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In 2014, Admiral William H. McRaven stood in front of the graduating class at the University of Texas and said: if you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.

The speech is twenty minutes, I recommend watching it in full. It has become one of the most-watched commencement addresses ever given.

It then was published as a small book with a bold, timeless thesis: it’s the little things that change everything. Every lesson boils down to the same three ingredients. Small wins. Consistency. Accountability.

Start With a Win

If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.

The made bed is the first proof of work of the day.

I remember reading this in college and it completely flipped why I make my bed. It’s not about being clean and presentable. It’s a psychological anchor. Starting the day with a win - one task completed, one thing fully in your control, momentum before anything else gets in the way.

Even a terrible day can end at a made bed. A day full of losses still had one win in it, and you come home to that.

This applies elsewhere in our day to day. I began to ask myself “what’s the made bed in other aspects my life?”

The Debts We Collect

The inverse: small losses compound too.

There’s a line I love about a rock in your shoe. Deal with it early and it’s nothing. Leave it in and it rubs the heel, then it’s a blister, then the blister pops, then it’s infected.

We’re all collecting invisible debts. Skip the gym long enough and you’re carrying exercise debt.

And then there’s mental debt. I’ve recently fallen off the daily practice lately of journaling, meditation, and yoga.

I’ve been coasting on a surplus built from a season of consistent practice, but I can feel it depleting.

If I don’t rebuild the surplus now, I’ll pay for it later (with interest).

Making your bed is the counter-position. Small deposits, every day.

Someone to Help You Paddle

Nobody gets through it alone.

Another quote I love: if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

This is proximity to power coming up again. You stand on the shoulders of the people before you, and the honest version of that isn’t extraction. You help them paddle, they help you, and a rising tide lifts all boats. The aspiration is putting yourself in the rooms and communities where those people already are, and being someone worth having in the boat when you get there.

McRaven’s munchkin crew (nobody over five-foot-five, little flippers, mocked by every other boat) outpaddled everyone. You don’t know who’s going to matter to your story until you’re in the water with them, which means giving people a fair shot, staying curious, and talking less.

When I catch myself talking too much, I’m usually just rehashing other conversations. It’s in the silence and the questions that you catch the butterfly crossing the room.

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Cringe Mountain

The obstacle course record at BUD/S stood for years. The safe way down the slide for life was proven — feet first, hang on. It was also the reason the record never moved. Then one student went down head first.

The content version of this is climbing cringe mountain. When you start, you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re probably not interesting. Everyone knows the feeling of hovering over publish. Do I really want to put this out? The head-first move is pressing post anyway.

What gets me through is what I’d call a delusional optimism about myself: my conviction that if my work is honest, it will find the right people and places, even if I can’t see the path.

So the deal I’ve made with myself is simple. I’m going to fail. I’m going to drop balls but not get caught in the small stuff. Win or learn.

If you hope to complete the swim, you will have to deal with the sharks.

The sharks are the critics. Sometimes the shark is your own patterns and programming, the voice that flares up whenever you stray from the “traditional” path.

Stand your ground on your why, and if a shark charges, you punch it in the snout.

Show Up in the Dark

The ninth week of SEAL training sends you under an enemy ship’s hull at night, where no light reaches you and that’s where the mission gets done. Everyone hits a keel moment eventually. What you practice in the small dark moments is what shows up in the big one.

Can you stick to what you believe in and show up in the hardest moments?

The physical versions of challenges here is more of the transparent one, especially for men. That’s the whole Goggins playbook.

The harder question I’m sitting with: when someone near me is in an emotional dark night, can I show up there too? Different shades of a similar skill.

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Never Ring the Bell

There’s a brass bell in the courtyard at BUD/S. Ring it and the suffering ends instantly. All you have to do is quit, publicly. The ones who made it through weren’t necessarily the strongest. They simply refused to touch it.

If you want to change the world, don’t ever, ever ring the bell.

I’ve joked that I should rename this whole project Stay in the Game, because that’s what every lesson seems to reduce to.

Staying in the game looks unglamorous. Strip out what’s not needed. Keep providing value, because value provided is value returned.

I plan to keep my North Star honest. Mine isn’t a Ferrari. It’s to build experiences that teach freedom technology, and freedom from technology.

Bitcoin, sovereign AI, and privacy on one side. Breath and yoga practices on the other.

What I’m Taking With Me

• Start the day with a task completed. Even the worst day still had one win, and you come home to the proof.

• Small losses compound exactly like small wins — get the rock out of the shoe early.

• Audit the debts: exercise debt, anxiety debt, mental debt. Pay them down while they’re small.

• Fast is alone. Far is together. Be someone worth having in the boat.

• Measure people by the size of their heart, and talk less — the butterfly shows up in the silence.

• Go head first. The cringe is the toll, not the verdict.

• Be your best in the darkest moment — and bring the speaker 😎.

• Life’s not fair. Drive on.

• Never, ever ring the bell.

Nobody knows what they’re doing. That’s anothert takeaway underneath every one of these episodes — everyone is experimenting, adjusting, and going again. Which means the game isn’t won by the person with the perfect plan. It’s won by the person still playing.

So make the bed.

Stay in the game.

Cheers, like and subscribe, and if you have more timeless podcasts to recommend, send them my way.

jacklesser.me

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Aho.

There’s a piece of stoic art hanging in my house. Two circles. One is labeled confidence — what you know. The other is humility — what you don’t know, and what you’re willing to admit you don’t. And the sliver in the middle, the overlap where you pretend to know what you don’t, is your ego.

I had that image in my head the whole time I re-listened to Ben Francis on Modern Wisdom.

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Francis is the founder of Gymshark. He started it at nineteen, kept working shifts at Pizza Hut while he built it, and became the youngest self-made billionaire in Britain. When you get a B next to your net worth, that’s not an accident. That’s proof of work.

But the word that pulled me into this conversation wasn’t billionaire. It was quiet. The episode is built around the quiet operator — the person playing the long game without needing you to watch. And what you hear, the deeper you go, is a man who has figured out how to keep that middle sliver small. How to put the ego down so the thing he actually cares about can win.

This is what I keep coming back to.

The Quiet Operator

Francis has spent years in rooms with people operating at a level most of us only read about. Chris asks him what they’re actually like. The answer surprised me.

They tend to be better people than you’d think. And bad people, in my experience, aren’t able to maintain relationships over really prolonged periods of time.

The best ones are organized, articulate, intelligent. The unglamorous fundamentals. The traits are obvious — everyone expects them of a great operator — and almost no one actually maintains them.

He tells a story about Harley, one of the founders of Shopify. Harley stands up at 8:59 on the dot, shakes every hand in the room, remembers every name — then leaves to call his family and prep for the next day.

Those little things over a long period really add up.

That’s the whole game. Small disciplines, compounded. Not the heroic swing. The boring rep, done again, for years, until it bends the curve. It’s the same thing I keep finding everywhere — often as simple as showing up.

The proof of work isn’t one big moment. It’s the stack.

And the door never closes. Francis runs a company many times the size of most people he talks to, and he still treats every conversation as a chance to learn. No here’s the small fry, I already know everything. The good ones stay students. That’s not a personality trait. It’s a strategy.

Ambitions for the Business vs. Ambitions for Yourself

Francis started Gymshark as the CEO. And then, a few years in, as it started to really grow — he stepped down. Not pushed out like Steve Jobs. He chose it. He looked at what the company needed and decided he wasn’t yet the person to give it.

If your ambitions for the business are larger than your ambitions for yourself, you’ll put yourself into any role it needs. I worked out what I was bad at, drew a line, and outsourced it — get the best people you can afford.

Read that again. Ambitions for the business larger than ambitions for yourself. That’s the ego, going down on purpose.

He breaks the founder’s job into phases, and they flip the work on its head as you grow.

The job literally flips on its head depending on the scale of the business. There’s peacetime, there’s wartime, and then there’s scale.

Zero to ten million, you do whatever the hell you want. No time for discussion, no data to back up your thinking. You force the business into success and you bet the entire house on going again. He says “I’ve made zero mistakes” is usually a sign you should’ve risked more. Then there’s something to lose, but adrenaline carries you — and the moment you start ignoring the real people you’ve hired, the do what I want approach quietly stops working. Then scale, where the job turns intellectual and social instead of adrenal, and my way or the highway hits a hard expiry date.

So he went and got the boot camp. Front row seat to his own company, learning the parts he was bad at from people who were better — and then he came back as CEO. Sharper. The same baby, run by a version of him that had the humility to leave and learn.

That’s not losing the company. That’s loving it more than you love being the guy in charge of it.

He was basically able to get an all class MBA while still gaining the real experience of working at a scaling company. And now he’s back leading the charge.

Positive-Sum

Culture sells you the cutthroat founder. The zero-sum world where my win is your loss and it all nets to zero. Movies love it. I think it’s largely a lie.

What Francis describes is the opposite. Relationships that last decades, because, as he puts it, bad actors can’t sustain them. The con gets exposed. The shortcut gets found. Over a long enough timeline, the only thing that compounds is being someone people actually want to keep doing business with.

This is where I think about proximity to power — Tony Robbins’ idea. Not power as in title. Power as in the traits you want to be near: the connector, the operator, the person who’s calm under conflict. You get better by standing next to better, and the real version of that isn’t extraction. It’s a flywheel. You learn from them, they learn something from you, and you go through the experience together. Positive-sum.

Francis figured out early that the room is the asset. So he immersed himself to be next to the people he’d decided were better than him. The discipline compounds.

The Summit Is Hollow

He’s done it. Made the money, traveled everywhere, fulfilled the dream. And he quotes Jim Carrey:

I wish everyone could get rich and famous and have everything they ever dreamed of — so they’d see that it’s not the answer.

We know this. We have a mountain of evidence — miserable billionaires, the whole genre of it. And yet some part of us still strains toward the summit anyway. Chris calls these the unteachable lessons. You can’t discover without real world experience. You have to climb the thing and stand on top and feel the nothing yourself.

I’ve written about this before as the difference between Vidya and Gyan — informational knowing versus experiential knowing. You can read that money won’t make you happy. You can’t know it until you’ve had enough to prove it.

Naval has the another clean version:

Money won’t solve all your problems. But it’ll solve all your money problems.

Which is real, and also the trap. A lot of big problems are money problems, so it genuinely helps. But the summit was more looking for the connection, the purpose, the people.

Francis says he’d rather have one percent of the wealth with a wonderful family life. The full package, not the number.

This landed differently because of the timing — he’d just had twins. He’s now thinking about how to raise the children of a billionaire with the same hunger he had as a working-class kid, when the thing that drove him is the one thing they’ll never lack. No easy answer. Just a father doing the work in real time.

Every Goal Is Equal

At some point Chris and Ben get into what Gymshark is even for. And Francis says something I think is quietly radical for a fitness brand.

A skinny kid in the UK who wants to build muscle — his ambition is no better than an American girl who wants to lose thirty pounds. Everyone wants to develop. Everyone’s goal is equal.

You don’t tier one person’s goal against another’s. You meet people exactly where they are. Improvement in any direction is still improvement — and the small ones compound into big ones if you just keep stacking.

The line he won’t cross is promoting the extremes as if they’re health. Five percent body fat, hormones in the toilet, the most incredible physique hiding the worst relationship with the body. Neither end is the goal. The goal is the person in front of you, getting a little better.

Start small. Stack. Adjust the difficulty up as you go. That’s the whole thing.

What Are You Going to Do About It?

Young Ben hits a problem and goes to his dad expecting comfort. His dad just asks him:

This quote came from his father. Tough, masculine love:

What are you going to do about it?

That’s a complete philosophy in six words. Some things you can control and some you can’t — you’re not going to change the weather or how other people run their lives. But you always own the response. You can outsource the problem, ignore it, or sit in it and find the move.

I’ve been thinking about it through two-way and one-way doors. A two-way door you can walk back through — post the clip, delete it, no harm. A one-way door you can’t — the tattoo, the promise, the word you gave. You build trust by how you handle the one-way doors. And when you build in the open, the proof of work becomes undeniable. You can’t fake the long game. It just shows.

So you pick a door and you go.

What I’m Taking With Me

• Confidence is what you know. Humility is what you don’t and will admit. The ego is the sliver between — keep it small.

• The best operators are better people than you’d think, because bad ones can’t sustain relationships over decades.

• Small disciplines, compounded, beat the heroic swing. The proof of work is the stack, not the moment.

• If your ambitions for the work are bigger than your ambitions for yourself, you’ll step back, learn, and come back sharper.

• Play positive-sum. Stand next to people better than you and bring them along.

• The summit is hollow — money solves money problems and not much else. Pick the full package on purpose.

• Meet people where they are. Every goal is equal.

• Whatever happens: what are you going to do about it?

There’s a market mindset I keep choosing, even when the season doesn’t earn it. Bear-market mindset — build like the stack is down, put in the reps, prove the work. But bull-market vibes — show up like it’s already going right.

Francis is the long-game version of that. Quiet. Humble about what he doesn’t know. Confident about what he does. And almost no ego in between.

That’s the operator I want to be. So I’ll keep stacking the small disciplines, keep choosing the positive-sum room, and keep asking the only question that ever actually moves anything.

What are you going to do about it?

Cheers, like and subscribe, and if you have more timeless podcasts to recommend, send them my way.

jacklesser.me

Aho.

