The full moon was as bright as our headlamps as we hiked into the canyon. We made good time to the base of the climb. Sunrise painted the rock of the Black Velvet Wall hues of amber and gold. The winds that had kept us up all night dampened.

We tied in at about 6am: Andrew beginning his day of rope gunning for our party of three, Brian and I beginning our day of rope management. Andrew was frothing to get onto the rock. Brian was a bit ghost-faced (last night’s spicy hot dog dinner) but ready to climb. Me? I wasn’t having a good time.

I spent the first three pitches consumed by fear. The sheer amount of climbing ahead of us, coupled with my lack of conditioning, made me concerned about a sandbag—with Andrew calling the shots, this fear is often justified. The wall quickly steepened toward verticality, making salient the fact we were dangling from strands of dental floss hundreds of feet from the ground. I overgripped the endless diagonal crack of pitch two. Andrew and I reminded Brian how to tie a clove hitch. On pitch three, as I followed the (per Mountain Project, “exciting”) traverse, Andrew snapped some photos of me. I called out to him, "thanks for capturing my last ever rock climb! I’m never doing this shit again!”

I asked a lot of questions of myself during those first three pitches. Why am I putting myself through this right now? Is this senseless risk-taking? If we pee into this large hole in the face, is urine going to shoot out of a crack onto the climbers below us? My nerves loosened a bit after some belay banter and I remembered that I did in fact know how to rock climb. Pollyannaism in the mountains is nothing new. But the speed at which your attitude can shift from “I’m going to die” to “I’m having a great time” impresses me every time.

By the top of the fourth crux pitch, which felt smooth, I was having fun again. Which was a good thing, because we had many hours ahead of us. Temps were good, if variable: as the breeze and sun alternated, we donned and shed layers accordingly. Between the three of us, we had one backpack, about four liters of water, and a lot of Trader Joes sour gummies. We could hear, and at times see, a couple of parties below us, but Andrew’s pace kept us comfortably ahead of our pursuers, even as a party of three. In no time we had blasted past P7, where some parties rap down, and had made it through some excellent climbing to reach P11, the last bolt we would encounter that day and where the notable climbing would end.

From here, the climbing quality deteriorated. Brian and Andrew both broke off small footholds. The routefinding became tenuous and our pace slowed as we sought the line of least resistance to the summit.

We started to feel the length of the day make us a little stupider and a little more clumsy. My shoes (WHY did I downsize my TC Pros??) were agonizing. Brian lost a fingernail (RIP Randy). Andrew, understandably, was having less fun climbing long runout pitches on garbage rock than the beautiful hand cracks and bomber face climbing of the morning.

After a couple of floundering pitches, and a notable battle between our ropes and a large blackbrush shrub, we felt back on course. Through thoughtful climbing we avoided any serious rockfall or breakage and scrambled onto the summit around 5:30pm after something like 2,000’ and 19 total pitches of roped climbing. Team send! We signed our names to the logbook—Brian digging through the archives to find his signature from when he climbed Epinephrine with Billy five years ago—then started the long walk down.

I’m so thankful that we weren’t walking down in the dark. Finding the cairns that marked the “trail” from the summit, in the dark, after 12+ hours of climbing would have been a challenge I’m glad to save for another day. We never even had to turn on our headlamps (hat tip to Andrew for being optimistic on this point when I asked for the torches from the bag during our last rest), cruising back into the parking lot just as the blue hour was fading into night.

Sour gummies aside, after a fourteen-hour day with no lunch there was only one place to go from here: In-N-Out. We loaded up on calories and slurped down milkshakes before heading back to camp to crawl straight into our sleeping bags.

