Ancient Guy Fitness: Recent Episodes
Mark Bruns
Life begins at 60 ... or maybe later.
For each of us, there are things that we cannot accomplish until after we have lost the arrogance that comes with ability and youth.
Until you take the UNNECESSARY away, you'll never know what you actually have.
ESPECIALLY refuse to ever just swallow something that makes you comfortable ... if it reaffirms or confirms what you believed before, it is bad ... informational comfort is used to sell you ideas and products that make you dependent and less than vigilant. You must wake every day and HUNT for the truth ... the truth will NEVER show up in old things that reassure you.
Explore IDEAS ... travel in the virtual realm without traveling ... to explore more ideas.
Understand your health. NOBODY else is going to be capable of understanding that better than you do.
👍 Failure to use your bodyweight throughout the entire day, using those giant thigh, butt and core muscle groups of yours to continually dispose of blood glucose with CONTINUAL, ALL DAY LONG load-bearing exercise will predispose to things like hyperinsulinemia AND West Nile and/or Lyme diseas AND chiropractor visits AND knee/hip replacement surgeries AND greater likelihood of falling in old age. 👌
What is your life about? If you only a copy of something else, how can you even stand being alone with yourself? Stop being a pathetic copy.
Stop analyzing economics as if the world is made up of tantrum-throwing five-year-olds who think exactly like you. NOBODY THINKS EXACTLY LIKE YOU ... YOU won't even think like you do tomorrow IF YOU ARE A HEALTHY HUMAN BEING.
No wonder you keep shooting yourself in the foot ... you keep aiming at the wrong things.
"How do I do that?" you might ask. It's like anything else ... you find out what it is and you dive in and do it ... and then you find out that you didn't exactly know what is ... so you find everything you can now that you know some of the keywords you dive in and try again to do it ... and you still will not come close to knowing, but as long as you keep diving off into the deep end of the shark tank, you'll be okay.
Stop being someone else's gadget. Stop wasting your life on someone else's game. RETIRE!
Affluence always produces deleterious consequences because of the tendency for the complainers who blame others for their inactivity and refusal to change, to adapt and produce under different circumstances.
PRACTICAL long-term fitness for an active life until one is at least a centarion what the training regimen for the annual winter hiking/backpacing reunion in the desert canyons is all about ... besides, a guy needs to die somewhere.
Regardless of how tough things get, you will find the most joy and happiness through fighting. Don't imagine that you're so entitled that you get to claim that these are something like "end times." Your ancestors lived, fought and died in times that were significantly worse. Knock off the complaining about your pathetic, trivial, insignificant difficulties ... if you are able to fight, you must fight.
Viruses are going to virus. Stop being spooked...get busy. Coronavirus is a viral opportunity accelerator.
It's okay if you choose the option of wotking according someone else's routine ... but realize that being coddled is a CHOICE. You have choices and options ...
If you can't knock out your opponent in a life-or-death fight in less than two minutes, the struggle is going to be severe and extremely costly. Ideas matter. QUICKLY. A game-changing idea doesn't require a CV. Or someone to take credit for it. Patents, awards, prestigious prizes, eg Nobel, Pulitzer, etc. are for teacher's pets and teacher's pets wannabes ... legitimate ideas don't take prisoners.
The habitual, deeply institutionalized, completely unexamined assumptions we make are the most deadly thing in our environment ... bad assumptions and unexamined habits kill more people every single minute that any other cause of death. Not thinking kills. We must break the bad habits of being ourselves or else the cumulative effect bad assumptions, bad habits will kill us.
It might look like chaos, disruption, upheaval, anarchy or revolution ... but the impossible storm that people fear is an opportunity. Don't squander the opportunity ... someone else will find a way to use it.
Push harder, take risks, think differently than you have thought...you cannot copy or ask someone else to think for you ... it's up to you to think harder.
