good or bad. But by its nature, angling is about orienting oneself in relation to other people. Which means angles people are always reading the room to discover what other people value and adapting themselves to it. You can’t trust this.

Of course some degree of reading the room and adapting to what pleases others is considered courtesy or social graces. If you have none, it’s a bit boorish, or the result of autism or similar. It’s not nice but it is honest.

The other extreme is not honest. When room-reading is placed above all other values you can never trust that person because they are not a person. They do not have a self. They are ghostly, unsolid. They are in a constant state of flux, perpetually morphing into whatever is reflected back to them in the positive responses of others. That means under the right circumstances, they could turn on you. You never really know them because there is no them.

It may sound selfless to be exceedingly sensitive to what pleases others, but it’s really a form of narcissism. Idolizing how others respond to you is to idolize your own reflection. You can’t discover and be who you are if you’re obsessed with how you appear to others. And you can’t be truly valuable and heroic for others if you don’t have a self.

People read the room and angle to varying degrees. But certain people do enough of it that you just always feel like, “Yeah he seems like a cool guy, but something is just slightly off”. Listen to your gut. You don’t need more justification to keep that person at arm’s length.

Sometimes people think they know the future because of the present. “The price of X is higher than the price of Y, so X is more useful than Y”.

This is a mistake. But it’s easy to get sucked into.

Markets are incredible, wonderous things sending signals and incentives all across the globe and allocating resources always towards their highest valued use. Prices are the tool that reflect this and help us see and calculate. But the important word to hang onto in the above description is towards.

The freer the market, the better and faster resources move towards their highest valued use. But they never arrive there, because there is no such thing as “there”. We don’t know and can’t know what the highest valued use of a resource is, we can only see how people subjectively value it relative to the other alternatives at any given time. Alternatives change. Preferences change. And a whole lot of other things change all the time. They are never not changing. So resources are constantly seeking out higher valued uses in every moment, but never arriving.

The more you know about markets, the easier it is to fall into the trap of thinking that they have already found the best use of resources. They work wonders and if you have seen the process and understand it, you can have great confidence that it will do a better job than any other process or individual mind at continuing to maximize resources and create wealth at scale. But this does not mean at any given time every single resource is being used in a way that could not be improved upon.

To say no innovation is possible sounds dumb on its face. Yet it’s the implied conclusion many reach after getting a little too wrapped up in seeing how the market as a whole operates so incredibly. They lose the plot. The market is never efficient; in fact it only continues to move ahead because inefficiencies never go away so innovation and arbitrage continually happen. But the market is the most efficient process possible.

The market does not reduce surprises, it increases them. One of the things that make markets so superior to central planning is that they allow for and reward totally unlikely advances no one could’ve imagined. Accidents can become innovations. Knowing this, you’ve got to be wary of believing the market has spoken. It’s always speaking and never perfectly communicating what it’s trying to say.

The process is the thing, not the particulars produced by it at any given point.

It’s useful to broadcast your interests and passions through blogs, social media, podcasts, etc. It increases your “luck surface” and helps you connect with people and opportunities relevant to your goals. This is how you build a network of go-to people and enhance your ability to get things done. You have a running list of people to work with on various things.

It’s also useful to know what kinds of people you do not want to work with. There are a lot of time wasters and bad fits out there, sometimes parading as good fits worth your time because they use similar language. Building a mental blacklist – “Avoid working with or relying on these people” – can reduce a lot of wasted time and annoyance.

One way to do this is to Tweet a not-very-nuanced take on behaviors or beliefs that you find difficult to work with. The people you don’t want to work with will reveal themselves by jumping in to defend theoretical people in the comments.

For example, perhaps you’ve learned that people who think it’s perfectly ok to be flaky, or are more worried about what they have a right to do than what creates value for others are a pain to work with. Maybe some of these types are lurking in your network and you don’t know it. A Tweet like, “Being 5 minutes late is worse than not showing up at all” will reveal them quickly.

The take is extreme. Anyone with a brain can think of dozens of scenarios where it’s not true. But anyone who shares your distaste for flakiness and defense of less-than-excellence in time management will smile and click like because they get the vibe. They’ve felt it.

Those who do not have the same level of respect for other people’s time won’t be able to resist adding nuance or pointing out how this kind of attitude might be unfair or limiting. This doesn’t make them bad people, but it reveals to you who you don’t want to have to rely on in high stress professional situations.

People reveal themselves when given the chance.

When I used to meet with entrepreneurs and owners who had built multi-million and even billion dollar companies I would always ask them the same question:

“What’s your biggest constraint to growth?”

I never got a different answer. Every single one, without fail, replied, “Talent”.

When I asked to what they attributed their success I always got some variation on the same answer too: “I found a great manager/COO/right-hand”.

Humans are incredibly inventive. Though entrepreneurship is somewhat rare (less rare than most people think, and would be far more prevalent if it wasn’t schooled out of kids by petty, pathetic bureaucratic morons), even just a handful of entrepreneurs have a lot more vision than they can execute on. They need people who have skill, and more importantly the hustle and willingness to try and learn, to help them bring things to life. There are just too damn few!