A day like this one really highlighted the absurdity of this hobby. The usual strangeness of an alpine start was only exaggerated by the glow of the Strip to the east. As we ascended five hundred, one thousand, two thousand feet from the valley floor below, the whole city became visible: the pyramid of the Luxor, the STRAT tower, and all those other monuments to avarice. Our Thursday couldn’t have been more different from that of the ravers preparing for that night’s Illenium show at the Sphere, the glassy-eyed gamblers spinning slot machines, or the locals going about their day-to-day lives. And while I had my moments of doubt, I can say that I’m happy with how we spent our Thursday, and I probably will do this shit again after all.

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And a few nights later we did pay homage at Gomorrah—as my Dad says, “breaking even” after a few hours of blackjack and craps. My biggest ever day of climbing (so far). Happy to have been able to tackle it with two friends that are way better climbers than I am.

The Second Flatiron, a thousand-foot spike of conglomerate sandstone located on the outskirts of South Boulder, is a part of the greater Flatirons formation. These 300-million-year-old rocks form the most dramatic portion of Boulder’s skyline and the most salient symbol of the city I could imagine (I mean come on, it’s named Boulder).

The Chautauqua Park trailhead parking lot stays full from just before sunrise until after sunset. Even being located next to the town, there’s plenty of wildness to satisfy me when I’m looking for a quick jaunt. Wildflowers bloom and leaves rustle in the gentle (and sometimes not-so-gentle) breeze. I’ve interrupted herds of deer eating breakfast, followed countless magpies squawking along the trail, and politely avoided at least one bear.

Having spent thousands of hours here, the most delightful thing about the Chautauqua and Flatirons Loops remains the sheer variety of people I find alongside me. College students taking graduation photos litter the meadow. Tourists speaking a dozen languages snap photos of the formation from the first clearing in the trees. Next to an old couple sharing a water bottle at the Flatirons Loop intersection, a professional runner blasts up the trail for another lap. Teenagers wearing really wide pants chaperone their parents along the trail, often resting in the shade after the steepness of the initial climb up the meadow (“Dad, I promise the rest of the trail isn’t this steep!”). Climbers clanking with full trad racks ascend next to boulderers with crash pads strapped to their backs, both on their way to their respective projects. The juxtaposition of elite to casual, normie to hardo, is singular here.

More often than not, when I arrive at the base of the Second Flatiron I find an audience. Hikers gawk and point as people climb (or as many in Boulder like to say, scramble) up Freeway, the 5.0 climbing route ascending the slabby face. Over the years of observing the characters on the route (including many shoeless climbers, at least two people carrying dogs in backpacks up the face, and a guy wearing a full suit), I’ve coined what I call Bateman’s Law: at any time on a nice day in Boulder, you will find at least one Hinge date going terribly wrong on the Second Flatiron.1

Doing the climb at this point feels almost like navigating my own house with the lights turned off; I know where the furniture is, just how many stairs there are, where there’s a dip in the floor or a sharp corner to avoid. Much of the route wanders across the textured face in a choose-your-own-adventure style, but at a few constrictions I feel so practiced that I can reproduce each crack, foothold, and movement from memory as I sit here writing. I’ve got complicated feelings about the culture of scrambling in Boulder, but time on the Second does evoke such focus and flow that I overflow with gratitude that it’s in my backyard.

I’ve done the full loop car-to-car in as short as 36 minutes and as long as 3 hours. I’ve biked to the trailhead and run the whole loop from my house. I’ve done it alone, many times, but in just as many cases I’ve shared intimate conversations with one or two close friends on the rock. With Ian I did the Third, Second, and First Flatirons in a day—setting no speed records. At least a few times I’ve mobbed the face with a dozen or more friends or cheered on participants in the Tour de Flatirons. Upon reflection, this symbol of Boulder serves also as a locus of my community.

My favorite view of the Flatirons is when they’re off-limits for scrambling: just after it snows. The clean, albedous snow and dark rock lit up from the east by an amber winter sunrise evoke such sublimity in my heart that I feel content not taking another lap. I know the snow will melt and I’ll be back out there with my friends soon enough. Here’s to one hundred more.