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Two young fish are swimming along, having what seems like a normal day. They pass an older fish going the other way, who nods and says, morning, boys — how’s the water? and keeps swimming.

The two young fish swim on for a while. Then one looks at the other and says: what the hell is water?

That’s the parable David Foster Wallace opens with in his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. It’s the most impactful commencement speech I’ve ever heard. This is a different kind of reflection than I usually do — it’s a speech, not a podcast — and honestly my first instinct is to tell you to stop reading this and go watch the twenty-two minutes yourself.

I come back to it every six or eight months. Partly to remind myself: this is water. Mostly to keep asking the other question. What the hell is water?

Because Wallace tells the graduates that the degree they’re holding isn’t really about the facts they memorized.

The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

A real education, he says, isn’t what to think. It’s how to think. And underneath that — what to pay attention to, and how to choose it.

The water is the obvious thing. The thing so constant and so close that it disappears. The collective, automatic, default experience of being a person moving through a day — the part we almost never stop to actually look at, especially now, when everything is sped up and we’re distracted by design and running problems in our heads on a loop we didn’t choose.

We’re the two fish. Swimming through it. Never once asking what it is.

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Main Character Syndrome

Here’s the default setting, and it’s worth being honest about it.

Every experience you have ever had has been from the exact center of your own perspective. You are, without effort, the main character of your own life. There’s something deeply human about that — it’s where your agency lives. Take the wheel. Be the protagonist. Write the story.

But the same setting has a shadow. The default isn’t just I’m the hero. It’s often I’m the hero and everyone else is in my way. And that default almost always gets attributed to the negative.

The line at security. The person fumbling for their ID when you’ve got a flight to catch and you got here with time and now they’re the problem. The car that cut you off. The call center rep who won’t make the exception you didn’t earn. Me, me, me. I know how to do this right. Why doesn’t everyone else?

You can run that story all day. It’s free, it’s automatic, and it quietly poisons everything.

Sonder

Sonder is the realization that every stranger you pass — the one crossing the street, the one holding up the line — is living a life as vivid and complicated as your own. Same fears. Same stakes. Same private weather you can’t see.

Wallace makes it concrete. Maybe the person who’s short with you hasn’t slept in days because their spouse is in the hospital. Maybe the car that cut you off is actually rushing a kid to the ER for an allergic reaction. You don’t know. You’ll almost never know.

But here’s the thing — it’s just as easy to attribute the positive as the negative. It costs the same. One story has you tense, righteous, and alone. The other has you soft, curious, and connected to a stranger you’ll never meet again.

Maybe the default story is true. Maybe the guy really is an a-hole. But do you actually know that, without a single word exchanged?

You get to choose the story. That’s the whole move.

The Mind Is a Great Servant

Wallace talks about the danger of living inside your own head — about suppression, about despair, about the worst places a runaway mind can go.

The mind is a great servant but a horrible master.

If you live in your head, telling yourself stories with no real truth in them, those stories can become hell. The traffic jam isn’t the problem. The narration is.

This is why I keep dragging it back to neutral. Life is going to keep doing the thing it does — up, down, comparing, expanding, shrinking, whiplash. The practice isn’t to feel none of it. Feel the highs. Feel the lows. Just don’t get stuck in the back-and-forth.

Awareness, breath, reflection, a beat before the reaction. That’s how you come back to neutral. That’s how the servant stays a servant.

Everybody Worships Something

One of the sharpest turns in the speech: there’s no such thing as an atheist.

Not in the religious sense — in the sense that everyone worships something. Money. Beauty. Status. Being right. The version of yourself you want other people to see. You don’t get to choose whether you worship. You only get to choose what.

And almost everything else will eat you alive. Worship money and you’ll never have enough. Worship your own intellect and you’ll end up feeling like a fraud. The default objects of worship are the ones that quietly consume you.

So if it’s a choice — and it is — the question becomes whether you can point that worship at something more shared. Something more profound. Something that builds connection instead of drawing down on you.

Which loops right back to the water. What’s the thing surrounding all of us that lets us bond, collaborate, build, and actually want good outcomes for each other? Whatever that is — that’s worth worshiping. The water you breathe in and out is the thing you end up projecting back into the world.

Take the AirPods Out

When you notice the water, you start finding joy in stupidly simple things. The flowers on the side of the road. The breeze on your skin. A mother smiling at her baby in a stroller. The same attention that makes the lows lower can make an ordinary Tuesday brighter and more alive.

It’s not going to get easier. The tools are coming fast — AI, automation, all of it becoming ubiquitous, the distance between us getting easier to widen. But the human part doesn’t have to go anywhere. You can still say good morning to the person in line at the coffee shop.

You can take the AirPods out.

Listen to the birds, the wind, the cars going by. Slow down. Expand the breath. Get out of your head. When you get out of your head, you find the softness — the acceptance of what’s actually there. The world doesn’t have to be out to get you. It can just be a beautiful thing to swim through.

This is the freedom-from-tech side of the same coin I keep writing about. The leverage is real. So is the trap. The competitive advantage is being able to disconnect long enough to feel the water.

What I’m Taking With Me

• The most important realities are the hardest to see, precisely because they never stop touching you. That’s water.

• A real education is how to think, not what — and underneath that, what you choose to pay attention to.

• The default setting makes you the hero and everyone else an obstacle. You can override it. It just takes noticing.

• Attribute the positive. It costs exactly the same as attributing the negative and leaves you somewhere better.

• The mind is a great servant and a horrible master. Don’t let the narration run the day.

• You’re going to worship something. Pick it on purpose.

• Take the AirPods out. The water is right there.

The send-off Wallace gives the graduates is that he wishes them luck — because we all know we’re going to need it. It hits harder knowing how his own story ended. The speech isn’t proof he had it figured out. It’s proof of how hard the practice actually is, even for the person describing it best.

So I’ll keep doing the simple, unglamorous thing. Coming back to neutral. Choosing the kinder story. Reminding myself, over and over, in the line and the traffic and the call I didn’t want to make:

This is water. This is water.

Cheers, like and subscribe, and if you have more timeless podcasts to recommend, send them my way.

Check out the episode companion @ jacklesser.me

Aho.

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The Mamba Mentality gets attributed to obsession. Peak performance. The 4am alarm. The 800 makes before bed. The opponent you study until you’ve broken them down to the studs.

Sit with Kobe’s last great interview, though — On Purpose with Jay Shetty, recorded four months before he died — and what you actually hear underneath the obsession is something quieter. Patience. Self-negotiation. Structure. What Kobe refers to as the cage that lets the animal run.

The Long Game Was Forced On Him

Kobe didn’t pick the long game because it sounded wise. He picked it because the short game was a guaranteed loss.

He explains as a kid he was scrawny, he couldn’t compete in the here and now, so he had no choice but to look long term. He chose a skill to improve on every year. Just continued improvement. Kaizen. The decade was the only timeframe where the math worked. Months were going to humiliate him. Years might give him something.

That reframe is the whole Mamba Mentality, and it almost never gets repeated.

Patience isn’t a virtue he developed. It was a strategy he was forced into. The obsession people now romanticize was downstream of a much less glamorous fact: this is just the only way I can win this.

That sounds like the Bill Gates line, we overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in a decade, but Kobe was living the inverse and let the decades compound.

The compounding is the part nobody wants to wait for.

The Cage Is What Lets the Animal Run

The line from the episode that triggered a pattern recognition of how to structure your life for success:

Creativity comes from structure. You have those parameters — and within that, you can be creative.

I used to read “creativity loves constraints” as something about resourcefulness. No money, get clever. No team, do it yourself. A more hacky solution.

Kobe means something else. He means the schedule is the canvas. The 4am alarm, the same gym, the same drills — the parameters aren’t a prison on the work. They’re the only way the work knows where to go.

He tells the story of how the name Detail, his ESPN+ show, just came to him. Not in a brainstorm. Not in a meeting. Walking around, mind on it for weeks, and one day it surfaced. The structure was the soil. The idea grew there because there was somewhere for it to grow.

I have a friend who did a “bad idea of the day” as a New Year’s resolution a few years ago. One business idea per day. Most of them were bad — that was the point. The constraint forced him to notice problems he would have walked past. Problem → solution → business. The bridge in the middle is the work.

Consistency breeds creativity. Show up. Do the work. Day after day. Ideas walk into rooms that have been left open for them.

Yes, I’m Afraid. But, what Am I Actually Afraid Of?

Kobe says: yeah, I am nervous. Yeah, I am fearful. Well — what am I afraid of?

Most fear and emotion collapses under that second question. The worst-case scenario you’re running in your head, the actual specific thing, is almost never going to happen. And the version that is going to happen, when you name it, is usually small enough to plan for.

He puts it cleanly: emotions come and go. The work is to accept them, embrace them all, and then choose what to do with them — instead of being run by them.

There are two versions of dealing with fear.

The first one is suppress and push through. Pretend the fear isn’t there. Be tough. Get the rep. This is the version that gets celebrated in gym posters. It works in short bursts. But the fear doesn’t actually leave — it just runs the play from the back of your mind. You think you’re tough. You’re just dissociated.

The second one is accept and interrogate. Put the fear on the table. Look at it. Ask: what specifically? Most of it dissolves under the question. What’s left is real and small enough to act on.

Kobe was great at the second one. He treated his own fear like a piece of game film. Slow it down, find the open lane, run the play.

The Tight Loop

He has this beautiful moment talking about the difference between sports and creative work.

Sports gives you the tight loop. You shoot. You miss. You adjust. The feedback comes back inside two seconds. The scoreboard at the end of the game tells you the truth.

Writing doesn’t do that. Music doesn’t do that. Business doesn’t do that. The feedback blurs. Sometimes it takes years. Sometimes it takes longer than your life — Van Gogh got his flowers after he was already gone.

This is why so many great athletes struggle when they leave the sport. They’ve trained an entire nervous system on tight-loop feedback, and then they’re handed a craft where the loop runs on a five-year delay.

Kobe’s whole post-basketball life was him retraining for the long-loop game. Writing children’s books. Producing Dear Basketball. Running Granity. Five rings, two Olympic golds, an Oscar, and then he starts over inside a craft where the validation comes back blurred.

That’s the part of the Mamba Mentality nobody talks about. It’s not just attack the day. It’s do this for the next decade and don’t need to be told whether it’s working.

The Rings Were the Byproduct

The rings were expected. The rings were the byproduct.

A serious flex, and also the point.

He’s saying: the results don’t really matter. The figuring out matters. Trophies are the receipt for the puzzle. The next morning there’s always another puzzle.

Most people invert this. They obsess over the outcome and underbuild the process. They want the championship without loving the practice. They want the book without loving the writing. They want the body without loving the training.

Kobe’s flex is that he got the figuring-out right and the rings happened later, almost by accident.

Jeff Bezos has a version of this from baseball. The most runs you can score in a single at-bat is four. The grand slam ceiling is four. In business and creative pursuits the ceiling is infinite. So the result doesn’t matter. The thing that matters is staying at-bat and in the game.

You stop needing the world to validate you. You’re paid in the work itself.

Bonus: You’re Reading the Wrong Things

Near the end of the podcast, Kobe and Jay are talking about how neither of them liked reading as kids. I had that same exact assumption when I was a teenager, and a high school teacher of mine called me on this one day. I’d shown up not having read the assigned novel and said, flat out, I don’t like reading.

She looked at me and said: it’s not that you don’t like reading. It’s that you’re reading the wrong things.

That clicked a gyan moment. Reading wasn’t the problem. The door was wrong. Once I found memoirs, then economics, then philosophy, then fiction adventures like The Alchemist — I couldn’t put them down.

Curiosity needs the right entry point. If something you “should” love is leaving you cold, the answer is almost never I’m bad at this thing. It’s I haven’t found the door yet.

This is also why Kobe says he loved The Alchemist. The whole book is Santiago following the door — the personal legend — without negotiating with the moment.

Trophy Case to Torch Pass

The closing arc of the episode is the part that wrecked me a little.

Kobe says his daughter — Gianna, rest in peace — called him out. He was hesitating to write a children’s book. He was a five-time NBA champion and he was scared of the page. And she said: you always tell us to go for it. Don’t talk about it, be about it.

So he did. He wrote the book.

Then he says the line:

Now it’s not about the awards. You wind up trying to create something that inspires someone — who then inspires someone else. That’s more significant than any championship.

He’s just been through 20 years of being told he’s one of the best in the world at one specific thing. And he’s telling you that the rings, the medals, the Oscar — none of it lands like inspiring one person who then goes and inspires another.

That’s the trophy case to torch pass. The work after the last trophy is the most important work.

And he’s not just saying it. He’s living it. He left the game and started over inside a craft with a long feedback loop because he wanted the torch to outlive the trophy case.

He didn’t get to finish that part. The interview was four months before the helicopter. It hits different now.

Create From Truth

He sends the whole interview off in three words.

Create from truth.

If it isn’t honest, it won’t carry. The audience can always tell the difference between a real thing and a thing made to look like one — even if they can’t articulate it, they feel it in their chest and they move on.

So much of what we put out is created from the algorithm. From the market. From what we think we should be saying. From the version of us we’d like other people to think we are.

The Mamba Mentality, stripped down, is: pick the long game on purpose. Build the cage. Let the animal run. Interrogate the fear. Stay in the figuring-out. Pass the torch.

