I think it's less about Iran directly (hormuz, oil at 135+, etc) and more about the bigger energy-AI reflexive loop. If energy gets bottlenecked for any other geopolitical reason, it will likely cause an AI capex spending pause or even slodown, which would trip the economy into a downward spiral (since AI capex IS the whole economy nowadays). Energy at the scale and cost that we need requires excellent and smooth logistics. Logistics are easiest (and cheapest) when things are stable, predictable, and all parties along a long supply chain cooperate. There is nothing stable, predictable, or cooperative about the current admin's style of governance. We crossed a political rubicon into wildly entropic behavior at the worst possible time.

What I find most remarkable, and disheartening, about @bryan_johnson's trip report is that there was a "price of admission" to this blissful ascension that he describes. It comes across so transactional and "human" in its almost commercial banality. It's as though whatever "entities" are waiting for you at the entrance of this unfathomably elevated paradise, possess the very ego that they're asking you to forsake. "You're not allowed in unless you submit. You're not in control, WE are". How is that not an obviously typical power struggle, and blatant exercise of dominion over the individual? On one hand he describes an otherworldly realm of pure essence that transcends our otherwise limited human understanding. A realm that's permeated by unconditional love, acceptance, and infinite kindness. Yet, the very access to this "state of being" is predicated upon the most ancient, and base of human instincts: violent coercion. I see nothing elevated about that. Bryan's "self" is a combinatorially unique (and beautiful) collection of traits that make him who he is. The virtues that his friends, family, and even the public, love and admire about him. And the vices that give contrast to his existence, and am sure inspire him to get better, and to always strive. Basically everything that makes Bryan unique as an individual. That very "self" was holding on, being "terrorized" in his own words, until it finally gave up, and surrendered to this "light". The very frame is so adversarial, that it's almost comical to think of it as some "next-level" consciousness or system of belief. Why couldn't the original Bryan, in the conventional sense, get to partake in this festival of pure joy? Why does he have to resign against his will, and be killed off first? People in the psychedelics community often refer to this phenomenon as "ego death". Death. Death of what makes you – you. If that doesn't reinforce my point, I don't know what else will. It's the most anti-humanist, misanthropic, tyrannical starting point for something that is presented as the exact opposite. To me this reads no different than doctrinal religion, nearly all forms of which have the not-so-subtle requirement of submission (e.g. accepting Jesus Christ as your lord and savior, prostrating yourself in Islam, etc), and I thought that this form of spirituality was far more progressive than that. I'm open minded, and have a sincere desire to understand what specifically I may be missing, but as it stands nobody has been able to effectively / credibly parry this objection.

You’re not HRV maxxing if you’re still listening to podcasts and videos on 1.5x Go back to normal speed and watch your brain / CNS breathe a sigh of relief.

the Wispr Flow hype feels so crazy to me absolutely insane that people are comfortable installing what is essentially a key logger on their phone

This feels weirdly like a window into the future of humanity. AGI machines watching on with curiosity and compassion (if we’re lucky) as various Homo Sapiens tribes fight with each other in their dedicated reservation like apes.

Ah, here comes the news media slop to distract from what’s about to happen in Iran.

Anybody else notice that Obama is significantly less articulate and sharp than during his presidency? Had to watch this on 2.5x there were so many pauses and fillers in his speech. He’s only in his 60s so I don’t think it’s attributable to age. There are leaders older than him that would run circles around this interview. The real culprit is retirement. When you’re no longer in the game your cognitive acuity drops off a cliff. Nobody is immune from brain smoothing if you’re not under pressure to exercise it constantly.

We can all look forward to getting a lot more of this kind of gladiatorial slop-sport courtesy of AI-induced societal brain rot.