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My home of Boulder has to include, if not most of the claimed userbase, some of the biggest power users of the platform. Boulderites LOVE Strava (and they’re all psychos—good luck getting any KOMs or Local Legends in Boulder). I hear it described as friends’ “preferred social media” or as a “dating app” regularly.

Living in ground zero of Strava culture, then, I feel qualified to make this declaration:

DON’T HIDE YOUR MAP ON STRAVA.

If you’re thinking about hiding your map, make the whole post private.

There are only two reasons to hide your activity map while still making a public post (provided that you don’t always hide your maps for privacy/safety reasons):

1. You were doing something you shouldn’t have been doing or were somewhere you aren’t allowed to be.

2. You’re trying to flex some cool secret spot to people that don’t know about it (or to signal to people who do know about it that YOU also know about it).

In the case of 1), I get it. I’ve skied an aspect that was aggressive for the day’s avalanche conditions too. I’ve gotten lost. I’ve had what should have been a quick and casual day ascending the Third Flatiron turn into an eight-hour epic. But hiding our mistakes doesn’t erase them, and owning them may even help someone else avoid them in the future. If you’re ashamed to post something because you “got away” with taking unreasonable risks, then maybe you shouldn’t have taken that risk. If you’re doing something illegal or trespassing… maybe don’t record GPS tracks your crime! Whether or not they’re the map is privatized, they’re still on Strava’s servers.

In the case of 2)…

Fuck you. Stop gatekeeping.

Let’s be wholly honest: the Strava project is about, above all else, vanity. Yes, it has maps that are useful in planning adventures. Sure, I’m confident that some people use its dashboard of statistics to inform some highly-scientific approach to training (couldn’t be me). But the overwhelming reason people use Strava is because of its social aspect—otherwise, we’d all be satisfied with Garmin Connect (or whatever other nonsocial GPS app you might pick from).

People want to post pictures of the sunrise on their morning runs. People want to flex their big vert days. People want KUDOS!

By publicly posting your activity with a hidden map, especially accompanied by photos of the sick powder skiing or secret bike trails that The Public isn’t allowed to know about, you’re saying to the world “look what I know that you don’t.” To those that are In On It, you’re saying “Look! I know! I too am in the club!”

Read C.S. Lewis’ The Inner Ring. Gatekeeping is lame and bad for your soul. Lewis said:

The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.

Claiming local status (especially not after having lived in Jackson/Summit County/RFV/SLC/wherever for like two winters) is eyeroll-inducing. Locality is just one of a hundred Rings to aspire to gain entry to or to exclude others from. Trying to reinforce your self-esteem by posting powder stash thirst traps is like filling sieves with water. It won’t work.

There are big campaigns to, e.g., “keep Jackson wild.” Not geotagging spots to prevent them from being loved to death is great ethics! I’m all for that! But even better ethics, if this is something you’re genuinely concerned about, is keeping the whole activity private. Don’t spray photos without a map.

If you’ve got a real reason to keep something private—one of safety, professional obligation, out of respect to someone’s request, recreating on private property, etc.— then by all means you should do so. And hey, maybe you do have a genuine, hidden, super-secret zone to ski in Marble that no one knows about!

But do us all a favor and either don’t record it or hide the whole activity. I’m tired of clout chasers clogging up my feed.

Disclaimer: This post was not inspired by any individual in particular but has instead been a part of a yearslong conversation with my friend Ian inspired by Strava behavior throughout the Mountain West. With that said, if you read this and thought it was about you… then maybe you should look at yourself hard in the mirror and ask if you’re acting like one of the Danaids.

I got trolled on Twitter.

This tweet lived in the corner of my mind all week, simmering quietly as I trudged up fifty miles of skin track and eventually reaching a boil when I finally sat down in front of my computer to write these words.