Learn from each failure, but quickly move on and quit your addiction again. Indulging your addiction will make it worse, give it more power and ... maybe your addiction will define your entire existence, if you quit on quitting the addiction. You will always be an addict ... but you can choose whether your existence is about recovery or indulgence.
We should constantly work at breaking the bad habits of being ourselves...in order to have a chance to find optimality, we must stop wasting our time doing things because of unexamined path dependency ... doing things just because we are prickly and defensive about questioning our assumptions is FAT ... it is past the time when we should remove the excess. Remove it now and don't look back -- we aren't going that way.
Develop the powers of self control. Tame the monkey mind. Prayers should not be requests, at most not for more than immediate necessities, eg our daily food, and for help with our ability to forgive others and letting go. Meditation discipline is an example of ancient guy mental fitness ... it's not about the monkey mind demanding that we do something or stay busy for the sake of staying too busy to think. Mental fitness is about being ready and able to think about massively weighty things that the merely busy cannot begin to contemplate.
Study success. Study ALL of it ... every last drop of it. Learn how the successful get up from failure and channel the experience into a new dimension of success. In other words, learn as much as you possibly can from the failures of others, particularly from the successful who, stumble and fall ... so that you may learn even more about preventing failures and also so that you are ready to get up, go forward and learn from your own inevitable future failures.
Coronavirus is 10X to 100X more lethal if you are exposed to it than flu is. You don't want flu, but you REALLY. REALLY don't want coronavirus. You are probably healthy and fit enough to take on the unknown unknowns that you encounter but you should limit your exposure to multiple threats simultaneously ... the limiting of exposure to hurtful attacks on your immune system includes the additional threat induced by the dysbiotic shock to your microflora and immune system induced by getting vaccinated for flu strains -- strains that you wouldn't otherwise be threatened by in a simultaneous multi-threat attack ... a vaccine must induce something like a dysbiotic shock OR there is no way to get the immune response ... this is why 3X as many independent ADULTS with serious responsibilities and full mental faculties evaluate the risk of being negatively impacted by the vaccine, coming down with something else [which isn't protected against by the vaccine] and rationally decide against getting a flu vaccine as those who decide to get the vaccine. Dependent children and adults are at the mercy of experts ... if you can avoid it, don't become dependent upon experts.
After you get some experience, you can improve the product...with a Zoom H6 and a REAPER digital audio workstation ... but the KEY thing is to just get started and to learn as rapidly as possible ... but if you're an old clown, stuck in your ways ... you have to try new scary things to get your mind out of its calcified, hardened, secure comfort zone ... the most important thing is to JUST GET STARTED .... in order to stay alive, you have to fail and get good at using failures to learn from.
Breaking the bad habits of being yourself is not going to be about swallowing more shit, buying more stuff or deluding yourself with fancier ideas ... fitness is primarily a matter of removal, cleansing and purification WITHOUT inducing vomiting, taking laxatives or piping an expensive enema up your rookter ... breaking the bad habits of being yourself is about what you take away. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss?wprov=sfla1
The profit margins on fitness trackers is beyond obscene ... those margins are so severe that the margins have spawned the rise of entire companies and distribution channels selling EXCELLENTLY reliable devices for $15-20 in the US, even less in value-conscious countries like Mexico. You cannot get fit by any form of virtue signalling...you already know what you must do, if you just stop and THINK ... rather than buying a damned device. You cannot consume your way to fitness; it's not about what tasty thing you show off or swallow -- fitness is about what you take away, what you do when NOBODY is tracking you. If you have to show that you're tracking your fitness...maybe you need to get some counseling or better yet, ask the person in the mirror why you are stressed about appearances.
The pain, death suffering are as real as anything else, but religous wars and misunderstandings are nothing other matter of symbolic interpretation, human objects, words and meaning, terminology, definitions ... one person's Simulator is another person's God ... you do not know the nature of God. You don't even really know what words are orher than what you have imperfectly learned in your imperfect life. Without the Simulator giving you your simulated Life, you have less than nothing, ie you don't even have the beginning of a clue of what the [simulated] word 'nothing' might mean.