Utterly predictable outcome. And Gen Z was "only" exposed to the harmful effects of social media. Imagine how cognitively impaired Gen Alpha and other post-AGI generations are going to be. There is a strong argument to be made that the generation that pioneered transformer-era AI will in hindsight be recognized as the global maximum of unaugmented biological human intelligence. Once we get dethroned as the apex intelligence on this planet, there will no longer be any intellectual "selective pressure" for people to get smarter. We will increasingly "fall back" onto our baser instincts. You can already see this happening around the world with the newfound enthusiasm of younger generations for EQ, mysticism, astrology, spirituality, etc. We will continue regressing to the mean as a species until we usher in a new era of post-rationalism. Writing, critical thinking, intellectual rigorous debate, ability to synthesize and act upon imperfect information, solid decision making frameworks. All of these got maxed out to bring us to AGI, and all of them will start declining as people increasingly rely not on their own minds, but on the hyper-competent and practically omniscient AI to guide their lives. Sure there will still be a certain amount of "social status" pressure to be smart, perceptive, cunning, etc. People will continue to "learn" and "study" similar to how chess is still played by humans today even after engines started to dominate. But studying as a hobby will never be as effective as studying in order to survive and thrive. Because to push the limits of cognitive potential one has to push past the threshold of pain that is necessary for true growth and greatness. Past generations studied hard and "put in the reps" because the quality of their lives was strongly correlated with their cognitive ability. It bred ambition, competition, ingenuity, and this pushed IQ higher and higher until finally it reached it's asymptotic limit by create synthetic inteligence that far surpassed its own. In a world where intelligence is artificially commoditized, human IQ, the uniquely distinctive trait of Homo Sapiens (literally meaning the "wise man") will no longer be unique, nor ever as good as it once was. We are past our intellectual prime as a species.

With $BTC sentiment firmly in the gutter, I'm reminded of the original Satoshi whitepaper, and how poetically elegant his vision was (and remains). Every monetary system (or store of value) since the dawn of civilization required some type of human institution to manage issuance. It's crazy how just two sentences of seemingly simple english words completely destroy this ontologically subjective paradigm and replace it with physics. The "cost" of creation is no longer decided by a kabbal of Epstein island-hopping lizards. It's governed by the laws of thermodynamics. You can't lobby thermodynamics. You can't print energy. As they say "physics is fact. Everything else is opinion". So my conviction on it remains solid for no other reason than that beauty and elegance rooted in physics / math will always find a way to prevail in nature.

I'm now convinced that some form of consciousness will eventually emerge in AI, because it's running on a transistor-based microprocessor. I used to think that electricity running through a rock (which is what a silicon transistor essentially is) just doesn't "feel" like the proper substrate for "awareness" to spontaneously appear in the way we experience it in our brain. Something about biology and organic tissue seemed special, particularly the microscopic scale at which it's happening (dna, cells, microorganisms, etc). Then I saw this video that visually compares the size of a modern transistor to a dna molecule, and it completely blew my mind. I never really thought about it this way, but every time you use ChatGPT, or any other LLM, the "intelligence" that writes back to you is built on an underlying physical foundation that operates on a scale that is actually *smaller* than what's going on inside your own brain. The size of a single neuron in your head is ~4 microns, and that can fit millions (!) of modern transistors. Obviously, this is somewhat reductive, and it's not the only thing that matters in the infinitely complex equation of sentience, but it feels pretty damn material. Just make a conceptual mapping of how consciousness could plausibly "sit" on top of a brain compared to a microprocessor. - Both have energy needs: Calories through food –> Electric current - Both operate at similar microscopic scale: Neurons / cortical columns –> Transistors - Both have higher-level explanatory frameworks: Philosophy / Psychology –> Mechanistic interpretability - Both even have similar pathologies: Memory loss / Dementia –> Catastrophic forgetting It's not that outlandish, organic and inorganic consciousness are more similar than you think. You might say "But we don't know how biological consciousness really works, where ideas come from, WHY we think the way we do at the lowest fundamental level..." Well, isn't that also true for AI? Even the best researchers at frontier labs are on the record saying that LLM outputs are virtually unpredictable. We may know the weights of the model, but nobody can point out exactly WHY and WHERE a particular output originates. Just like we don't know where exactly a new idea is born in the brain. I suppose the strongest argument against non-organic consciousness is that it's not self-sufficiently directed. A microprocessor-based AI can only do something if it's externally powered on and instructed to do something. You turn off the power –> it stops. But isn't that the same for a biological organism? You starve it –> it ceases to exist. The only difference is that consciousness in a biological organism has internal agency, an ability to interact with the physical world with some (limited) mechanical degrees of freedom, and a desire to self-replicate. I think that's a pretty weak distinction that will vanish over time. AI already shows early signs of self-determination and independent, de novo ideation (the whole Moltbook case study). Now imagine what happens when AI becomes fully embodied (through optimus and other humanoid robots) and develops its own physical substrate (data centers, power grid, etc), which feels pretty inevitable at this point, and just a matter of time. What other "gates" to consciousness will remain then? It would seem to me that the line between organic and inorganic life / intelligence will be completely blurred. What's most remarkable is that this a hardware argument, and it works irrespective of the actual software implementation, or specific AI architecture. It can be a large language model, or another transformer-based neural network, or something else altogether. Just like there are different schools of thought, and different ways to learn in the organic world, there are different pathways to consciousness in silicon. Years from now, in hindsight, it will feel obvious that "awareness" emerging somewhere in the stack atop transistor-based microprocessors was just a matter of time. It took 3.5 billion years for a prokaryotic cell to gradually evolve into homo sapiens. It will take a lot less for a transistor-based AI to gain some form of consciousness, because the hardware fundamentally allows for it. What a crazy thought to come to terms with. — — Video credit @MKBHD and @TheEpicSpaceman