The take came onto my feed thanks to a retweet from Tyler Cowen. In the replies, I saw folks agreeing (Joe Weisenthal of Odd Lots: “Same”) or furtherance of the same idea:

I don’t know why this small snipe at joy burrowed its way so deeply into my mind, especially given everything that’s going on in the world right now. But something about its specific failure mode felt generalizable into a broader idea: no joy in life can survive reductionism.

Each element of the poster’s critique is, in a sense, correct. Yes, skiing can be expensive. Yes, you can get hurt doing it (and I have). Skiing, especially good skiing, relies on geography and climate (which is worsening judging by Colorado’s snowpack this year). And yeah, skiing is often cold.

But these elements in isolation don’t mean anything. You could make similarly fragmented critiques of biking—it’s so expensive, people get into serious, even deadly, crashes all the time, and the weather has to be good. Same with golf! That reminds me: why would you ever teach your kids how to scuba dive or surf? You can only do these things in coastal areas! And you have to get wet to do them (sounds cold)! And don’t even get me started on surfing. Lineups! you have to wait in a line!?

Reductionism will make anything sound miserable, even the greatest joys in life. Powder skiing is just riding two planks of wood through accumulated frozen precipitation. Splurging on a delicious dinner out is foolish—that’s nothing but chemical reactions on your tongue’s taste receptors. Sex? Oh, yeah, you mean friction?

Even reading sounds abhorrent in the right framing (@ Tyler Cowen). Staring at motionless symbols on a page, sitting in a quiet room by yourself for hours—what a terrible thing to teach your kids!

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Reductionism is lazy critique. Teach your kids to ski (not snowboard).

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The overarching theme of this blog is that how you spend your time matters. In 2025, my choice to make this my byline back in 2021 feels awfully prescient. My attention has never felt more under siege, intentionality has never felt more effortful, and curation has never felt more essential.

Spending time at home this December has turned a suspicion of short-form video’s evil into a strong conviction. I won’t turn this recap post into one of a thousand existing polemics against video slop and in favor of the text-based internet, but I can’t help but devote a few words toward being scared for friends and family (and myself) because the battle seems already lost. The algorithms are too satisfying. The content creators are too well-incentivized. The videos are too good! I feel my brain melting. Which brings me to my first selections:

Shortform Writing

I came across a few stories over the course of the year that seemed to gain significance as time passed. Early in the year, in my weekly article club my friend Tom shared Greg Egan’s 1990 short story Learning To Be Me. It describes a neural implant that syncs to and copies the brain of the host, eventually allows for a switch from a fallible biological brain to a digital brain that doesn’t degrade. The story explores consciousness, self, and continuity, with a twist that I will not spoil.

This story sat in my mind for a few months before I again came across the extremely-short 2012 Scott Alexander piece The Whispering Earring. This is one of those stories that could be a vessel for many messages, but the clearest one for this year is AI. When I reread this story, it made me think of Egan. Is dependence or reliance so bad? Would you make that trade? Would you wear the earring?

(I’d wear the earring. The temptation would be too much for me to avoid. Yet even with that self-knowledge, I find myself in our moment trying to limit the ways in which I use AI in my life, along the logic of Keep the robots out of the gym: things that I want to do I use AI without a second’s hesitation, while things that I want to improve at, or stay good at, I take a much more cautious approach.)

Books

I’ll be honest: there wasn’t a total standout book for me this year. The most perspective-shifting combo, though, was reading Tom Holland’s Dominion in combination with Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars.

Dominion makes the case that modern morality and culture cannot be separated from the impact of Christianity. Holland’s background as a classicist led him to realize that the ancient world was “increasingly alien, increasingly frightening to me.” In reading the works of ancient Roman and Greek writers, he realized that the Christian revolution was deeper than he had appreciated as a secular, educated European. Even the very word secular originally described clergy living “in the world” as opposed to in a monastery! The effects of the Christian revolution are global, not just in the Christian West, and in his tour of world history he crafts his argument using compelling anecdotes from Judea to China to America across thousands of years.