And underneath all of that — create from truth.

That’s the practice.

What I’m Taking With Me

• Patience as a strategy, not a virtue. Pick the timeframe where the math works.

• The cage is what lets the animal run. The schedule is the canvas.

• Yes, I’m afraid — what am I actually afraid of? Most fear collapses under that.

• The tight loop is a gift. When the feedback blurs, you’re going to need a different muscle.

• The result is downstream. Stay at-bat. Love the figuring-out.

• If you “don’t like” the thing, you might just be at the wrong door.

• The torch outlives the trophy. Start the long-loop work before you need to.

• Create from truth. The audience knows. Always.

Kobe got the rings, the medals, the Oscar — and then quietly told you, in his last great interview, that none of it landed like inspiring one person who then inspires another.

That’s the part I want to carry. Not the obsession. The pass.

If you made it this far, please like and subscribe, and if you have more timeless podcasts to recommend, send them my way.

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Aho.

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When was the last time you walked into something, a goal, a project, a relationship, without needing one specific thing to happen in order to feel fulfilled?

I tweeted a few weeks ago that I’d reminded myself to have fun. In an era of hacks and stacks and optimization, that was the most useful hack I’d found in months. Just have fun. Strip the cherished outcome. Show up without the contract.

That tweet didn’t come out of nowhere.

I keep coming back to episode #770 of the Tim Ferriss Show — Tim with Elizabeth Gilbert, recorded in 2024. They sit with the modern problem: how do you work on something that actually matters without driving yourself crazy in the wanting of it? How do you stay generous and present when every part of life has been gamified by the optimization industry?

Elizabeth opens by reading a Celtic prayer of approach.

I bring an undefended heart to our meeting place. I am not negotiating by withholding. I am not subject to disappointment. I have no cherished outcome.

That last line is the whole essay. I have no cherished outcome. Not “I don’t care.” Not “I’ll go with the flow.” Something stranger. You still show up. You still bring your full self. You’re just not negotiating against the moment.

The Optimizer’s Trap

Here’s what I love about Tim being on the receiving end of this conversation.

Tim is Mr. Optimizer. He wrote The Four Hour Work Week twenty years ago, and when you read it today, almost every premise has been absorbed into the cultural water. Own your time. Build cash-generating assets. Work remotely. Leverage. It was novel in 2004 and it’s drinking-water now.

What’s interesting is that Tim has now gone so deep into the optimization stack that he’s started trying to climb back out. He wrote an essay earlier this year about over-optimizing, about the cost of being the person everyone calls when they want to know what to try next.

That’s a hard thing to say if you’re him. His identity is downstream of how he shows up. To publicly admit the thing you’re known for has run out of utility takes a kind of release that the Celtic prayer is actually pointing at.

You can’t get there if you’re still negotiating.

How You’re Complicit

The single sharpest question in this episode:

How are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want?

This applies to everything. The friendship that’s draining you. The inbox you blame for owning your time. The project that demands more than it returns. The pattern in your relationships you can’t seem to escape.

You’re not a victim of the conditions. You’re an author of them. Some part of you is feeding the loop you’d swear you’d cut tomorrow. And until you can sit with that — not punish yourself for it, just see it — the loop runs on you instead of you running it.

Removing the cherished outcome is one way out. When you stop needing the relationship, the project, the audience to give you a particular thing, you stop showing up in the bent, contorted way that creates the disappointment in the first place.

The weight comes off. The thing gets to be what it actually is.

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About vs Toward

Elizabeth introduces a one-word switch that’s been hard to shake.

Stop asking how do I feel about myself. Start asking how do I feel toward myself.

About puts you in the dock. Every old verdict comes back. The inner critic gets the mic. Toward puts you outside, looking at yourself the way you’d look at a friend you cared about. Different question, different answer, completely different relationship.

This is what she calls letters from love, or two-way prayer. I’ve journaled for years, but a lot of my journaling has been to-do lists in disguise. I want to X. I’m working on Y. The two-way prayer flip is to write to yourself from the voice that’s actually on your side. You are X. You are loved. You don’t have to earn it on the page.

And as Elizabeth puts it — if it’s just you writing to yourself from a kinder voice within you, wouldn’t that still be worth doing?

Boundaries, Priorities, Mysticism

Elizabeth calls herself a relaxed woman. She frames her life around three pillars.

• Boundaries. Stewardship over self. Honest “I” statements. Not everybody is entitled to have you in their life. The inbox test: the reason it’s been sitting there isn’t that you’re too busy. It’s that you don’t care. Say it without guilt.

• Priorities. Four or five things. That’s it. Everything else falls under “I don’t care” — said as fact, not failure.

• Mysticism. A felt connection to something larger. Two-way prayer. Letters from love. Whatever quiets the part of you that thinks your output is the point.

And then her line that goes on the wall:

Martial artists know that the most relaxed person in conflict wins.

The world has tried fierce women. The world has tried resilient women. The world has tried vulnerable women. It hasn’t yet tried the relaxed woman. The same is true of men, if you ask me. The same is true of any of us.

The relaxed person doesn’t lose. They flow.

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The Ladder

The scene from this episode that captures it in entirety is when Elizabeth is walking down a street in California on a free morning.

She sees a man on a tall ladder doing repair work, alone, in a way that strikes her as dangerous. She walks over and just holds the ladder. For half an hour. He doesn’t notice her. They don’t speak. When he climbs down, she leaves.

She tells Tim that maybe that’s why she was put on this earth. Just for that. To hold a ladder for a stranger so he gets home to his family that night.

We spend so much time inflating our cherished outcomes — I’m here to do great things, I’m here to build the thing, I’m here to be remembered — that we miss the small, unmarked moments where the actual work is happening. A yoga teacher of mine once said: most people think meditation is about seeing the blues and yellows behind your closed eyes. Really, it’s about seeing the blues and yellows of the flowers when you’re walking down the street.

That’s the practice.

What I’m Taking With Me

• You don’t have to abandon a goal to release the cherished outcome. You just have to stop renegotiating with the moment.

• The conditions you complain about have your fingerprints on them. Look there first.

• Change about to toward. You’ll meet a different self.

• Boundaries, priorities, mysticism. Four or five things. The rest is “I don’t care,” said as fact.

• The most relaxed person in the room wins. Not because they care less. Because they’re not leaking force.

• Hold the ladder. Sometimes that’s the whole assignment.

Naval says to work like a lion. Sprint, then rest. Elizabeth has a version: when there’s something for you to do, you’ll be notified. Until then, rest. Not recovery rest. Energetic rest. The willingness to not press against doors that haven’t opened.

I’m finding that the most useful thing I can do is show up undefended. Bring the full self. Hold the ladder when it’s there. Let the rest be the rest.

The cherished outcome is the leak.

Cheers, like and subscribe, and if you have more timeless podcasts to recommend, send them my way.

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Aho.

When you see a logo and something inside you stirs - confidence, aspiration, suspicion - that feeling is the brand. Not the product. Not the marketing. The brand is what someone else thinks of you when they see your service.

That sentence has been rattling around in my head for a few weeks now. Mostly because of a podcast.

I keep coming back to the Acquired episode on Hermès. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal spend four hours on a 190-year-old French handbag company, and somehow the whole thing reads less like a business story and more like a manual on how to build anything that lasts. I usually gravitate toward the interview format — ancient wisdom from accomplished people, Naval on Rogan, Goggins on Modern Wisdom as previous examples over the last few weeks.

But Hermès is a different kind of artifact. Six generations deep. If we’re talking timeless, that’s the proof of work.

Most of what I took from it falls into two acts. The build of the sustaining brand, and the defense of that moat.

The Build

Hermès started making saddles for horse-drawn carriages in 1837. Then the car showed up and erased their original product. Most companies die or wouldn’t adapt to this changing technological landscape. Hermès didn’t. They took the craft they’d already built, the saddle stitch, the leather, the obsession, and pointed it at handbags. The skills carried.

What they refused to do was cut corners.

Every Hermès bag is still made by hand. One craftsman. Start to finish. There’s a quote from the episode I can’t get out of my head:

“Today hand stitching is the highest quality. When machine stitching gets better, we will do it. We’re not a museum.”

That’s the whole game. Not nostalgia for slowness. Not romanticism. Just a refusal to ship something that doesn’t carry the weight of the brand.

They earned the brand before they marketed it.

The Kelly. The Birkin. Twelve-thousand-dollar bags that you can’t just walk into a store and buy. They’re not even on display. You build trust with the brand. You demonstrate that you’ll be a worthy representative of it when you wear it. That’s not marketing. That’s the brand selecting its own customers.

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The Paradox

Luxury is a paradox. The harder it is to get, the more people want it. Hermès leans into this. They could probably sell ten times the bags they make and the market would still be hungry. They don’t. They can’t mass-produce without diluting the thing that makes a Birkin a Birkin.

Ben and David call it a rate-limited flywheel. The supply is capped by craftsmen. Craftsmen take years to train. So Hermès keeps building ateliers and schools across France. They’re scaling, but slowly. Gradually, then suddenly.

Here’s where I think it gets personal.

The discipline to say no is the same muscle whether you’re a 190-year-old maison or a person trying to build a life. Every yes is a no to something else. Every decision has a trade-off. When you say yes to too many things like clients, projects, opinions, or identities you dilute.

When you can walk away, you become more valuable. Humans fundamentally understand scarcity. We always have.

The Defense

Around 2010, Bernard Arnault, the LVMH chairman who built Louis Vuitton into the most valuable luxury house in the world, started quietly buying up Hermès shares in the private market. He was trying to take the castle. And he’s smart enough to say all the right things on his way in: I would never diminish the quality, Hermès could be even rarer and greater with us. Speaking their language. Eyeing the moat.

The family stood strong.

The H51 pact locked their shares together for twenty years. No selling. No exits. The hostile bid evaporated.

That’s the part that hit me hardest. The brand isn’t a logo. The brand is the thing the family agreed to defend. The brand is the castle. And when somebody comes for the castle, the people inside have to actually believe in what they’ve built.

On Consultants, Briefly

Somewhere along the way, Hermès was advised to standardize. Automate. Adopt the LVMH playbook. They said no. I worked in consulting for a while, so I have an inside perspective for the industry.

I know the reality of the job that exists to sell a fantasy. To tell the client what to do without ever having build the thing or deliver on the empty promises. Consultants don’t outlast the company. They outlast the contract.

If you build something that’s truly yours, the answers can’t come from outside.

What I’m Taking With Me

I’m in a phase of trying to build things, at Bitcoin Park, at jacklesser.me, in the body, on the page, that will hold up. That won’t dilute as they scale. Hermès gave me a vocabulary for that.

• Refuse to cut corners.

• Earn the brand before you market it.

• Say no enough that your yes becomes scarce.

• Defend the castle, with the people who built it.

• Build durable systems so it lasts long enough to compound.

I don’t know what the Hermès of my life looks like yet. Probably nothing like Hermès. But I know now that the through-line isn’t strategy or marketing or luck. It’s a series of small refusals. A long line of people deciding, every day, not to ship the cheaper version.

Again, that’s the proof of work.

Cheers, like and subscribe, and if you have recommendations for more timeless podcasts, send them my way.

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Aho.

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I first found out about David Goggins in the late 2010s, back when he was doing the podcast tour and you couldn’t open the internet without his face yelling “stay hard” at you.

The dude is wild. Navy SEAL. Three Hell Weeks. Army Ranger. 100+ mile ultra marathons. One of those Hell Weeks, he literally broke his leg, duct-taped his bone together, and made a homemade cast so they wouldn’t pull him from training.

That’s not a normal human.

But what I find more interesting now, three years later, is going back to his 2023 sit-down with Chris Williamson — the Never Finished episode. It’s calmer than the Rogan stuff. Less viral clips, more actual psyche. And once you start picking it apart, you realize Goggins is basically a field general drawing the same conclusions as the philosophers and psychologists I read. He just got there through experience instead of theory.

Here’s what stuck with me.

“I’ve never failed at anything”

This was the first reframe that hit me.

Goggins talks about how he’s never actually failed — because if you extend the timeline far enough, every loss is just an attempt. He didn’t finish the Moab 240 the first time. He got lost, missed the time cutoff, didn’t cross the line. By most definitions, that’s a failure.

His version: that was attempt one. He trained, came back, finished it the next year.

Same thing with Hell Week. He didn’t fail twice — he had three attempts, and he finished on the third. The only way to actually fail is to stop attempting.

That’s a small mental flip that changes a lot. Because it removes the permanence from a bad outcome. The question isn’t “did I succeed or fail?” — it’s “am I still in the game?”

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The $15/hr Job

This is the part of the episode that nobody talks about enough.

Goggins turned down millions in speaker fees and book advances to take a $15/hr job jumping out of airplanes into forest fires.

Read that again.

He doesn’t need the money. He’s a New York Times bestselling author. He could be coasting. Instead, he’s doing some of the most dangerous work in the country alongside guys who actually need the paycheck and don’t care that he’s famous.

Why? Because he says capping your success keeps you sharp. The fame would make him soft. The money would make him soft. So he caps it on purpose, goes back to ground floor, and lets the work humble him.

What I love about this is the second-order effect: the guy is, by accident or design, doing massive public goods. Serving the country. Putting out fires. Saving lives. Even if his motivation is just “can I do the hard thing,” the ripple effect is real. Does it matter if the why is selfish when the what helps thousands of people?

