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

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)

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)

There are certain things that once you see, you can’t unsee You can do your best to ignore them, rationalize them away, or go back to living the way you did before, but something will always feel off. Because once you’ve directly experienced something that contradicts your existing model of reality, it’s difficult to fully return to believing in that model in the same way And the interesting thing is that this isn’t always a good thing Being able to recognize patterns in people or see where something is heading before it becomes obvious can be an incredible advantage. But there’s a cost to seeing things that other people don’t necessarily see, or that they actively avoid seeing A lot of the things that make life comfortable depend on you NOT questioning them too deeply The beliefs you’ve inherited from your family, the assumptions you’ve absorbed from society, the things you’ve been taught to value, and even the identity you’ve constructed around who you think you are. Most of these things were established long before you had the capacity to objectively evaluate them For a long time, they just feel like reality. You don’t experience them as beliefs you’ve adopted. You instead experience them as the way things are Until something gives you a glimpse outside that framework And once that happens, you have a choice. You can retreat into what’s familiar, knowing your previous way of seeing things is no longer entirely convincing, or you can continue exploring, even if doing so means dismantling everything you’ve built your identity around The most difficult part is that you don’t know what you’ll find on the other side You might realize that things you believed were completely wrong, or that much of what you thought was your personality was actually a collection of adaptations and expectations you picked up along the way For a while, this can feel like losing yourself, and it kind of is in a way. The version of you that existed within the previous framework is no longer sustainable, and you haven’t yet developed a new relationship with reality to replace it I think this is where a lot of people get stuck. They recognize that their existing model of reality is incomplete, but can’t tolerate the uncertainty of not having another model to replace it. So they search for new certainties, identities, and belief systems that restore the stability they had before But I also think the real ‘goal’ is something different It’s the ability to look at something, including yourself, without immediately needing to defend it, rationalize it, turn it into a fixed belief, etc. about how things are supposed to be To observe what’s actually happening, recognize the assumptions you’re bringing to it, and decide how you want to live rather than unconsciously operating from a framework you never consciously chose Because there’s a difference between choosing how you want to live and simply acting out beliefs that were installed in you before you were capable of questioning them The irony is that becoming more free can initially feel like losing everything that made you who you are And you can understand all of this intellectually, but that’s a very different thing from actually experiencing it It’s one thing to understand that your beliefs shape how you perceive reality. It’s another to experience one of those beliefs falling apart, recognize how deeply it has influenced your behavior, and realize you’ve been living according to something you never consciously decided was true That kind of experience changes your relationship with yourself in a way that simply understanding the concept never will

There comes a time in the life of any intelligent, successful person where the delta between them and the people around them becomes so wide that they can no longer really relate to each other in the same way This was always the case to some degree, but eventually you reach a critical point where the experiences you’ve accumulated, the patterns you’ve recognized, and the competence you’ve developed are so far removed from those of your peers that even people who were relatively close to you early on can no longer really understand your perspective I see this as both a good and a bad thing. You ofc have a degree of freedom and a way of seeing the world that you probably wouldn’t trade, but there’s also a growing lack of relatability You can see people making decisions that you feel relatively certain aren’t going to work out, because you’ve already experienced the downstream consequences of similar decisions, or you’ve seen the pattern play out enough times to understand where it’s heading Yet trying to explain this to them often makes you sound delusional. They haven’t had the experiences necessary to understand why you see things the way you do, and from their perspective, you’re the one who’s detached from reality The main problem with this is that you eventually start questioning whether you’re actually delusional Because you look around and everybody is doing something different. They’re following conventional paths and making decisions that seem perfectly reasonable to them. Meanwhile, you’ve developed a very different model of how things work, and you can see the flaws in a lot of what they’re doing But what if you’re wrong? What if you’ve just constructed an elaborate narrative around your own experiences and convinced yourself that you see something other people don’t? The irony is that the ability to question yourself is part of what allowed you to get here in the first place. You had to be sufficiently self-aware to recognize when something wasn’t working and continually update your model of reality So then you find yourself caught between two things: the recognition that your own way of seeing things has repeatedly produced results, and the fact that almost everyone around you seems to be operating according to a different set of assumptions And I think the best answer is to continue leaning into what got you here, while remaining sufficiently self-aware to recognize when you’re wrong Because if you’re going to do anything meaningfully different, there will inevitably be periods where the evidence available to you makes sense before it makes sense to anyone else