Understand something about options and uncertainty ... it's not only about what can go wrong, but how rapidly the shift comes and the payoff changes as the underlying factors driving the payoff change ... not just the price of the asset but the deltas, gammas, thetas, vegas ... MOSTLY you must be extremely wary of believing that you are right ... the underlying factors are changing that will make static, passively-evaluated position wrong.
Path dependency KILLS. When we settle for inertia become this is the stupid, backward way that we have done it...we DESERVE to afflicted with cancer or some neurodegenerative disease and to rapidly die. We DESERVE death for clinging to stupidity, error and SIN.
Practice the most extreme form of Extreme Ownership. Give everything away and start over. It's scary ... too scary for most to contemplate, but you will learn that doing so fosters excellent all-around fitness of the body, mind and spirit. If you can push on through to the other side, you find it infinitely satisfying to completely OWN problems, to enjoy the fight, to embrace the suck of training for the war ... but if you don't want to be an old idiot tethered to the ball and chain you thought was so cool, you have avoid Ownership Prison ... instead break the [bad] habits of being yourself so that you are FREE and can be free from your shit, free from your comfort zone to enjoy your participation in producing and creating everything that the world offers up. Give your shit away ... avoid Ownership Prison. Brainwash yourself to craving discomfort. https://twitter.com/KetoAurelius/status/1224098929270312960?s=19
Budget so that you can invest. Change your preferences away from consumption to find greater enjoyment from the journey itself and simply being more fit and more productive. Then work at being less needy, so that you can drive your investment toward 100% of your income.
Situational awareness must be dynamic; you have to be comfortable constantly improving information and questioning your assumptions. As with driving, you use the rear-view-mirror ONLY to calibrate your steering adjustments and updateyourawareness of what is approaching from the side ... otherwise, don't look back -- you don't have to about someone hitting you from behind as long as you are not a stationary but driving forward.
If you work in the realm of data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing... perhaps you develop sophisticated recommendation engines ...you're doing it wrong -- we need to talk. I don't want to be spoofed your homogenized schlock ... gimme something DIFFERENT!!!
Of course, demand for long-term debt capital is extremely or almost nonexistent amongst those who actually have a plan to repay ... because people who doing things, like starting new ventures, do not need much or any capital, ie needing big money is a sign that the guy asking for money refuses to exercise or work or scrounge unless there's a budget for vacations in London OR the cupboard's full of "heart-healthy low-fat" Hostess Hohos. https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1223283714676924416?s=09
Break the habit of being yourself. Read Dr Joe Dispenza's work or listen to audiobook ... you are your habits...BREAK the bad habits of being yourself. You are the person who needs to get a night's rest or maybe take a nap. You are the person who needs to be hydrated or exercise more. You are what you eat; you are what you consume; you are what you have consistently hypnotized yourself to be [partly, by wasting effort on why others do what they do].
Do NOT settle for being comfortable or reaffirmed or uplifted ... for being told what you want to hear. Seek out LEGITIMATELY good information that directs you back to the best path. Instead of being merely entertained or distracted with the latest shiny crap, either get some exercise or lay down and get some sleep.
FIRST, do no harm! Look at the BIG Picture, look at the tiniest details, look at the distant past, look at first principles but before you open a vein, consider what happens if you don't listen to the experts. FIRST, do no harm.
The #nCoV2019 coronavirus probably will kill you...but something that you don't for your own pleasure or affirmation WILL almost certainly kill you. It's just quantum mechanics, man!
You don't need to be perfect or ready for prime time...you need to work at it and GET BETTER. Every.Single.Day. If you need an example--study and follow Joe Rogan's example ... OR continue being an arrogant, superior know-it-all and see how that works out for you. There are almost 8 BILLION people on our plant -- instead of coveting your neighbor's property or being satisfied with the non-achievers passively watching television or films, reach out and look and find the 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% WORTHY of imitation.