I don’t think it does.

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One Second at a Time

The most practical takeaway from the whole episode.

Goggins describes how he survived his third Hell Week — 130 hours of pure misery, in freezing Pacific water, getting smoked by instructors. His trick wasn’t pep talks or visualization of crossing the finish line.

It was counting.

One. Two. Three. Don’t quit. Four. Five. Don’t quit. Six.

If you start projecting forward — “I have to do this for five more days” — your mind breaks. The number’s too big. But if you can just survive the second you’re in, and then the next one, and then the next one, you cross the finish line eventually. You have to.

He even says he was able to mentally place himself somewhere warm while sitting in 50-degree water. That’s not magic. That’s reps. That’s a trained mind that’s been put through enough discomfort to know how to pull the lever when it needs to.

It’s moving a mountain rock by rock.

The Garage and the Inbox

If you watched the Rogan + Naval episode (JRE #1309 — also worth a rewatch), Naval describes meditation as cleaning out his email inbox. One thought at a time, file it, move on, get to inbox zero.

Watch my breakdown of this iconic Naval episode

Goggins, asked about the same thing, describes his mind as a cluttered garage that he organizes every morning before going to war.

Two completely different humans. One is a Silicon Valley investor running a tech and finance brain. The other is a Navy SEAL running an extreme physical-challenge brain. They’ve never lived the same life for a single day.

Same conclusion. Different metaphor.

You cannot have discipline without an organized mind. Period. If your thoughts are jumping from task to task to anxiety to phone to task, you’re not disciplined — you’re reactive. The clarity comes first. The output follows.

Don’t Let the Poison In

This one called me out.

Goggins works out before he looks at his phone. Every day. He doesn’t want to let the poison in before he’s earned the morning.

I’m guilty of the opposite. Some days the phone is the last thing I see at night and the first thing I see in the morning. I know it’s wrecking my sleep. I know it’s spiking my stress before I’ve even brushed my teeth. I know.

I’m not at the 5 a.m. Goggins level — I like sleep. But the principle is portable. Earn the morning before the phone gets you. Movement, sunlight, water, anything. Just don’t start the day with a loss.

The Live Autopsy

This is the heaviest idea in the conversation, and the one I keep coming back to.

Goggins says: when people die, we do an autopsy to figure out what killed them. But nobody does a live autopsy. Nobody asks, “What’s killing me right now? What’s eating away at me while I’m still here?”

Most of us live with stuff stored in the body — old trauma, old resentments, formative experiences from childhood that we’ve intellectually moved past but somatically still carry. It sits in the hips, the lower back, the shoulders.

This is where I think the physical and the spiritual actually meet. Hard physical work — yoga, lifting, running, anything that puts you in real discomfort — flushes stuff out that talking can’t reach. People cry in yin yoga. People break down on long runs. The body finally has permission to release what the mind has been carrying.

Numbing the mind with distraction is not the same as quieting it. One makes you soft. The other makes you unbreakable.

Where I Push Back

I want to be honest about one place I disagree with Goggins (or really, with how this idea gets framed in the broader manosphere).

The “it’s so easy to be great nowadays, most people are weak and lazy” line. I hear it constantly. I don’t buy it.

It’s never been more accessible to start something — anyone with a phone and a $40 mic can launch a podcast. True. But “accessible to start” is not the same as “easy to be great.” If anything, the accessibility means the competition has never been higher. There’s more content, more noise, more people genuinely showing up every day.

Being great is hard. It’s always been hard. I don’t think we should pretend otherwise just to flex on people who haven’t started yet. Just because something is simple doesn’t mean it’s easy.

The simple truth: stay in the game, do the work, don’t quit. That’s it.

The hard truth: a thousand other people are doing the same thing, and most of them want it as bad as you do.

Both can be true.

What I’m Taking From This

If I had to compress 90 minutes of conversation into a few sentences I actually want to live by:

• Failure isn’t real if you’re still attempting.

• Cap your success on purpose. Stay close to ground floor.

• Discipline > motivation. Motivation flees. Discipline shows up.

• Confidence is a stack of undeniable proof, not a stack of affirmations.

• Earn the morning before the phone gets you.

• Do the live autopsy. Find what’s killing you while you’re alive.

• One second at a time, forever.

Goggins said in this episode he was done with podcasts for a while. As far as I can tell, he’s mostly held to that — he’s been quiet, training UFC fighters, doing his thing. Which feels right. The man practices what he preaches.

These ideas aren’t going anywhere though. They’re timeless. That’s the whole point of revisiting episodes like this — the news cycle moves on, but the wisdom doesn’t expire.

If you enjoyed this breakdown, full notes and the full archive live at jacklesser.me. Subscribe to the channel for more timeless podcast breakdowns — saving you the rewatch.

Got an episode I should break down next? Drop it in the comments.

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That question kept following me after listening to Dr. K’s conversation with Andre Duqum on the Know Thyself podcast.

It was one of those rare conversations that feels both ancient and current at the same time. It moved between neuroscience and spirituality, Western science and Eastern wisdom, practical psychology and deeper questions of identity. But the idea that stayed with me most was surprisingly simple:

Information is not the same thing as understanding.

And that difference is where the aha moment lives.

The Understanding Isn’t in the Book

One of the key distinctions Dr. K makes is between knowledge you can repeat and knowledge that actually changes you.

We live in a time where it’s never been easier to collect information. We can listen to a three-hour podcast at 1.5x speed, save twenty clips, read five summaries, and come away feeling like we “got it.” We can talk about meditation, discipline, trauma, purpose, dopamine, serotonin, attention, nervous system regulation, all of it.

We can sound fluent in the language of transformation without actually being transformed.

I’m not above that. I catch myself doing it too.

There’s a huge difference between being able to explain an idea and being changed by it. Between being informed and being altered. Between knowing the words and knowing the thing.

That’s what I loved about Dr. K’s framing. If understanding truly existed in the book, then anyone who read the book would understand. But clearly that’s not how life works. Two people can consume the exact same information and walk away completely differently. One is entertained. The other is changed.

Why?

Because the understanding has to happen within you.

That’s the aha moment.

It’s not just, oh, now I get it.

It’s, oh, now I see it.

And once you see it, your behavior starts changing on its own.

The Wasabi Test

Dr. K uses a funny example about telling his daughter that wasabi is spicy.

She doesn’t really believe him, so she tries it for herself.

And then it hits.

That’s the moment.

Before the bite, she had information. After the bite, she had understanding. And once she had that understanding, her behavior changed instantly. No motivational speech needed. No habit tracker. No productivity system. Just direct experience.

That example is simple, but I think it explains so much.

Real understanding is embodied. It lands deeper than language. It’s not just something you think. It becomes something you know in your body. That’s why some lessons take years to learn, even when we’ve heard them a hundred times before. The information arrived long ago. The understanding didn’t.

And when it finally does, it can feel almost magical.

But maybe it isn’t magic.

Maybe it’s just truth reaching a layer of us that words alone can’t touch.

Why So Much Information Changes So Little

This is where the conversation started connecting to my own life in a real way.

Because if I’m honest, I think one of the dangers of the modern world is that it gives us endless access to information and almost no space to metabolize it.

We are constantly taking things in. Podcasts, posts, headlines, reels, books, opinions, clips, frameworks, takes, counter-takes. We are overfed intellectually and underdeveloped internally. We mistake exposure for integration. We confuse recognition with wisdom.

And the result is strange.

We know more than ever, but a lot of us feel less grounded.
We have more language than ever, but less clarity.
We are more connected to information and less connected to ourselves.

That’s why I keep coming back to this question:

Do I actually understand this, or am I just repeating something that sounded smart?

That question is uncomfortable. It checks the ego fast.

But it also feels necessary.

Because the truth is, a lot of what we call “learning” today is really just consumption. And consumption, by itself, doesn’t change much.

Understanding does.

Attention Is Life

Another idea from the episode that really stayed with me is Dr. K’s line that the reclamation of our attention is essentially the reclamation of our life.

That feels true to me.

I usually say time is our most valuable resource, and I still believe that. But attention may be the way we actually direct that resource. Attention is what gives time shape. It determines what we notice, what we strengthen, what we become.

Where attention goes, life goes.

That’s why this isn’t just a productivity conversation. It’s deeper than that. If your attention is constantly fragmented, borrowed, manipulated, and interrupted, it becomes much harder to arrive at anything real. Much harder to think clearly. Much harder to hear yourself. Much harder to let deeper understanding emerge.

Aha moments usually don’t happen when we are scattered.

They happen when we’ve sat with something long enough for the noise to fall away.

That’s what makes attention such a superpower now. Not in a hustle culture sense. In a human sense. The ability to stay with one thought, one question, one page, one practice, one difficult feeling long enough for it to teach you something. That is becoming rare.

And because it’s rare, it’s becoming valuable.

The Difference Between Being Broken and Being Unhappy

One part of the conversation I appreciated was Dr. K’s distinction between depression and unhappiness.

That nuance matters.

Because not every painful human experience is pathology. Some people are clinically depressed and need treatment, support, therapy, maybe medication. That is real. But some people are also living lives that are disconnected, overstimulated, isolated, and misaligned, and the sadness they feel may not be a malfunction so much as a signal.

A signal that something is off.
A signal that the way they’re living is not working.
A signal that their body, mind, and spirit are not in harmony.

I think that’s an important distinction because it changes the question.

Instead of only asking, “What is wrong with me?”
You can also ask, “What in my life is not true?”

That opens a different door.

The Work Most People Try to Skip

Another framework from the episode that I really liked was the progression from healing pathology, to shadow work, to ego work, to spiritual development.

What I appreciate about that model is that it respects the layers.

It says: first, fix what is broken. Then start facing what you’ve buried. Then start looking at the ego and its blind spots. Then, maybe, you begin moving toward something like spiritual development.

That feels honest to me.

A lot of people want the insight without the excavation. The peace without the confrontation. The spiritual language without the shadow work. But real growth usually doesn’t work like that. Most of it happens in the dark, in private, with no applause.

It happens when you notice the same thought looping again and again.
It happens when you ask why you keep reacting the same way.
It happens when you realize some of your thoughts are not even from today. They are echoes. Old patterns. Old wounds. Old identities still trying to run the show.

That awareness can be painful.

But it’s also the beginning of freedom.

Because you can’t change what you won’t look at.

Dharma and the End of Forced Discipline

One of my favorite parts of the conversation was around dharma.

Dr. K describes dharma as the thing that allows you to do hard things. That idea immediately resonated with me because it reframes discipline in a way I think a lot of people need to hear.

So many people are looking for more willpower.

More discipline.
More motivation.
More systems.
More hacks.

But maybe the real issue is not that they are lazy. Maybe it’s that they are disconnected.

Disconnected from purpose.
Disconnected from truth.
Disconnected from the thing that would make effort feel meaningful.

Because when you’re aligned with something deeply, the energy changes. The work may still be hard, but it no longer feels hollow. You stop dragging yourself through it. You start devoting yourself to it.

That’s a very different experience.

There’s a huge difference between doing something because you think you should and doing something because it feels true. “Should” has a heaviness to it. It carries guilt. Social conditioning. Performance. Fear. Dharma feels cleaner. It feels like inner alignment. Like your life is moving in the same direction as your deeper nature.

And when that happens, discipline stops feeling like the main event.

Devotion takes its place.

You Can’t Chase the Highest States

Another paradox from the episode is that you cannot desire enlightenment in the same way you desire an achievement.

The longing itself becomes the obstacle.

That feels true well beyond spirituality.

You can’t force peace.
You can’t manufacture insight.
You can’t white-knuckle your way into presence.
You can’t demand a runner’s high.
You can’t make grace happen on command.

You can only create the conditions.

You can slow down.
You can sit still.
You can practice.
You can protect your attention.
You can let boredom come up.
You can let discomfort come up.
You can stay long enough for the poison to rise before the medicine does.

And then sometimes, unexpectedly, something opens.

So What Is an Aha Moment, Really?

The more I sit with this, the less I think an aha moment is just a flash of intelligence.

I think it’s a moment of alignment.

A moment when signal gets through the noise.
A moment when something moves from concept to conviction.
A moment when truth drops out of the mind and into the body.
A moment when borrowed knowledge becomes your own.

That’s why real aha moments change behavior.

Not because you forced yourself to improve, but because once you truly understand something, the old way no longer fits.

You don’t need to be convinced the stove is hot after you’ve touched it.
You don’t need a reminder that wasabi is spicy after it hits the back of your throat.
And maybe, at the deepest level, you don’t need to be told what matters once you’ve really seen your own life clearly.

That may be the real work.

Not collecting more ideas.
Not sounding more informed.
Not performing wisdom.

But living in a way that allows understanding to arrive.

Because in a world designed to keep us distracted, fragmented, stimulated, and externally oriented, that may be one of the greatest advantages we can build: the ability to become unavailable to noise and available to truth.

So maybe the better question is not just, what is an aha moment?

Maybe the better question is:

Am I creating the kind of life where one can happen?

Explore: jacklesser.me

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What makes this conversation so powerful to me is that it sits right at the intersection of three themes I think about all the time: leverage, inner work, and performance. Naval talks about building wealth, but he also talks about peace. He talks about ambition, but also stillness. He talks about succeeding in the modern world without becoming consumed by it.