A lot of talented, intelligent guys figure out how to play games really well from an early age This transitions pretty naturally into business later on. Depending on the type of intelligence they have, they start to see patterns earlier than other people, make better decisions + accumulate the compounding benefits of doing so over time They experience a lot of success because they’re innately good at taking objective reality, figuring out what’s working and what isn’t, and pivoting accordingly The interesting thing is that this becomes progressively more fine-tuned throughout their life. The more they do it, the better they get at it, and the more the game itself reinforces the underlying behavior The fundamental feedback loop is pretty straightforward. You look at reality objectively, identify what’s wrong or what could be improved, adjust your behavior, and get a better result. Repeat this enough times and you become exceptionally good at it The problem is that the game itself starts to become your model for life And how you perceive reality quite literally becomes your reality The game isn’t just economics either, although it certainly attracts extremes in this category. It’s everything you’ve learned to do well, everything that has rewarded you for being this way At a certain point, you start to realize that there are other dimensions of life that don’t operate according to the same rules. Relationships, love, internal peace, actually feeling things, being present, having a sense of self that isn’t entirely contingent on what you’re doing or how well you’re doing it And the really interesting part is that some of the traits that got you here can actively get in the way of developing those other dimensions Because you simply CANNOT approach everything as a problem to solve In fact, some of the most important things in life seem to require almost the opposite of what made you successful This is a particularly difficult transition for anyone who has spent their entire life being rewarded for the ability to adapt and make things happen The real challenge is learning when the thing that makes you exceptionally good at one game is no longer the thing that will get you where you want to go in another And being intelligent enough to recognize that isn’t necessarily the same as being able to do it At some point, you have to develop an entirely different relationship with reality It requires a big leap of faith into the unknown, which feels like death at first There is no other option tho, unless you want to continuing living a life of illusion

This post-AGI real estate thesis is certainly interesting - I met 2 Turkish RE guys who thought similarly about Montenegro property last year - BUT the thing I said then and will repeat now is that I think people are projecting way too much of today’s world into a world where true AGI actually exists If AGI is genuinely transformative, it cannot just be “people make more money or have more freedom and then move to places with better weather” You’d have to reprice basically everything If productivity explodes and human labor becomes far less economically scarce, the relationship between labor, income, currency, asset prices, etc… would have to change dramatically. I don’t think you can just assume today’s purchasing power and economic incentives survive intact And then there’s ofc the geopolitical side. If everyone suddenly decides that Spain, Portugal, the Balkans, Morocco, California, etc. are the places to live, you’re assuming the political systems governing those places just stay exactly as they are while enormous amounts of capital and demand flow toward them Why would they? These places already have shitty governance to begin with If AGI creates that much surplus and makes certain geographies extraordinarily desirable, you’d expect governments and capital to respond to that incentive (probably gets to military escalation tbh) So I don’t really agree with the idea of simply buying a house today in a place with nice weather because “everyone will want to live there after AGI” The more interesting question is what happens to the underlying political, monetary, and geographic structure of the world if AGI actually becomes that powerful International network becomes the true moat IMO I’m actually more bullish on concepts akin to Network school in Kazakhstan / mini governance projects backed by bright minds - you can artificially create an ecosystem of like-minded ppl who have at least some connections/influence on larger entities this way

My true long-term bet for the world is the deliberate configuration of states Instead of being constantly thrown around by external circumstances, I think we’ll eventually have ways, potentially heavily intertwined with AI, to deliberately move ourselves into states like love, peace, curiosity, presence, aliveness, etc… What’s super fascinating is how little of this you can actually override with your mind vs how much is stuck somewhere deeper in the body @johnsonmxe is doing some amazing work around this, and I think he’s onto something with the idea that you can’t necessarily just think your way into a different state Some examples that come to mind: You can know you’re safe and still feel fear or you can know someone likes you and still feel anxious around them One of the most common is: You can understand exactly why you do something and then watch yourself do it again anyway I find this last one super interesting because most people basically think the voice talking inside their head is them But almost every major spiritual tradition has some version of the idea that this is only one part of you There’s the thinking mind, the emotional system, the body, automatic reactions, desires, etc. And if those different parts aren’t aligned, you get this weird incongruence where consciously you want one thing while the rest of you is doing something completely different So imagine if we actually figured out how to deliberately configure the entire person Im not even talking about just changing negative thinking to positive. It can also be related to environment, attention, movement, breathing, memories, physiology, relationships, sensory input, and eventually AI that understands which combination moves you into a particular state Because think about the best states you’ve ever experienced Falling in love, a profound achievement, being completely immersed in something, the birth of a child, etc Most people experience those as things that happened to them that require an external factor What if those states could eventually be deliberately accessed? Buddhism claims this is possible What happens if you can access love without needing someone else to behave exactly right? Peace without needing your external circumstances to be perfect? Meaning without needing status? I think that’s a much more interesting vision of technology than just making the external world more convenient The ultimate technology might be understanding the machinery that produces the experience of being alive itself And if we could actually align the different parts of ourselves so that what we consciously want, what our body expects, what our emotions are doing and how we behave are all pointing in the same direction… I have no idea what kind of civilization that produces But certainly seems worth the bet

The same obsessive attention that can destroy someone can also make them exceptional at something Thus, there’s an interesting relationship between extreme vice and extreme success Someone who is capable of becoming completely consumed by gambling, drugs, sex, gaming, status, etc. often has an enormous amount of energy available to them. The problem isn’t necessarily the amount of energy, it’s just where it’s being directed Modern society has done a terrible job cultivating this raw force in young men You have to learn how to hold that intensity without needing something to consume you, which is exceptionally difficult If you can redirect the energy without needing to extinguish it, you unlock unbelievable powers This is the part most people seem to miss when they look at someone with a serious vice and just see a lack of discipline There’s always a light and dark, Yin and Yang, etc. Which is why developing enough internal awareness to actually look at yourself objectively is so critical You need to be able to see both what your energy is capable of creating and what it is capable of destroying then take a leap of faith