Fitness is partly about keeping your sense of humor, embracing the suck, impressing the right people ... but MOSTLY it's about looking at the road ahead and being READY for what comes next...you have to develop the ability to always have an answer for The Big Question ... and THEN what?
Stop accepting advice from people who don't understand quantum mechanics or spend time on their mats rolling or accept the necessity for distributed defense ... half of a clue is worse than no clue at all. If you trust the experts, you will end swallowing low-fat whole-grain fair-trade gluten-free Hostess Ho-Hos or some fad diet that is even WORSE.
Sleep. Hydrate. Exercise. Fast. Fitness is about what poison and ugliness you work at taking away. Resist all temptation to buy or acquire or join or travel your way to improvement...you cannot get there by squandering your cash.
You can't have legitimate confidence in yourself until AFTER you have built yourself. You can't buy trust. You need to BUILD it with each repetition, each day's actions ... when you try to fake or to buy trust, you will only end up with a bar tab and a nasty hangover. Building trust is up to you and what you will do today, tomorrow and the day after.
As with fitness...sleep, exercise, hydration, fasting... excellence derives from harsh simplicity and tedious repetition rather than from elaborate eloquence and soothing pipie-dream distractions. All great endeavors are deeply, tightly, perfectly fractal.
Most people are addicted to soothing, entertaining, reaffirming distractions ... actionable information is NOT sweet, tasty, gossipy swill. Actionable information is the kind that makes you think, "Oh crap! I need to crank it up a bit OR maybe even change direction." Information, particularly health or fitness information that makes you feel all nice, warm, fuzzy is, at best, worthless ... it is probably propaganda designed to make you comfortable in the kill chute.
It's YOUR fault when a disagreement happens ... there are some, probably MOST, agreements that you shouldn't enter into in the first place ... you can never understand enough about the other side, the other stakeholders when you enter in to an agreement.
It is a deliberate act of kindness that will randomly benefit thousands or millions or even billions who will never be able to repay you. It requires GENUINE humility...that is the most important facet of fitness, flexibility and service for many, if not MOST, ancient guys. Read Github's Guidelines on contributing to an open source project. Contribute to an open source project.
1 person in 100 will share your GENERAL interests, will have things in common in terms of aptitudes, abilities, talents. Of those 1%, 1 in 100 will mesh well with you in terms of chemistry, attitudes, tastes. This means that for every 10,000 people in the world, there is likely to be ONE person who really GETS you ... they won't all be around you geographically; they will come from very different backgrounds; they will be different ages ... BUT they will be the FEW who will kind of persons who are able argue with you over a passionately shared interest and yet continue to think of you as a friend. You don't yet know all these people, but in order to be INTELLECTUALLY fit, you need to go out and meet the 1% of the 1% ... you can't meet them all ... of the 1% of the 1%, START with ONE PERSON, ie the 1% of 1% of 1% OF your 800,000 person tribe of the 1% of the 1% of 8 billion people.
Remove the UNNECESSARY. Improve QUALITY of execution by focusing more attention on the most valuable, most essential.
Better dead than a slave ... better to be a slave than a slave trader. ABOLISH slavery IN YOUR MIND. Every. Single Second. Every. Single. Day. Slavery or being a slave to something is NEVER okay. It's simple jiujitsu...start with the white belt and never being taken captive, continue with the blue belt and teaching people to escape.
Migrations benefit everyone...a change will benefit you as well as ALL of the people in contact with you.
Get AWAY from like-minded people. Find people who share your passions, aptitudes, eccentricities ... find people who care enough in order to ARGUE FIGHT with you as if they were your brother or sister. Fitness is about being pushed...just a little harder than you want to be pushed. Find the people in the world who can push you ... more than you want to be pushed.