Here are the four ideas from this episode that have impacted me the most.

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1. You’re Not Going to Get Rich Renting Out Your Time

The biggest takeaway from this episode is Naval’s point that you do not get wealthy by renting out your time. You get wealthy by owning something: equity, a business, a product, a brand, media, code, or some asset that works while you sleep.

I felt it firsthand when I was working in corporate America. I could work 50, 60, even 70 hours in a week, and it didn’t meaningfully change the outcome compared to a 20 or 30 hour week. The effort was real, but the upside was capped. That disconnect taught me pretty quickly that more hours do not automatically create more leverage.

Naval’s framework here is simple but deep: specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage. Specific knowledge is the stuff that comes from genuine curiosity, not just formal training. Accountability is putting your name on the work. Leverage is using code, capital, media, or systems to scale what you do far beyond your own labor.

That feels even more relevant now. The internet already gave individuals distribution. AI is adding another layer of leverage on top of that. We’re watching people build useful tools over a weekend and turn them into real businesses because they solved a clear problem and had the means to distribute it. The opportunity now is not to become more generic. It’s to become more distinctly yourself.

I also love Naval’s idea to work like a lion, not a cow. A lion does not punch a clock all day. It rests, then sprints when it matters. That has been true in my own life too. The best output I’ve had has never come from endless, numbing hours. It comes from focused bursts, recovery, reassessment, and then another burst. The quality of effort matters more than the quantity of hours.

2. Happiness Is a Choice, but It’s Also a Practice

That one exposes how often we attach our perceived peace to a future outcome. We think the money will do it. The relationship will do it. The body, the job title, the apartment, the car. And then people reach those goals and still feel incomplete.

That’s something I’ve wrestled with personally. I’ve achieved things I thought would make me happy, and I still found myself asking deeper questions. What do I actually want? Is this my desire, or something I absorbed from the internet? Am I chasing what is aligned, or just what looks good from the outside?

I think Naval is right that happiness can be trained. Just like fitness can be a choice and health can be a choice, happiness can be a choice too. But to me, it also requires acceptance. You have to be honest about what you feel before you can move through it. You have to label it before you can release it.

For me, that looks less like some grand theory and more like simple practices: bringing good energy into rooms, spending time with people who reciprocate that energy, getting sunlight, moving my body, having real conversations, and not pretending I’m fine when I’m not. Happiness is not always a permanent state. Sometimes it’s just the ability to meet life clearly instead of fighting it.

3. The Modern Struggle Is Learning How to Do Nothing

Naval says the peace we seek is not peace of mind, but peace from mind. The only solution is to turn it off.

That sounds simple until you actually try it.

One thing I’ve noticed again and again teaching yoga classes is that the hardest moment for many people is not the hardest posture. It’s stillness. You can take someone through a challenging class, but the second you ask them to lie down in savasana and do nothing, you can feel how difficult that is. We are so conditioned toward stimulation that silence can feel threatening.

That is why I love Naval’s analogy that the mind is like an email inbox. Meditation is self-therapy. Old thoughts, unresolved emotions, fears, resentments, and loops pile up for years. When you finally sit down in silence, they all start resurfacing. The work is not to suppress them. The work is to let them come up, one by one, until the inbox begins to clear.

I also appreciate how simple he makes meditation. No perfect app. No elaborate ritual. Just sit. Whatever happens, happens.

That resonates with me. I do not think there is one right way to meditate. Sometimes it is silence. Sometimes it is breath. Sometimes it is guided meditation. Sometimes it is music. Sometimes it is movement that quiets the mind enough to let stillness arrive afterward. The real point is not the technique. The point is learning to witness without immediately reacting.

In a world full of social media, sugar, noise, and endless dopamine traps, doing nothing is no longer laziness. It’s a skill. Maybe even a form of resistance.

4. Life Is a Single-Player Game, but It Doesn’t Have to Be a Zero-Sum One

Life is a single-player game. It’s all happening in your head, and the world reflects your own feelings back to you. I believe life is a mirror in many ways. The energy you bring, the story you tell yourself, and the lens you choose all shape the world you experience.

That doesn’t mean the world is fake or that hard things are not real. But, our interpretation of challenges and suffering matters more than we think.

This is also where the idea that life does not have to be a zero-sum game comes into awareness.

In a zero-sum game, for me to win, you have to lose.

But so much of life does not actually work that way. Great businesses, healthy communities, meaningful friendships, and honest conversations can all be positive-sum. Both people can leave with more than they came with.

That mindset has become important to me. I do not want to build a life where progress requires somebody else’s collapse. I want to create, connect, and contribute in ways that expand.

I also think Naval’s confession about “sounding smart” is one of the most underrated moments in the entire episode. He says he grew up poor, and the way he got out was by sounding smart, not being smart. That self-awareness is rare. And it leads to a question I think is incredibly useful: would you still want to learn this if you could never tell anyone about it?

That question cuts through ego fast.

Final Thought

The reason I keep coming back to this episode is that it refuses to separate external success from internal peace. It asks you to build leverage without losing yourself. To pursue wealth without worshipping status. To work hard without becoming a machine. To sit still long enough to hear what your life is actually trying to tell you.

One of my favorite quotes, which Naval shares from Confucius, is this: every man has two lives, and the second starts when he realizes he has just one.

That might be the real point of the whole conversation.

If you only get one life, build it on things that compound. Learn how to be alone. Train your mind. Choose better desires. Play positive-sum games. And stop waiting for some imaginary future to finally begin living.

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Yup that’s right. Just under 31million views in 5 days. Crazy.

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Slowmaxxing is the idea of taking tasks that we may not even feel like we’re rushing on and doing it intentionally slower than usueal.

But there’s a reason here. It’s resonating. This quote tweet is supplementing this virality nicely:

We are constantly being programmed and pushed to speed up. We want to achieve our goals faster. See results faster. Skip to the finish line. Fast isn’t good if the output isn’t good.

In an age of burnout and constant go go go, we are also becoming increasingly aware that this self imposed pressure to be at full steam 100% of the time will only be a detriment to ourselves in the long run.

Everyone wants to go Ricky Bobby fast all the time.

But that’s not how life works - slow and steady is smooth and ready.

It’s great to have that one friend who reminds you to unclench your jaw. Or take a deep breath. Or find some time to smell the roses. This is vital. Because "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it," as Ferris Bueller famously said.

In the year of 2026 we are constantly getting sped up. Constantly missing out on the magnificence of life. Short form content, dopamine injected notifications, and casino inspired addictions. It’s so easy to begin your day feeling rushed, when there is legitimately nothing to be rushing over. Most days the first thing I do when I arise (after my patented bunny hop) is look at my phone.

That is a pattern I’m trying to break, however!

Because I truly believe one of the key drivers to this year is finding the most frictionless way to regulate your nervous system and find opportunities to slow down. Balancing out the time we spend between our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. I think that this will only continue to be emphasized in this world of agentic engineering and automation.

When I wake up and can avoid technology before getting some morning slowmaxxing in (like a walk, for example), it sets the rest of my day up for actually driving my calendar and not being driven by it.

One of the benefits of not knowing what is and isn’t real online anymore is that you can just decide to shut it off. The real, good stuff will rise to the top. I don’t think there’s a specific formula for this other than authentic storytelling and the ability to make you feel sensations beyond just the numbing of your eyeballs and brain from unimaginable brain rot.

So when thinking about slowmaxxing find a mundane activity you do throughout your day - brushing your teeth, taking a shower, or even tying your shoes. Just do it slower.

Notice how the action pulls you into the present. Feeling the massage of the bristles against your gums becomes a joy. You’ll become aware of an unspeakable energy that often gets ignored while we pass through our daily tasks.

The bounce of the keyboard while I type is a perfect example of this right now. Feeling the reaction of pushing down each letter creates a fun tension with each word, added and deleted, appearing on my screen.

Or while you read this essay. Notice your own feelings as maybe you don’t need to race against an imaginary timer in your head. Read slower. It’s each word, carefully crafted creating a clear picture of calmness within yourself.

I think this idea of going slow is powerful. I found an instagram caption I created about a year ago about the Power of Slow and practicing patience:

P A T I E N C E 🧘🏻‍♂️
•
Navy SEALS have a saying that “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast”. That’s because deliberate, intentional actions lead to sustained success and victory.

Patience isn’t easy, but it’s what keeps our integrity intact. When we embrace the power of slow, we approach problems with rational and focused action.

Rushing a task or project leads to mistakes that need fixing later anyways. Take time ensures it’s done right the first time. And if a mistake is made, then use these principles to correct course.

Remember, the importance of slow isn’t inaction—it’s about being purposeful and disciplined. Trust the process, stay patient, and let your efforts build a solid foundation for lasting success.

It’s hard to see growth in the moment, and it may create doubts and fears. But don’t stop because everyone is going at a different pace. 💪

This is still relevant today. Slow is hard, but it’s a presence multiplier. Aha moments don’t come from rushing. They may not even come from going slow. But, in my experience they come from focused presence and having the mind/body connection to identify areas of opportunity.

All good things come from a slow, dedicated practice. Nothing is truly achieved over night. It’s the conviction and dedication to direct the main purpose of your life like a cargo ship that will lead to lasting benefits. Intentional movements and actions. More energy directed at these ideas and passions builds a foundation of durability and sustainability. It’s a low time preference.

So with all this said I challenge you to try and introduce some slowmaxxing to your day. Take time to remove the screens and the rush. Just notice that when you start to go slow, you start to feel the natural sensations of different actions. And use these sensations to identify what’s blocking any action and creating fear within yourself. Because at the end of the day we can only hold one thought at a time. So we might as well focus on that single thought/idea.

And of course, always come back to the breath. Find softness and release the once again identified tension that permeates your body. Roll back the shoulders, unclench the jaw, and soften your grip. Breath in, breath out.

I aim to do more slowmaxxing and sharing of these practices going forward. If you have any requests just hit me up.

Thank you to all my guides and teachers who have blessed me with their wisdom that I can only hope to translate into my own voice and share beyond the broader world.

Here’s to slowmaxxing the rest of 2026 🥂.

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Aho,

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We are facing a crisis (been known).

First off, let me just say that we’re going to win. Freedom tech will be the underpinning thesis for all human centered innovation and abundance over the coming decades. The world is changing fast and by focusing on freedom, privacy, and sovereignty will we build a future that is ripe for abundance.

But we’re facing a crisis. There is a doomer ethos that is spreading across our timelines and conversations which creates a vibe of hopelessness and despair.

We’re spending more time on our devices than ever and the fear and greed index is as bad as I’ve seen it. I fear people are falling victim to apathy.

But what if it didn’t have to be this way? I saw a quote the other day that may help keep you going:

As a self proclaimed Vibes Architect, I disavow this negative energy and want to help shift the conversation.

Experiences that were not related but also wholly related

There were 3 core experiences I partook in during January that on the surface seem unrelated: the first AI Hack for Freedom in Austin Texas, our 4th annual Nashville Energy & Mining Summit (NEMS) in Nashville TN, and the Global Bitcoin Circular Economy & PlanB Summit in El Salvador.

These are 3 events seem unrelated. 3 very different audiences, topics, and desired outcomes.

1. Our weekend hackathon with activists looking to use open source, self-sovereign tools to advance their cause of fighting for human rights against dictators and tyrants.

2. NEMS was the examination of large scale energy producers across the Tennessee Valley (and world) to utilize tools like Bitcoin mining, AI, and HPC to increase human flourishing and provide the power to maintain America’s role as the leader in the global economy.

3. The Global BCE brought together community leaders and educators from over 25 countries teaching the developing world about how Bitcoin is money, and that by using permissionless money we can build a new system that solves the problems of inflation and economic malpractice that has deteriorated, ignored or suppressed their quality of living for decades. PlanB helped spread this message even further.

I guess at a simple analysis Bitcoin is the underlying theme/technology across these 3 experiences. But the more I examine my last month, the more I realize how the Bitcoin network only plays a fraction of the role here. At the end of the day it’s really the proof of work. It’s that without effort, results, and continuing to stretch the boundaries of what these tools are providing, there is no progress. No growth. No hope.

Because at the end of the day these were experiences that created a bedrock of fighting for freedom. Freedom is a broad term and I mean it as such.

This includes advancing technologies that can unlock new productivity previously unheard of and providing platforms for community leaders, operators, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and capital allocators to see that the future is being built right in front of us, with the tools that are both available and accessible.

I generally see my role here as helping set up the parameters or sandbox to make the experts and innovators successful. It’s allowing them to just show up and know that I’ve created a container that allows for collaborations, connections, and opportunities.

Architecting good vibes.

Because money underpins much of our society and everyday life, we continuously see the running thread of how a better money and monetary network can solve the problems and broken incentives that are deeply embedded in the system. Digital scarcity secured by the strongest decentralized compute network in the world is valuable to the success of these projects.

However, I think it’s becoming more than this.

There’s a bubbling of people who are hungry to win back their sovereignty and freedom in other ways, too.

It’s the Ph.D who is tired of just talking about nuclear theory and looking for those bold enough to build out his careers’ work. It’s the journalist who is on the ground covering a genocide and in need of an SOS system if things go south (which can happen in an instant). It’s the Argentinian who has known his money has been broken since he was in the cradle, and knew right away that digital scarcity was the escape route from all the bouts of hyperinflation over the last 1/2 century.