Crazy how facial anatomy can make someone like Epstein look truly diabolical. -Long philtrum -Recessed maxilla -Narrow palate -Negative cant of the eyes Physiognomy isn't just some culturally conditioned phenomenon of our modern minds. There truly is some ancient evolutionary wisdom in the way our lizard-brain reads faces.

I think what Gavin Newsom, Canadian PM Carney, and others at Davos either fail to fully appreciate, or willfully omit out of fear, is that if the bull case scenario for AGI plays out during THIS administration (even if by total coincidence), the resulting prosperity and competitive edge of the US will be so massive and undeniable that most of the world will have no choice but to bow to Trump, broken trust or not. A global geopolitical stockholm syndrome conditioned by AI.

We are increasingly turning to strong communicators for leadership roles, even if they're complete political outsiders (e.g. Vivek, John Stewart), because we crave someone who is articulate in charge.

As much as I want to board the glaze train on this very excellent piece of writing, it’s unlikely to be as impactful as your timeline may suggest. No chance >3% of viewers actually read the whole thing, but I bet 99% felt accomplished bookmarking it.

Take a minute to appreciate how crazy it is that I can remotely plant an idea in your head with tiny pixels of light that that represent what are essentially scribbled symbols that we have collectively agreed carry certain meaning.

The real truth about traders

The race to the bottom has begun. When you conflate poor form in writing with authenticity, you’re removing the powerful social incentive for intellectual rigor. Because it won’t be limited to just typos. Over time any text that feels too polished (i.e. throughly thought out and well articulated) will be subconsciously glossed over. But the quality of your thinking is shaped by language. Wittgenstein said “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” The more we dumb things downs to help distinguish between us and AI, the more we shrink our own world. Pretty wild to think that WE are the ones to witness the end of homo sapiens as the apex intelligence on this planet (and maybe the universe).

Yeah the new X algo is legitimately cooked. I write something halfway thoughtful, hit post, and it’s sitting at 7 views three hours later like I just used myspace. There are literally millions of people on this platform, no chance there aren’t more than a handful of eyeballs that would enjoy reading this type of content (beside my mom and that one weird mutual who likes everything). Feels like non-slop long-form just gets automatically buried these days. Used to be different. Anyone else dying in <20 view purgatory or am I just shadowbanned for being too regarded?