Discipline is freedom. If you actually want discipline, you cannot buy it or get it from listening to or watching someone else -- YOU must DO IT, you must SHOW UP and own what YOU do. YOU must do it as well as YOU can .... repetitiously, for 10,000 hours, 1000 days ... if you screw up in any particular hour, get after it the next hour. New Year's resolutions are for morons. Fitness is not special or a different place you go. Fitness is REPETITION. Forget about your snowflakey little safe space workout at the gym or dojo .... repetition is intensely ordinary. If you are serious about resolving to improve a habit, you will need to do it immediately for the next 10,000 yours ... and then re-commit to 10,000 hours whenever you break your resolution. The next 10,000 hours start with the next hour. If you're going to quit on anything, quit on not showing up in your life. REPETITION matters ... escapism or failure to be repetitive in your resolutions is the path to slavery. Lewer Dood As Slaav ... you're better off dead than thinking like a slave.
Sleep better. Move more/move better/do jiujitsu. Exercise in order to get more oxygen to your brain and stay hydrated. Eat less, pay less attention to nutritional fads and propaganda--it's what you REMOVE, not what you add. Think better, work smart, remove the fritterware and distractions to focusing.
You need five streams of income...you probably will have THOUSANDS of great ideas for solid businesses that you are not going to be able to develop...so SHARE your ideas...work instead on improving your workflow...the best way to do that is jiujitsu.
Fitness is NOT about your past, even your recent past. Fitness is NOT about being a pathetic mope longing for yesterday.
For background on DISC (Distributed Idea Suppression Complex), you might want to listen to different episodes of The Portal, a podcast by Eric Weinstein.
Take five minutes and look at a SUMMARY of ten years of the Joe Rogan Experience ... or spend more time and look at a longer summary. Go back and surf through the archive of the EARLY episodes. It's really kind of amazing ... although what would you expect from DILIGENT mastery. I have ENORMOUS respect for Rogan and crew for doing exactly what they have done over the last ten years ... the DAILY process or Youtube/podcast WOD of how they have made JRE look easy is a gift to human beings everywhere. Pay attention to it.
Don't overestimate your abilities as you start something ... if you overestimate what you can do, you'll disappoint yourself right out of the chute and you'll let someone else who is already a master do it. Don't do that -- instead, work at being a master. Almost all people grossly overestimate their current competency and similarly, they grossly underestimate what they can accomplish in 10 years. All serious investors understand the magic of steady COMPOUNDING ... you have to have skin in the game OR you can't participate in the upside -- you just watch other people and imagine something idiotic like "I could do that." You can't do it unless you do it. EVERY SINGLE DAY. That's how it is with any exercise ... it's about spending a little bit of time EACH day doing an exercise and, most importantly, IMPROVING your mechanics in doing an exercise.
In order to THINK in different languages, one must understand something about the history, the culture, the literature, the proverbs and stories, the idioms ... languages is more than just letters, syllables, words, syntax ... it's primarily about understanding the entire FLOW of an idea ... mental fitness demands exercise ... it is as we butcherers of the Russian language like to say, "luchshe pozdno, chem nikogda!" ... because "Better Late Than Never" just seems to mean more from a Russian POV.
Remove the obstructions to THINKING. Being mindful requires that you work IN A DISCIPLINED FASHION at ridding your mind of desire, anger, hate, jealousy and negative barriers. You are designed to THINK ... but if you think wrong, think STUPID or allow your thinking to be driven by desire, pride, jealousy or hate ... you cannot possibly THINK ... your mind will be incapable of more elegant, more beautiful and certainly more sophisticated and complex thought.
Make your routine SIMPLE-ER! Simple doesn't mean easy; SIMPLE repetition of a tough routine is HARD. Break your entire 16 hr workday into 30 minute time periods ... 25 minute pomodoros of focused effort or diligent ATTENTION to just one thing with a 4 minute TABATA of multiple sets of exercise. In quick succession. Think. Use your head to incorporate different exercises to appropriately build/rehab your body. It's SIMPLE to design your whole day like this. It is HARD to do .... but after you have done it, you will be more present and focused for each portion of your day ... and includes the time when you are LISTENING to someone or doing a necessary task. Stop sitting around. Stop multi-tasking.