Sound money plays like music to the ears of these individuals, with the instrument being the simple task of getting the work done and spreading the message to those who need it.

It’s this collision of worlds and people like me and Alonso from Pichilemu, Chile who generally have nothing in common other than the vision to build a better life for ourselves, our friends, and our families. And with each of these problems a technology that provides a stored, digital value by means of proof of work consensus helps drive these solutions forward.

So why is freedom tech the answer?

Well ultimately we are falling back into some of the same traps we experienced in the 2010s. Besides the fact that these tools will invade our privacy, it’s also the seduction of endless scrolls and a horrible diet of information intake. AI content is making the dead internet theory look more and more real every single day.

There are only a few ways to verify that bots are not completely in control of the accounts we spend most of our time observing.

This is becoming an inherently fragile approach to life. A numbness to our outside world and a dependency on quick hits of dopamine by way of fake news and AI generated slop. A complete disconnect from our true consciousness and awareness.

Screen times are way up and with that has come a crisis of mental health for seemingly everyone. Remember - covid lockdowns were only 6 years ago. I think we’re really just starting to see the long term impacts here. Things will continue to get crazy.

But, simplifying and strengthening our ability to execute on tasks with the least amount of friction is key. We then gain leverage for the freedom and return of our time.

So what is truly value? It is a steady and sustainable simplicity towards being of service to yourself and others.

I believe the true wealth we can unlock here is freedom from technology and connection to others.

It’s having both trusted and non-trusted tools in place that just work. It’s the ability to go experience nature and disconnect from the notifications and stresses of our unrelenting news cycle.

For example, Pathos is a tool that is being built by one of the hackathon teams from the other week. Pathos at the end of the day is a new social network. But, it’s different from X/Twitter or Instagram in that there isn’t a single point of failure. Unilateral autonomy is removed from the equation. So anyone can use it and communicate with it. There’s no centralized interest pushing onto you. That’s the NOSTR protocol in a nutshell.

These help decrease reliance on anyone else who may be incentivized to keep you sucked into their algorithm.

It sounds simple but it’s not easy. Computers can be confusing. It took me 4 months to figure out what a Github repo actually was and how it interacts with vibe coding tools. Took me another 5 months to then understand how to connect this code to other external tools building dynamic websites and applications. Now I’m learning how to work in the terminal and becoming a super user of these.

But I also believe it’s only a matter of time until all things said in the previous paragraph are basically obfuscated from the regular person and it’s as simple as just using any other search bar or chat bot to yield the same results.

Building has never been easier. And soon the productivity unlocks will create a new genre of jobs and work we have yet to imagine.

That’s a good thing. But it also means that the way we work with change drastically. Dependencies are a barbell. It’ll create some of the best work you’ve seen and some of the worst slop you could imagine.

So, systems become a non-negotiable where the tools you use (Grok, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) are interchangeable. It’s a freedom from the technology we use. And then once we can automate and streamline the inputs it becomes agentic.

And by having the freedom from the technology, you then have the ability to turn off the cell phone or shut the laptop. It creates the opening to connect with others and find true meaning to life.

Because freedom from the technology also permits a return to true self. A pause in the chaos. And a moment to find presence in the breath.

I’m still figuring this out myself. But it’s not dystopian, it’s opportunity for a renaissance. And then that will unlock the time to come inwards. Focus on the real important things like health and spirituality.

Too many are just worried about how to stay ahead instead of building a structure that protects them right where they are.

Opportunity is right there for the taking.

I view the 3 prongs of wealth being physical, spiritual/mental, and financial - with Proof of Work falling in the center of these venn diagrams.

Remember that creativity loves constraints. It’s setting up boundaries to achieve a desired outcome. Small wins are still wins. And they compound.

Then from there the knowledge and flow state will naturally take over. I’ve seen it both in my own life and in the lives of those who come to experience Bitcoin Park. It’s addicting honestly. Because when you are mission aligned then the work doesn’t really feel like it. It becomes a day building and trying, only to fail and then try again.

Too many of us are living in a constant state of stress. The fight or flight sympathetic nervous system is the default mode of our day to day.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s not the hippie ideals of just simply turn if off (although that’s not always the worst move), it’s the challenge to create a life that uses technology and these insane leaps of AI/compute to our advantage. It’s to use it as a tool to build instead of a tool to ruin.

I think those who find ways to disconnect over the coming ½ decade will be the real winners of this new economy. Because true wealth is found in the connections and peace we have to ourselves and others.

Freedom technology 🤝 Freedom from technology.

If we can focus on using the advantages and blessings we have as a way to continuing building and creating true abundance, then the only thing that can really stop us is ourselves. And for that reason I’m bullish.

It’s the convergence of AI, Energy, and Bitcoin. With each underlying pillar being the promises of freedom technology.

And don’t forget to take intentional breaths throughout your day.

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Aho,

P.S. Stay up to date on everything I’m hosting at the Park related to Freedom Technology: bitcoinpark.com/schedule

And of course thank you to all my teachers, mentors, and guides who have helped me curate this wealth of information to share with all of you reading this.

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Working with the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), we paired 8 global activists with some of the best Bitcoin, NOSTR, and open source developers in the world. The task of the hackathon was simple: build a tool using AI and vibe coding to build a tool that will advance the freedom tech movement through each activists' first hand experience needs.

I have been operating with the mindset that Austin is ripe for this caliber of building, and the AI Hack for Freedom proved this to be true.

I was also reminded of the power that comes from working on something bigger than ourselves. When you combine the right platform with the ability to build, incredible things happen in remarkably short time.

While the teams were hacking away at their projects, I made it a personal weekend challenge to build my own freedom tech adjacent tool: a better way for people to follow all of the meetups, workshops, and summits we're hosting at Bitcoin Park to advance the freedom tech movement.

You can check out (and stay updated) at bitcoinpark.com/schedule.

Dictators will use AI to suppress freedoms and strip away our human rights. But, these same tools are accessible enough that we can use them to defend our own privacy, property, and freedom.

It's been inspiring to see the work HRF has done pairing freedom fighters with freedom builders. The builders build and the activists leverage their platform and distribution. It's an incredible collaboration.

As part of leading Bitcoin Park, I'm humbled that we can provide a container where these projects move from ideas to working, deployed products in under 48 hours.

AI will shape our future. And we're building the one we want to see.

Aho!

Recap of the weekend from our friends at Stacker.News: https://stacker.news/items/1415288

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Before

It’s the lucid flow state where you’re indescribably comfortable and time is still. The chill to warmth transferring between sheets, skin, and soul brings a soft smile to your face.

A gentle stickiness to the eyelids. Sinking deeper into the pillow, your shoulder firm and balancing the weight to reach for a final dream of the night.

That beep is coming and you know it, totally disrupting that peace.

But lines of defense have been strengthened. I’m not concerned over this interruption. Alarms can blare, but I can neutralize almost as naturally as the blood that flows through my veins.

Snooze.

Another 9 minutes pass.

Snooze. So the cycle goes.

This has become all too common for me and I’ve tried so many tricks to break the spell. I’ve put my phone in another other room, set multiple alarms, and have optimized for light entering my bedroom as the sun rises. But I still just can all too easily get back into bed.

I know it’s a cowardly decision every time, but my unaware, monkey brain just overcomes the required discipline. It’s turned into a big friction point for me.

I haven’t been able to just simply feel “awake” when I rise in the morning. And it doesn’t seem to matter if I “optimize” my evenings either. I’ve tried almost all the Huberman tips and tricks, it’s kinda just all the same. My natural wake up time is between 7:30 and 8:15 am, and unless there is something that I truly “mission critical” I don’t really wake up earlier. But, I want to change this.

I don’t think this is a terrible thing. However, I do get frustrated with myself when I set an alarm to wake up and then snooze multiple times. And the worst is when I’ll turn the alarm off all together and just go back to bed. The decision has become almost subconscious for me at this point. I can snooze my phone without even looking at it as an alarm. So, I’ve upgraded to a real alarm clock and is another added variable to these results. Simplicity wins.

This is a pattern that I’m determined to break.

After

Yesterday something came over me. I woke up at 6:30am (as my alarm was going off) and for whatever reason the first thing I did was just a bunny hop.

I was up and aware instantly. It was the quickest “on” button I’ve found to date (besides that jump-scare that I overslept a flight).

It actually made sense after putting the pieces together. To jump is a decision that can’t really be done without focusing that transfer of potential to kinetic energy. It takes a slight bit of cognition. Previously I’d drag my feet and hit snooze or basically anything to just get me back to that blissful state of rest. You can be up but not awake.

This hop felt different. Instant “let’s go” energy.

I’m not a huge morning routine person. I like slow mornings, and I generally ease into my day. But, I don’t want to waste my mornings either. They are quieter/calmer and ripe for high leverage tasks - this goes all the way from exercise to deep work.

So even if I do wake up and get past the line of snooze, it still doesn’t change that I am groggy and looking to fall back to sleep. Just 10 more minutes.

A hop, I’ve quickly found, changes this. It gets oxygen and blood flowing. Wakes up the fascia. It literally tests your awareness and the laws of gravity. It brings you to the reality of the present moment. Fully awake. And everyone can do it.

It’s funny because I had a little league baseball coach back in the day who basically recommended this. He’d say before every pitch just take a slight hop to turn your focus on. Get on the balls of your feet. Get athletic.

Baseball is a beautiful sport because it goes from slow to quick at the crack of the bat. And if you aren’t ready almost instantly then you likely won’t make the play.

So I’m bringing this approach into to my mornings. Wake up, hop, and get ready to make a play.

This is a small step (hop) in just removing the frictions of daily life that drain or stagnate my energy.

Because one hop turns to two which could turn anything.

Start the morning with this single hop. Become present right away.

Try it out for yourself. Please let me know if this is of help to you 🤝.

(Next up will be figuring out the breathing & Kundalini practice that I can integrate with this. Big, sweeping breaths. Wake the body up and the mind follows.)

Hit the music:

Aho,

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Aho,

A Full Breath

Yesterday, January 6, was a very important day of remembrance for me.

No, not for that reason.

January 6, 2023 I took my first full breath in 25 years. I know that sounds crazy. But basically on that fateful day in Austin, TX, I got introduced to what would become a totally transformational practice that changed the direction and trajectory of my life. My friend, Dom, hosted a 2-hour breath work session with guides Big Joe Fauria and Michelle Florez.

Initially I went to support his event. I had done some guided meditation and breath work before in extremely short chunks, like 5-10 minutes at a time. I didn’t realize that this was going to be a full transformational journey as I began to lay on my yoga mat and settle into the session.

This changed my life. I had no idea of the state of constant stress I had been living under.

As a man it is often expected to just deal with these issues and suppress what are perceived as negative emotions - loneliness, anxiety, depression, stress, anger, sadness, among others. The alternative becomes a hyper-feminized outlook on how to deal with issues becoming worthless for most men. Men want to feel worthy and have purpose.

What I believe to be true as a man in is that you do have to deal with your own problems. No one is coming to save you. However, I have learned that connecting with emotions is an incredible, noble practice to identify best solutions and actions for dealing with problems. It enhances our ability to show up as a better man, not hinder it. It’s important to start to take some type of “plunger” and clear the blockages within.

Getting to a state of vulnerability creates an opportunity to identify both problems and tactical solutions. It’s the first step of picking up a stone to move a full mountain.

This was a 2-hour journey that allowed me to breathe, feel, and experience the entirety of my being. It woke me up. I felt all the sensations. The vibrations, the tetany, the tears, the tones, the laughs, the release. All of it. In a short 2 hours I uncovered so much insights about myself that I began to only scratch the surface of.

This led to more practice, a full breath work retreat, and now a deeper understanding of the body’s ANS, the vagus nerve, and how the breath impacts our nervous system and presence throughout the day. It has drawn me down the rabbit hole.

I’m not here to sell you on full holotropic, tummo, Kapalabhati, or even Bhastrika pranayama breathing just yet. Maybe we’ll get there in the future.

But what I do invite for you is a practice of 5 second inhales and 5 second exhales. Taking ~6 breaths per minute for 5-10 minute a day will change your relationship with yourself, time, stress, and the world around you.

Because the biggest transformation for me was learning how to actually use my diaphragm to channel and drive my breath throughout my body. I had no idea that I wasn’t breathing right. Resonance, or coherent, breaths changed my chemical makeup. My resting heart rate went down and my heart rate variability went up. I began to not just think divergently but also get outside of living in my mind and getting connected with my full body. It allowed me to better listen to my heart and intuition.

I know this sounds crazy, but it’s true. And the science backs it up.

I felt a sense of calm and relaxation that I didn’t know was possible. That has led to 2 years of personal growth and purpose that I truly only feel is the start. A new relationship with my ego and purpose. It ultimately led to a new, brighter inner light.

The Diaphragm Is Like A Sailboat ⛵

The anatomy here is diaphragm, which is the muscle that guides our breath into our lungs. And like any muscle - think your shoulders or hamstrings - it can get tight or weak.

So it’s important to release tension of your diaphragm and strengthen it by using it. Give yourself a massage. You can do this by hooking your fingers into the bottom crevice of your rib cage, right above your abdomen. Feel into this area and give it a gentle rub. Poke around and feel the tightness begin to release.

