gavin retweeted
Loosh harvesting isn't some abstract idea of psychic energy being sucked out of you into space. It's right in front of you.
Scrolling is distortive hypnosis made to drain you of life (time, attention, energy) so companies can sell ur data to advertisers, essentially you are their greatest employee. All your free time is spent training their algorithms and you don't even get paid for it and you can't stop "working".
The more and more I contemplate, the more insane the reality becomes. That people literally gain NOTHING from scrolling and they trade their whole lives to do it and can't stop.
How does watching the first video below make you feel?
The other week I saw a post where someone layered 50 shorts on top of each other as an image so I turned it into a video.
When I first watched it, I instantly felt disgusted.
I showed two of my friends and they had the same experience, both feeling viscerally disturbed.
Most content on short form platforms is slop, propaganda or made to extract some form of energy from you (time, attention or money). Everyone knows that. What I'm getting at here is the deeper mechanics and function of this phenomena. So let a nigga schizo rant.
In the 3rd dimension time moves linearly through space where only one VIDEO can be seen at a time. So you see "funny relatable video" and scroll then next, so on and so forth.
In the forth dimension all the videos are happening simultaneously in the same moment of space and time and you can see the result of that from this simulation of videos stacked on top of each other.
In this sense it's extremely ugly, chaotic, disturbingly hypnotic. What is the mechanism of this? It's to destroy your mind, it's to confuse you, to flood your mind with a seemingly infinite amount of input and the negative consequences of this are severe.
You lose sense of your physical being, the external world gets quieter in every sense, your vision is sucked into the screen, you don't really notice the sensation of your body making contact with the surface you're on, you can't hear what's going on around you because you're so engaged with the music, the storytelling, the sound effects. You dissociate completely, and once you hit that dissociated state that's when the trance begins to peak and YOU FEEL LIKE YOU CAN'T STOP, like your attention is being MAGNETISED into the screen beyond your volition.
and on the surface level it doesn't seem that bad because it's so normalised and all you see are "entertaining videos" but what you fail to see is it's true form which is chaos.
This chaos seeps into your mind, it rewires your perspective about yourself and in tandem the world. It propagates the idea of the world being an evil twisted place, of hopelessness, of not feeling good enough. It impregnates your mind ideas of what you should do with your life (most of which are completely inauthentic to YOU).
Attention IS the most powerful tool you have, and your attention is being harvested in real time right now, and the MAIN reason the world seems so fucked up is because this creation has propagated and infected the minds of almost every individual on the planet. It's amplified their feelings of scarcity, missing out, of not being good enough and then those people who are affect by these things FEED into that form of their world through actions, trying to play catch up with that they think they're missing/have missed out on.
The opposite of all of this and what is useful to strive for is the cultivation of beauty in our lives. Through simple things such as gratitude for being alive right here right now, for reverence of life as it is, for opportunities to extend ourselves outward to plant the seed of love where we can.
True beauty gives space for God to reveal himself. To spend time hope scrolling the sunset at a beautiful view will do more than any special kind of practice. To directly experience the awe of simple beauty in it's densest forms is what is most important. The only pre-req to these experience is space of mind.
The kaleidoscope in the 2nd video is perfect for this and if you spend time gazing out into vast views, or narrow points of nature, relaxing, life's perfection will reveal itself to you in a subtle visual sense through kaleidoscopic morphing.
Thank you @PsychicSoldier7 for creating the engine that makes these - these Kaleidoscopes are great for inspiration.
Beauty is good for the soul and opens the heart
Slop rots your soul and hardens your heart.
gavin retweeted
23.5 hours later... there's an app and it's open source.
It tracks activities & sleep. It has full sensor support: HR, SpO2, HRV, Temperature, Motion, etc.
gavin retweeted
Julian Rotter ran a study in 1960s that accidentally explained why most people never build a life they actually chose.
He called it locus of control.
People with an external locus believe their outcomes are governed by forces outside themselves: luck, authority, circumstance, other people’s decisions. People with an internal locus believe their actions are the primary driver of what happens to them.
Decades of follow-up research produced a finding so consistent it borders on uncomfortable. Internal locus of control is one of the strongest predictors of income, health, relationship satisfaction, and psychological wellbeing ever measured across cultures.
The school system, almost by design, trains external locus into children from the earliest age. You don’t choose what to learn. You don’t choose when to learn it. You don’t choose how to demonstrate understanding.
Someone else sets the standards, grades your performance, and tells you whether you were adequate. Do this for sixteen years straight and you don’t just learn math and literature. You learn, at a neurological level, that external authorities define what counts as success and whether you’ve achieved it.
Psychologists call the long term result of this “learned helplessness,” a term Martin Seligman developed after watching dogs stop trying to escape electric shocks even when escape became possible. The shocks had been uncontrollable for long enough that the animals stopped registering their own agency as a real variable. The cage door opened and they stayed inside because their nervous system had stopped believing that moving would change anything.
The overlap between Seligman’s dogs and adults who cannot imagine building income outside a employer’s permission structure is not metaphorical. It is mechanistic. The brain that was never allowed to direct its own learning, never allowed to fail on its own terms and recover, never rewarded for autonomous decision making, genuinely loses resolution on its own capacity for self direction. The capability atrophies the way a muscle does when it goes unused.