For people with the right frame of mind ... there has never been a better set of opportunities than what we have right now!
Look up the idiom "to tempt fate" ... don't worry about bad luck or good luck, invite Bad Luck over to your house by showing some confidence in something ... I'd be really surprised if Bad Luck shows up at your boring old house ... if you want any Luck, you're going to have to whip it up yourself.
At 59, the odds of dying in the next year are 1/100 and your life expectancy is 81 yrs ... life expectancy means that your odds are 50/50 of making it that far ... as you age, the odds of dying in the next year bump up slightly, but if you survive, your life expectancy keeps getting older, ie you're always going to die in the future [although it doesn't look like anyone makes it to 125] ... according to the Social Security Administration's life expectancy tables, it is something roughly like this schedule:
- 60, 1/90, 82
- 61, 1/80, 83-
- 63, 1/70, 83
- 66, 1/60, 83+
- 68, 1/50, 84
- 71, 1/40, 85
- 74, 1/30, 86
- 79, 1/20, 88
- 85, 1/10, 91
Do a TABATA or 8 sets of 5-10 exercises with a 10 second breather between sets right now ... then set your pomodoro alarm so that you do another TABATA every 30 minutes throughout day ... do easy exercises and do tough ones ... change the rules; follow your own rules ... but do enough different sets of calisthenics throughout the day so that nobody knows what you're going to do next ... be like an impossible to control toddler.
This little podcast thought is partly about the future of this podcast ... and the absence of censorship or filters ... but more generally it's about how podcasting could evolve to be something more than just tape to listen to during a WOD ... the activity of podcasting could be more involved, more aggressively reaching out for active participation by audiences to make social podcasting into a virtual venue or gathering place ... the ideal audience of this podcast will never be a MASS audience -- the content will always be something that maybe 5 or 10 people on the planet find interesting, because there are lots of lowest common denominator schlock shovelers dishing up crap for the herds of bovines.
Of course not! The answer is ALWAYS that the tool needs to be better ... but you have to work now with what you have today; but you have to make the tools that you are using better. A warrior must always train and also work at sharpening his blades. Work will change; social conventions and culture will change and change rather dramatically. As we look back on each year, we see what these changes are and a single year might not look that significant ... but. over the course of five or ten years, the combination or accumulation of change can be absolutely mindblowing ... for example, think about what you were thinking about in January of 2015 before Google opensourced Kubernetes, then think about how has Kubernetes shaped what is possible in January of 2020 ... change@scale and done on internet time is how change must be. Until the pace get faster ... keep up.
If you really want to understand how open source communities work nowadays, you NEED to understand the fundamental architecture of directed acyclical graphs that underpin the operational mechanics of Git. It's not that difficult to understand these DAGs or acyclical digraphs, but understanding these concepts is essential for understanding HOW and WHY distributed open source teams can even have a prayer of working to develop useful software. Do yourself a big favor and spend some time understanding acyclical digraphs and maybe a few other things about graph theory.
Every last thing in the Universe dies. Every last thing ... and that process is how eternal PERFECTION is ultimately achieved. You can look forward to perfection ... OR ... you can look back, focus on what is lost and continue as you are now, focused on the illusion of your existence, but at best, only a frozen pillar of some substance that no one will ever care about.
Think in an antifragile manner, implement antifragility by obsessively, compulsively, relentlessly REMOVING the things that can go wrong AND by simultaneously obsessively, compulsively, relentlessly adding things that can possibly go right. Life is hard for people with giant egos because they imagine that they know what the future holds but the only certainty we can possibly have is uncertainty.
Yes, getting up before first light seems crazy. Maybe it is. But THE HABIT will remind you that the point of your existence from now on is to build better habits. And to do that, you will need to start your day before the sane people who are satisfied with the state of their habits.
That's a damned lie ... this episode is only a bit of a sound check, to try the thing out and see how the Anchor.FM platform works. DON'T EXPECT TOO MUCH!!! Which is kind of the whole motto behind this whole thing.