Now, when you try to breath you should feel it a bit easier to expand your belly.

Your diaphragm is the sail of the sailboat. When it’s catching air it expands and allows you to glide oxygen into your lungs, which in turn transfers oxygen into your bloodstream.

When you exhale it releases that tension and relaxes your space in the open sea.

Understanding how to fully utilize and activate our diaphragm creates that smooth and full sensation of a full breath voyage.

Stay with me.

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You Are Not Breathing Correctly

Most people don’t breath into their bellies. They just don’t breath into the entirety of their lungs. Like myself prior to J6 ‘23, most people breath into their chests or, even more shallow, their throats.

This is a common practice from a ignorance of utilizing the diaphragm muscle.

Common side effects of this shallow breathing are: sleep apnea, snoring, inability to hold breath, fatigue, brain fog, and poor posture. Among many others. These lead to a degradation of overall health and wellbeing.

It’s funny because when I have guided friends and family of this “full body” breathing practice (that I begin to explain in the next section), a common reaction is that they feel “dizzy” or “light headed”.

This pumps me up!

That’s because they are sending oxygen to areas of their lungs (and in turn, body) that haven’t received such attention in (potentially) YEARS. It’s a feeling of presence that you legitimately cannot ignore.

It’s important to be in a safe position when doing this, but dizziness, tingles, etc. is a feature, not a bug.

If you need to take a break and reset, that’s totally okay.

So, when the waves of breath begin to steady in the lungs (continuing on the sailboat analogy), you may start to travel faster than you initially expected. But that’s where it gets just as important to continue with the technique and return back to the cadence of coherent breaths.

You’ve probably heard in a yoga/meditation class before, “guide the breath to xyz part of your body”, and that’s a bit of a woo-woo practice that can be helpful from a metaphoric sense, but from a tactical and practical sense doesn’t change much.

“Directing the breath” to a specific area in the body is useful only if you can fill your lungs fully while digging into the fascia of a muscle (like the hamstring, shoulder, or hip flexor), then you may feel a release of tension from your parasympathetic system activating in that moment.

It’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s just important to understand that the guidance of the breath is more metaphysical than anything else. The actual practice is filling your lungs up with enough oxygen so your blood can transfer that for you automatically.

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The Practice - Coherent Breathing

This first step into the world of diaphragmatic breaths was a gateway to fully utilizing my lungs and capacity to send oxygen into parts of my body that hadn’t been exposed to this since I could remember.

Now, to start breathe through your nose until you feel your tummy expand. Almost like you are giving yourself a food baby after a big meal. This intentional channeling of your breath down towards your tummy will allow the full flow of oxygen into your lungs.

Again, this will begin to expand your diaphragm, the muscle that guides breath into the lungs.

If your stomach expands even .5 centimeters you are doing it right. Having a hand on the belly will help for awareness.

Next, find a comfortable position (ie lying down on the floor with a pillow), and pretend there is a string pulling your belly away from your center as you inhale. Slowly feel your whole body become filled with oxygen. And do the opposite on the exhale/release.

Repeat this for 5 minutes. Allow your gaze to soften or close. A total of 30 breaths can totally redirect the outcome of your day.

Let the breath become a circle as you inhale oxygen down your throat into your belly, and exhale CO2 emptying the belly up back out the throat. Expanding with each inhale, contracting with each exhale. Creating a balance and dance with the breath and inner self. Just breathe and return any wandering thoughts back to the sound of each inhale and exhale.

Breathe easy and intentionally 🌬️.

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A Guided Practice - Breathe With Me

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What’s Right and Wrong

A common piece of feedback and deterrence to practicing breath work is that people don’t think they are “doing it right”.

This is a double sided answer. I know I spent this essay explaining how to “breathe right”, but that’s a generalization used to hopefully get you to consider how to take more intentional breaths.

There is not “right” or “wrong” way. There are for sure ways that have more benefits than others. But, just because you don’t feel tingles or see crazy colors when doing a breath work session doesn’t mean you “did it wrong”. The presence of intentional breathing is the practice in and of itself.

The key is to turn your consciousness towards your breath and then allow the sensations to take over. Not thoughts.

The right way to breath using the full capacity of your lungs is through an engagement of the diaphragm, that is true.

But, sometimes - especially as you get deeper into the practice - you will want to do the opposite. You’ll experiment with longer breath holds and turn inwards in ways that can really only be accessed through the breath (at least in my experience). Some techniques even stimulate a release of DMT from the brain, naturally.

At the end of the day, it is breathing. So there isn’t a “wrong” way to do it.

But, if you are looking for a way to start your day with a sense of calm, or find a reset in the afternoon after a bout of distractions, or even help you fall asleep at night, then try this method and see what happens.

At very worst you may become conscious about how many breaths you are taking per minute. And the less of those you can do, the deeper into your parasympathetic state you can fall into.

This practice will help you show up better for your work and those around you. Try it. Maybe then you’ll begin to go down the rabbit hole of this crazy world of breathing.

Aho,

P.S. as always thank you to my coaches, teachers, mentors, and guides who have shared with me incredible techniques, practices, methods, and inspiration leading to the man I have become today. I hope I can continue to pass along the message and the mission 🙏

Additional resources:

• Andrew Huberman & Rick Rubin share 5 minutes of coherent breathing:

• 2 Bells

  • Use the time between gongs/bells to pace out your inhales and exhales

• Learn more - James Nestor “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art”

  • https://www.amazon.com/Breath-New-Science-Lost-Art/dp/0735213615/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0

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The beauty of New Years is that things tend to slow down and it becomes a very reflective period as goals, projects, and aspirations are drawn out for the upcoming calendar year.

With that, I hosted 15 beautiful souls earlier this week, along with my 2 housemates, to review our 2025 achievements and look ahead to 2026.

The Approach

We took a somatic, or bodily, approach to this exercise.

Understanding our fascia, or what I call the bodies’ highway system, helps us become aware and present for a moment of time. The fascia is a web of interconnected cells inside us that permeates the entirety of our body. It connects from our muscles to our organs to our bones. It is a channel that sends signals to the rest of our body. The fascia is our true connective tissue.

Performing intentional movements, stretches, and breaths to target the root of our fascial tissues can floss, loosen, or “unlock” blocks of stored emotions that are often ignored throughout the day (or week, month, year(s)) in every crevice of the body.

It was vital to approach this exercise not just in our minds, but also our entire being.

I believe that so many of use are in a state of unknowing hypertension. Living in constant stress, stimulation, anxiety, and even depression. In my experience, the best way to escape living in this state of stress (our sympathetic nervous system and discovering calm/relaxation of our parasympathetic system) is done through intentional breaths. I’ll explain more. As simple as it sounds, the breath is the key to unlock a shift in our state.

As we live through each passing day, the importance of finding moments to “stop and smell the roses” becomes more and more vital to our survival. Believe it or not, we’re coming up on 6 years since the covid lockdowns. The lasting impacts and consequences of this forced isolation and quarantine is really just coming to light. And so far what we’ve see is not pretty. Apathy, anger, regret, fraud, and hopelessness.

But, What if I Told You It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way?

Through simple yoga, breath work, and meditation practices I’ve been able to see significant improvements of my resting heart rate, heart rate variability, cortisol levels, and overall health. It’s been done by targeting the fascia and the benefits that I realized after learning about the above information. This has allowed me to push my edges in overcoming a wide variety of challenges across my work, fitness, and wellbeing goals. It’s allowed me to find comfort in taking risks and overcoming setbacks.

It’s a lil woo-woo and a lot of science. The proof is in the work.

Let me explain:

Our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) is made up of 2 pillars - the sympathetic and parasympathetic system. These are the bodily functions that happen automatically within our body. For example, we don’t have to think about pumping blood from our heart to our toes or our pupils dilating. It just happens subconsciously. The body is cool like that.

And in short, our sympathetic nervous system is our fight or flight response. It’s our survival instincts. It’s when we feel alert.

Our parasympathetic nervous system is the opposite, our state of rest and relaxation. Digestion & recovery occurs while we’re in a state of calm and “slowness”.

But, with these automatic systems taking place, the breath is unique in that we can do it both consciously and subconsciously. This allows us to manipulate our ANS to become more aware of what’s going on in our bodies from a perspective of thoughts, feelings, and emotions - or what we call sensations.

Being in either a sympathetic or parasympathetic state isn’t necessarily good or bad. However, our ability to identify when/where we are in our own bodies and then having the capability and awareness to regulate this state is very important. Too many people, including myself just a short period ago, are unaware of what their body is trying to tell them. Being in one state for too long can lead to both internal and external harm.

So as we look towards the Great Regulation of 2026, I think it will be those who can “switch” or flow between these states of being consciously that will have the most impact. When we can control our own bodies we can think clearly without ego or emotion clouding our awareness.

A regulated nervous system is like a clean dishwasher. You know the plates/bowls will get dirty again, but the more efficiently you empty the dishwasher and reset, and the better system you have for keeping the dishes from piling out of the sink, you reduce the need to pile up the dishes in the sink.

The breath is the dishwasher pod that clears the leftover residue of our thoughts.

Try this breathing exercise:

Sit up straight and start by inhaling through your nose, channel the breath deep into your belly feeling it expand like you have a big food baby. Inhale for a count of 5 seconds.

Once you hit 5, exhale through your nose emptying all the oxygen from your body. Feel the abs begin to flex. Keep exhaling for 5 seconds.

At the end of this exhalation, begin inhaling again at the same cadence. The breath becomes like a circle.

5 seconds in, 5 seconds out.

Feel the belly expand and contract. Turn your gaze inwards and just find a moment of ~slow~.

Repeat this sequence for 5 minutes. See how you feel. A total of 30 breaths over the course of 5 minutes. It’s all it takes.

Knowing how to allocate energy, analyze challenges, and execute plans can be significantly impacted by monitoring over a regulated nervous system.

Finding stillness allows the things that truly need attention to come up intuitively within ourselves. Usually the body just knows. It’s cool like that.

Our 2025 Annual Review on New Years Eve

The day included:

• 15 minutes of a Tai Chi inspired fascial flossing, led by Yash, to loosen up our bodies and create a sense of presence as we prepared to look back on the last year.

• 80 minutes of annual review, spending 5 minutes remembering and summarizing each month, by looking at our camera rolls and calendars then answering 15 thematic based questions.

• 30 minutes of Yin Yoga + Pranayama (breath work) led by myself to again tap into our fascia, identifying and acknowledging the sensations & emotions of the body that came up after an extended period of time spent in the mind (see above for a quick peek - shoutout to Alec Alvarez for capturing!)

• 60 minutes of vulnerable, honest storytelling around the biggest/most impactful moment(s) of 2025 and how we can channel that same energy going into the new year.

Initially when I began this practice thinking about the upcoming year, I wrote about all the things I wanted to do and achieve. I let my ego take control and write out big, attractive goals. What I thought others may be impressed with, or even what I thought I may be impressed with. I planned to hit a certain number/target, strive for a specific time, etc.

But what I came to realize was the most important way I could look back at my camera roll and calendar of the last 12 months was determining the actions and tasks that no longer served me and my quest to grow into a better friend, brother, and son. I began to see where my ego was driving decisions instead of what I truly was set out to do/be.

So instead, I took the opportunity to identify where I can shed, or subtract, areas of my life that are inhibiting this. As the saying goes, “the best additions are done through subtraction”.

So, simplicity will be a mantra I look to champion forward this upcoming year. Simplifying diet, systems, communications, and expectations.

Simple ≠ Easy.

But, it’s often the simple tasks, actions, words, and thoughts that can drive the most impact. Instead of taking on new things to prove to myself that I can get it done, like I did for a few achievements (that I’m still proud of - but for different reasons now) that I did last year, I want to challenge myself to see where my ego shows up in unexpected ways.

The simplicity of intentional breaths throughout the day, intentional movements, and intentional awareness can make all the difference.

We ended the night bringing together an even larger group to celebrate with amazing steak, lobster tail, music, and vibes. It was an incredible way to both say goodbye to the last year and ring in the new one.

Happy New Year to all!

P.S. Thank you to all my guides, teachers, and instructors who have gifted me this information/knowledge in the last year. You know who you are 🙏.

Welcome back to this week’s edition of The ₿ridge Report!

Subscribe now

Today’s report is broken up into 3 parts:

1. The Bitcoin Meetup - a review of some broader happenings surrounding bitcoin and how it continues to influence culture and grow as a global community.

2. The Blockchain Audit - an insight in my personal journey as I continue to integrate a bitcoin standard into my life and the broader world around me.

3. The Volatility Index - a review of newsworthy articles, podcasts, and events of the week, an AI generated summary, and my Dose of analysis.

   ---

Bitcoin Meetup

Join me at Bitcoin Park Austin this week for our monthly meetups!

• Monday: Litdevs #21 with a Lightning network workshop

• Tuesday: Austin Bitcoin Design Club

• Thursday: Bitdevs #67

Come say hi!

👉 RSVP for future meetups and experiences: bitcoinpark.com/austin

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Jack’s Blockchain Audit

In Nashville this week we hosted an Open House and incorporated a “Nashville Round” which is where 4 independent music artists went back-to-back singing original songs and providing great tunes and vibes.

We also live streamed this on NOSTR and the Tunestr app.