Reclaiming internal locus of control as an adult is rehabilitation work. And the research shows it compounds exactly the way the damage did, slowly, then faster than you expected.
The single most important thing you can do in today's world is to stop operating from the old paradigm. If you need to be told what to do next (go to school, get a job, retire at 65) the outcome of your life will always be in someone else's hands. You must learn how to direct your own work. You must learn how to tolerate and mitigate risk and uncertainty. You must figure out what you want and teach yourself everything necessary to get it. It's extremely difficult, but not as difficult as the silent suffering people learn to accept as "normal."
gavin retweeted
Howard Lutnick’s family firm reportedly bought tariff refund rights for 20–30 cents on the dollar after “Liberation Day” last year.
gavin retweeted
TikTok Zombie Brain Rot Confirmed By Major Study zerohedge.com/medical/tiktok…
gavin retweeted
10 things we don't talk about enough that you can build on Ethereum:
1. Diplomas that can’t be faked
2. Traceable relief money that actually makes it to people after a disaster (saw this need first hand even in the LA fires)
3. Contracts that enforce themselves
4. Medical records you own & share when you want
5. Pay that shows up the second you finish a job
6. One login you can use everywhere online
7. Books you can co-write with your community
8. A savings account that doesn’t ask for your whole damn life story
9. Rent that splits automatically between roommates
10. Tickets to shows that can’t be scalped
And so. much. more......
What did I miss?
gavin retweeted
All it takes for God/The Universe to reward you beyond your wildest dreams is to simply stop doing the dumb shit you know you shouldn’t be doing and start doing the difficult but correct shit you’ve known you should be doing for a long ass time but for some reason haven’t.
gavin retweeted
Either Elon stole this wealth, in which case Bernie should be advocating some kind of criminal case against him, or Elon produced and traded for this wealth, in which case he should rightly be viewed as a hero of civilization for such achievement, and an inspiration to others to achieve the same.
Crucially, Bernie's wealth comes to him after being taken by force from others, while Elon's does not.
And if you care about the plight of the poor, which all good people should, consider studying the structure of the financial system in which they operate. Consider, as Bernie shows, that from the 1970's something seems to have happened, structurally, that has lead to increasing wealth disparity.
This disparity has little to do with Elon's momentous achievements, and much to do with money being perverted into a fiat institution when it was severed from gold in 1971.
Civilization is sick because money itself—that blood which courses through its productive veins—was perverted.
And it was perverted by people very much like Bernie, who, being unable to produce themselves, advocate for the wholesale theft of what others produce. That overt theft is somewhat distasteful, many insidious methods have been devised... most notably, the debasement of currency, which not one citizen in a hundred even diagnoses as the problem.
gavin retweeted
We launched a paid subscription this week and were surprised by how many investors emailed back with emotional responses. Some were upset, others asked for a discount. The decision tree couldn’t be more simple…
gavin retweeted
Confession: the phrase “I am a contrarian investor” has always irked me.
This might come off as pedantic to some, but I think this nuance is incredibly important to the health of one’s investing career.
Nobody should strive to be—or identify as—a contrarian investor. But everyone should strive to be an independently-minded investor.
Conclusions that run contrary to the crowd should be INCIDENTAL to the process, NOT the goal of the process. The moment being a contrarian becomes the goal, the investor becomes vulnerable to overfitting mental models to see opposing views—even when they aren’t warranted. It can quickly turn into an ego-driven odyssey.
I know plenty of people who fall into the trap of being contrarian for contrarian’s sake, and it’s usually because they self-identify as contrarian. They’d be far better off identifying as independently-minded investors who are interested in situations where their conclusions diverge from the crowd.
Conclusions that align with the crowd are totally fine—and will happen often. They’re just not all that interesting.
Framing it the right way also allows for slightly variant views (not necessarily contrarian) that can be valuable and encourage more nuanced thinking.
gavin retweeted
BlackRock's Head of Digital Assets (@robbiemitchnick) @blockworksDAS regarding $ETH
"The negativity around Ethereum is very overdone. There is a lot to be optimistic about."
"There was no question that the blockchain we would start our tokenization on would be Ethereum and thats not just a BlackRock thing. That's the natural default answer. That's really important."
"Clients have clearly made the choice that they really do value decentralization, credibility, and security. And that is a great advantage that Ethereum continues to have."
"ETH is a bet on blockchain adoption and innovation."
"ETH is a bet on tokenization, stablecoin adoption, and decentralized finance."
Big thanks to @Etherealize_io @VivekVentures @Consensys @ethereumJoseph for "bringing ETH being in the room"
gavin retweeted
I really enjoyed this paper by @pernasresearch. It provides helpful context for thinking about and identifying market inefficiencies.
Sometimes, the numbers don't tell the whole story. A company can have what looks like deteriorating financials while its fundamental motor is actually strengthening. When you look under the hood and spend time understanding the fundamental drivers of financial performance, you have a chance to develop a variant perception.
The entire piece is a must-read: pernasresearch.com/wp-conten…