I suspect that if entrepreneurs had double the talent they’d be five times more productive. It’s not linear.

Julian Simon understood that human ingenuity and talent are the ultimate resource. More humans with more freedom to explore and play and niche down would unleash untold benefits for all.

The perpetual talent bottleneck is far greater than any other bottleneck. Lack of good ideas, lack of money, lack of a market – all of these pale in comparison to lack of good talent, because good talent is the one thing that can overcome all the other hurdles. Good talent can adjust and adapt until they match the right ideas and market. Good talent can find or make the money. But ideas and money and market can’t make talent. Only people can make people. And only people can raise people in an environment of freedom that lets them become talented and valuable to the world.

You want to make the world a better, freer, more prosperous, peaceful, and wonderful place? Go produce or adopt some kids and offer them a safe home and a lot of freedom. Keep them away from the conformity factories and movements or causes. Let them be kids. Curious, resourceful, mischievous, annoying, creative, destructive, tiring, and interesting. Increase their independence steadily until they’re totally autonomous. They’ll do the rest.

P.S. – Another thing every successful entrepreneur told me was, “For the right person, I’m always hiring”. This is true for me as well. I am always looking for top-notch talent to help bring visions to life and grow ideas into something powerful. If that’s you, pitch me anytime.

Bitcoin SV (BSV) is Orthodox Christianity.

Bitcoin Core (BTC) is Roman Catholicism.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is Protestantism.

The more I think about the protocol (doctrines), developments (practices), and culture (aesthetics), the more this analogy rings true. If you want to know the strengths and weaknesses of each implementation of the bitcoin faith, think about the strengths and weaknesses of these implementations of the Christian faith.

I might go in depth on this metaphor later in a podcast or something. I’m telling you, it pretty much nails it. Even the types of people typified by each.

What technology that exists today has the ability to upend the way things are done a decade from now?

The ability to identify this is correlated with ability to predict the future.

A lot of people attempt to predict the future by going to the edge of technology and imagine changes brought by inventions that don’t yet exist. “Once AI is able to do X, it will change Y in the following ways” kinds of predictions are very unlikely to be accurate. There are too many variables.

Instead, find technologies that actually exist and work well today, but very few people realize or use them yet. Not because of a fundamental limitation of the tech, but because the knowledge of it and human skill able to use it aren’t yet widespread. Then you eliminate the biggest variables around the if, when, and how of the new tech. You can focus on the implications and industries affected.

There are other factors beyond just technology, like trends, norms, beliefs, politics and culture. But those are also more variable and less able to be pinned on a timeline than technology. They affect each other, but new tech, if it makes people’s lives easier, is very hard to bet against over a long enough time horizon. People want more for less. Once they’ve tasted it, they want more of it, and to sell it and take it to its limit. Any tech that can do more with less is highly likely to shape the future, and cultural narratives tend to bend around it.

It’s easy to assume any useful tech in existence is already being fully exploited. This is the theoretical economist trap. If you understand and appreciate the power of markets and human self-interest, it can be hard to understand just how unevenly capital and knowledge are distributed at all times, and how much room for innovation always exists. Not just tech innovation, but business model innovation that can deploy existing tech that is underutilized.

There is tons of this all around us all the time. Tech that works wonders but is in “deceptive mode”, relegated to small circles of hobbyists, or weird applications that under-exploit its potential.

I think bitcoin fits into this category.

Bitcoin as it was invented and released to the public over a decade ago does a few things that have staggering potential. The ability to attach monetary value to the transfer of information, and do so at levels as small as a 1000th of a penny instantly and globally is incredibly massive. To do this with no trusted third party or single data repository is even more massive. This is all possible right now today with no need for any new inventions. Hardly anyone knows it.

Instead, most people imagine a future for bitcoin where it becomes gold, then currency, but only if something new gets invented. Most people think bitcoin can’t operate at scale and can’t handle tiny payments. They are trying to predict the future based on stuff that still needs to be invented. Too many variables to be accurate. That’s because what’s become known as bitcoin – BTC – stripped out all the functions bitcoin was designed with that let it scale and handle tiny payments instantly. So BTC has to try to solve that all over again and hasn’t yet.

Meanwhile, what bitcoin originally was is still operational and working today. It’s under the ticker BSV and almost nobody realizes how well it works, and those who have heard of it hate it for personal, cultural, and political reasons. Right now, today, it is doing transactions instantly and globally for 1000ths of pennies as it was designed to do. Nothing new needs to be invented for it to work.

Whether BSV or something else like it, the cat is out of the bag. Current tech right now today can do this. That means the best way to predict the future is to imagine what instant global monetary transactions tied to bits of information from 1000ths of a penny to billions of dollars means. Think through every industry and application. Consider what is not possible today that this makes possible.

Sure, some current businesses will get more efficient. But the real power of prediction comes from finding things that are literally impossible without this tech that only become possible with it. An entirely new model for the internet could emerge. Problems with the information age currently being solved in frustrating, ham-fisted ways (free use, sell user data; trusted third parties; etc.) could be solved in straight-forward efficient ways.

The tech is here. The knowledge and skill and application is not. In ten years, what will be built on it? That’s how to see the future.