NOSTR is an open communication protocol that can help rewrite how information and content is shared and distributed on the internet.

Tunestr is a NOSTR-native music streaming platform to help independent artists maintain control over their music and flip the incentive structure of the music industry.

This includes the idea of exchanging value for value (V4V) on content and services that are otherwise controlled by mainstream distribution platforms like YouTube, Spotify, and other social medias by using bitcoin.

This was a ton of fun and we received over 1million sats for the 4 artists during their sets!

Watch the recap of the livestream here.

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Volatility Index

What Mattered This Week in Bitcoin

Subscribe to OP_Daily to get this news sent directly to your inbox.

Also, for the best way to keep up with all these stories and news in Bitcoin subscribe to OP_Daily. That’s my main resource for all news bitcoin and freedom tech nowadays.

If you're looking to begin saving in Bitcoin, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter and I’d be happy to help get you started.

Happy stacking. Aho.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe and share 👇

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Welcome back to this week’s edition of The ₿ridge Report!

Subscribe now

Today’s report is broken up into 3 parts:

1. The Bitcoin Meetup - a review of some broader happenings surrounding bitcoin and how it continues to influence culture and grow as a global community.

2. The Blockchain Audit - an insight in my personal journey as I continue to integrate a bitcoin standard into my life and the broader world around me.

3. The Volatility Index - a review of newsworthy articles, podcasts, and events of the week, an AI generated summary, and my Dose of analysis.

   ---

Bitcoin Meetup

Check out this week’s Medium of Exchange Podcast where Jason and I talk through how we approach volatility. This is a great listen for anyone who is worried about price fluctuations with Bitcoin.

👉 RSVP for future meetups and experiences: bitcoinpark.com/austin

Leave a comment

Jack’s Blockchain Audit

This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to navigate the flood of new tools and technology without drowning in them. The pace of innovation, especially in AI, can be exciting, but also paralyzing if your only motivation is “smart people I follow online say I should try this.”

When there’s no clear outcome in mind, I’ve found myself spinning wheels, tinkering with tools like ChatGPT just because they’re “the new thing.” That’s when writer’s block hits hardest. But when the goal is crystal clear, and especially when there’s a hard deadline, these tools shift from distractions to force multipliers.

That’s exactly where our team is right now. We’re 40 days out from CTS and Imagine If in Nashville a pair of back-to-back days that will be unforgettable, but also require a mountain of prep for a small team. To pull it off, we’re building smart workflows and leaning hard on tools that compress hours of procedural work into minutes.

For me, this has been a revelation. I can lock in for three hours straight if it’s on something creative, like exploring AI image or video generation, but the administrative side of event production? Schedules, checklists, timelines? That’s where my energy drains fast.

With ChatGPT, I can knock out that kind of work in 30 minutes at a quality standard I’m happy with, without burning myself out. Yes, there’s human in the loop but that is a lot more effective than just getting the structure input in the first place.

It’s a reminder that the right mix of human intention and machine efficiency can be a real unlock. Especially when the goal isn’t to “play with tech” but to ship something that matters.

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Volatility Index

What Mattered This Week in Bitcoin

How Gen Z Is Stepping Into Financial Independence
Gen Z is the most formally educated generation yet, with over half already investing in some form. But surveys show they lack depth in key financial areas—only 1 in 4 who invest in the stock market feel they could explain it to a friend. Many excel at saving and spending discipline, shaped by watching their parents through the Great Recession, but feel less confident with taxes, debt, and complex investments. Notably, about 1 in 4 invest in crypto, making it as popular as stocks among some subsets. The opportunity is clear: bridge the education gap while encouraging personal responsibility and sound money habits.

My Dose: Gen Z’s saving discipline is strong, but Bitcoin offers them a way to skip the legacy system entirely—no unlearning required. The key will be pairing sound money with sound education.

LightningPiggy: Teaching Kids Bitcoin With a Physical Piggy Bank
LightningPiggy turns saving bitcoin into a tactile experience for kids. The open-source, Lightning-enabled piggy bank lets children receive sats and watch them grow without the distractions of a phone. It’s adaptable, from paintable plywood to 3D-printed shells, and integrates Nostr Wallet Connect for flexible custody setups. By showing balances in sats—not fiat—kids avoid the price-watching trap and focus on accumulation. As they grow, the hardware can be repurposed or passed along, making saving sats a lifelong habit.

My Dose: A savings habit built in sats from childhood is a moat against fiat thinking. This isn’t just hardware, it’s a culture hack. Teach ‘em young, as they say.

Also, for the best way to keep up with all these stories and news in Bitcoin subscribe to OP_Daily. That’s my main resource for all news bitcoin and freedom tech nowadays.

If you're looking to begin saving in Bitcoin, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter and I’d be happy to help get you started.

Happy stacking. Aho.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe and share 👇

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1/2 way. Because then you are running out of the woods.

Welcome back to this week’s edition of The ₿ridge Report!

Subscribe now

Today’s report is broken up into 3 parts:

1. The Bitcoin Meetup - a review of some broader happenings surrounding bitcoin and how it continues to influence culture and grow as a global community.

2. The Blockchain Audit - an insight in my personal journey as I continue to integrate a bitcoin standard into my life and the broader world around me.

3. The Volatility Index - a review of newsworthy articles, podcasts, and events of the week, an AI generated summary, and my Dose of analysis.

   ---

Bitcoin Meetup

Cathedrals, Rooftops, and Reset Buttons

Tonight I’ll be leading my first official yoga class. It’s happening on the rooftop at Vanta Athletics in Austin — a space that overlooks the downtown just as the sun begins to set. This is exactly the type of scene I wanted to teach at while I was undergoing my training. I’m super blessed to have this opportunity and can’t wait to lead this session.

For the last week I’ve been thinking about the "Cathedral Effect" — how tall, open spaces can spark higher-order thinking, while low-ceilinged rooms promote detail-focused execution. The environments we inhabit shape our attention. They pull things out of us that we didn’t even know were there.

That’s what I’m trying to recreate on the rooftop tonight: an atmosphere that expands minds and opens hearts. Finding presence and a way to slow ourselves down after hectic weeks, and getting ready to flow smoothly into the week ahead.

I’ll be honest, I’m nervous.

This weekend was full of physical reset, too. I signed up for a 5K and a 150-meter burpee broad jump challenge at 7:30 a.m. Saturday morning. Brutal, but necessary. Running and breathing and sweating is my way of clearing bandwidth. It reminds me I’m here to live, to move, to build a body and mind that can carry weight.

If you’re around Austin and want to join a future class, check out ATX Rooftop Yogi on SweatPals. I hope to see you there.

👉 RSVP for future meetups and experiences: bitcoinpark.com/austin

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Jack’s Blockchain Audit

Imagine If… Vision Meets Vibe

This week we officially launched ImagineIF — and the countdown is on. 50 days until we welcome some of the most curious and capable minds in Bitcoin, AI, energy, and freedom tech to Nashville. The landing page is live at bitcoinpark.com/imagineif — and I couldn’t be prouder of how it turned out.

I mentioned in last week’s report how I’ve been “vibe coding” this website. What does that mean? It’s just problem-solving with an aesthetic compass. We knew we wanted to convey clarity, warmth, and vision — and thanks to help from the team and collaborators I work with at Bitcoin Park we made it happen.

I also finally fixed a redirect bug that’s been haunting me for three months. It was such a small thing — buried in a long to-do list — but it mattered. It always does. The elegance is in the details.

I had the chance to see the Fisher Center for Performing Arts in person, and I was blown away. Now I understand. The architecture alone will challenge us to rise. So we’re embracing that same “cathedral effect” as our programming north star: every talk, every moment, every interaction should aim to entertain, inform, and inspire.

This summit is shaping up to be something truly special. I feel grateful to play a small role in making it happen. This is what it looks like to build toward freedom — deliberately, beautifully, and together.

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Volatility Index

What Mattered This Week in Bitcoin

This Week’s Signals and My Dose of Perspective

1. KYC Is a Liability, Not a Safety Feature
A breach at Tea, a dating app marketed around “safety,” exposed over 72,000 images including face scans and government IDs. The data, scraped from an open Firebase bucket, was weaponized almost instantly.
My Dose: Privacy theater is not safety. We can’t be so willing to give up our personal data for convenience. Especially in a world where most websites are thrown together using tools like chatgpt and cursor, it’s not something to overlook when collecting information from people.

2. Ray Dalio: Hedge With Gold and Bitcoin
Dalio suggests allocating at least 15% of portfolios to hard assets like gold and BTC as the U.S. enters a phase of fiscal instability. While he still leans toward gold, his recognition of Bitcoin’s role is noteworthy.
My Dose: I’ll take the acknowledgement. When the old guard starts nodding at Bitcoin, even with caveats, it means the walls are cracking. It’s not fringe anymore. It’s inevitable.

3. US Government Still Holds $24B in Bitcoin
Despite rumors of a massive sell-off, Arkham confirmed that the U.S. government holds nearly 200,000 BTC. The assets haven’t moved in over four months.
My Dose: Whether they know it or not, they’re playing the long game. Let’s just hope the Bitcoin they hold ends up being used to protect, not control.

If you're looking to begin saving in Bitcoin, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter and I’d be happy to help get you started.

Happy stacking. Aho.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe and share 👇

Share

Welcome back to this week’s edition of The ₿ridge Report!

Subscribe now

Today’s report is broken up into 3 parts:

1. The Bitcoin Meetup - a review of some broader happenings surrounding bitcoin and how it continues to influence culture and grow as a global community.

2. The Blockchain Audit - an insight in my personal journey as I continue to integrate a bitcoin standard into my life and the broader world around me.

3. The Volatility Index - a review of newsworthy articles, podcasts, and events of the week, an AI generated summary, and my Dose of analysis.

   ---

Bitcoin Meetup

We’re hosting our next Austin Bitcoin Club meetup this week, and I couldn’t be more excited for the topic — freedom energy.

It’s easy to take energy for granted, until you realize how much human flourishing depends on it. The more I’ve learned about Bitcoin mining, the more I see it not as an energy consumer but as an energy optimizer. This is a tool to flatten volatility, stabilize grids, and make renewable investments profitable.

Zach Dell’s recent podcast on this hit a nerve. The speed of energy innovation right now is staggering. As demand accelerates from the next billion people entering the digital economy Bitcoin finds itself in the perfect spot: a buyer of last resort for energy, helping producers stay afloat while the rest of the system catches up.

If this sounds abstract, come hear it firsthand. These are real stories from real people building in the field, not hype from press releases. It’s shaping up to be a high-signal meetup that could change how you view energy, Bitcoin, and the future of abundance.

RSVP and join us at Bitcoin Park Austin:
👉 https://www.meetup.com/bitcoin-commons-austin/events/307355640/?eventOrigin=group_upcoming_events

→ If you want to get more involved and have these kinds of conversations in person, I recommend you find your local meetup.

Leave a comment

Jack’s Blockchain Audit

I’ve been vibe coding like a madman lately.

If you told me eight months ago that I’d be deploying full-stack websites, I’d have laughed. Now? I’ve got actual code in actual Git logs and live HTML/CSS on the web. It’s a new mental model for how I build and ship.

The AI tools are getting better by the week, but the gap between “cool demo” and “usable product” still requires effort. You need a PRD. You need clarity on voice, text, full vibe. You need to learn when to code yourself and when to use the agent. And you definitely need to figure out GitHub without smashing your keyboard.

Some lessons:

• Organization is everything.

• Hallucination control is a skill.

• Breathing helps.

And most importantly: making is momentum. I’m learning by doing, breaking, shipping, fixing, and repeating.

I have no clue what skills I’ll unlock next, but I’m in builder mode. Total vibe coder zone. And there’s no turning back.

Just take action.

“Do the thing,” as they say.

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Volatility Index

What Mattered This Week in Bitcoin

AI Will Need 50GW of Power by 2028 — Anthropic

Anthropic says training frontier AI models will require at least 50 gigawatts of electric capacity in the U.S. by 2028 — more than the total energy used by many countries today. Permitting and infrastructure delays are already bottlenecks.

My Dose: This isn’t just a data center problem — it’s an energy allocation problem. Bitcoin miners are already helping utilities manage demand fluctuations, and this trend will only accelerate. Energy abundance is no longer optional. Bitcoin, again, fits the moment.

El Salvador’s Bitcoin Transparency Questioned — IMF Report

According to a new IMF report, El Salvador may not be “buying 1 BTC a day” as claimed. Instead, the government appears to be reshuffling existing holdings between wallets, while scaling back Bitcoin-friendly policies to secure a $1.4B loan.

My Dose: The signal here isn’t in the scandal — it’s in the tension. Bitcoiners want transparency, but sovereign actors still play by opaque rules. This reinforces the need for self-custody and skepticism, even in narratives we want to believe.

Three U.S. States Pass Bitcoin Reserve Laws — NH, TX, AZ

New Hampshire, Texas, and Arizona have passed legislation enabling state treasuries to hold Bitcoin. While some bills aim for direct purchases, others permit custody of seized or unclaimed BTC.

My Dose: This feels like a turning point. State-level Bitcoin reserves are a grassroots version of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve concept. Not perfect, but practical.

If you're looking to begin saving in Bitcoin, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter and I’d be happy to help get you started.

Happy stacking. Aho.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe and share 👇

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