Naturally, Dominion provided the motivation to crack open the copy of The Twelve Caesars I bought last year to see how alien the Roman world really could have been. As far as I’m concerned, Holland is totally correct, and Suetonius is the perfect writer to make this point by his recounting of the most salacious details we could ask for. Even if historians believe many of the details are sensationalized, how it’s written speaks volumes about how contemporary readers might have reacted.

Yes, Suetonius writes about the history—the triumphs they won, marriages, construction of public infrastructure and monuments—but he also has a knack for prurience. We learn of the horrible perversions of Tiberius, who forced nobles to send their children to his own version of Epstein’s island, Capri, to perform in sex shows for him; Suetonius recounts how Caligula staffed an imperial brothel with the wives of leading nobles; we read of Sporus, the castrated slave boy made wife of the emperor Nero and used for pleasure by his successors Otho and Vitellius.

Slavery and prostitution were both a part of everyday life (a fact I already knew thanks to my senior year of high school’s IB Latin final project, an examination of primary sources surrounding prostitution and brothels in Rome). Homosexuality as a concept essentially did not exist, as male attraction and sexual activity were to be expected. The only stigma, in Roman eyes, was to be a bottom—a pathicus or cinaedus, as I learned in the wonderfully lewd Catullus 16, the foulest poem of antiquity. Suicide was often seen as honorable and expected rather than the mortal sin it’s seen as today.

L.P. Hartley wrote, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” I look forward to continuing my travels via the volumes of Herodotus, Tacitus, and Homer I have waiting on my bookshelf.

Music

Bleeds by Wednesday

Wednesday’s sixth album is maybe the best yet. Karly Hartzman’s lyrics are unrivalled in their evocation of sensation across all of your senses—the feeling of swimming “past the cold spot in the lake”, the stunning couplet of “Grocery store sushiiiiiiiii/You’re chopping ketamine with a motel room key”, the smell and sound of “stokin’ bonfires with leaf blowers.” You can’t help but be transported to the rural exurbs of Greensboro, North Carolina when you listen.

The media is trying to style Karly and MJ Lenderman’s (the band’s guitarist who last year struck out on his own wildly successful solo effort, Manning Fireworks) breakup as a Fleetwood Mac situation. Karly’s essay in Vulture certainly helped add to the growing myth of their relationship. I saw the band play (without MJ Lenderman) in October, and the live show was arguably the best I saw all year, both in terms of music but also the crowd energy at the Gothic Theater in Denver.

Highlights: Bitter Everyday, Pick Up That Knife, Wasp, and, as a lifelong Phish hater, the ending verse of Phish Pepsi: “We watched a Phish concert and Human Centipede/Two things I now wish I had never seen.”

Something to Consume by Die Spitz

Die Spitz, an Austin-based rock band, had an awesome, fun EP (“Teeth”) in 2023, but their debut album Something to Consume takes things to the next level. I feel lucky to have seen the group at a small venue where we got to crowd surf the band members as they played because I know that will never happen again—these girls are going to explode with the energy of their live shows, the charisma of the band, and ripping discography.

Highlights: Pop Punk Anthem (Sorry for the Delay), Throw Yourself to the Sword, Red40, Down on It

Honorable Mention

It’s A Beautiful Place by Water From Your Eyes. Really good duo, one of the more unique albums of the year. Don’t miss the remixes they’ve released too, especially “Born 4”.

American Hedonism by Your Neighbors. I’ve already written at length about the album, linked below:

Passing Time Year in Review

My favorite post I wrote this year was Losing My Edge, about wanting to know what the next thing is, and feeling stale in the meantime. If anyone knows what it is now (it can’t all be AI, can it?) let me know. I got a lot of outreach on this one, and it seems like it struck a chord with a lot of folks, but not in the way I intended at all. So it goes!

I also believe I said something true when I wrote an expression of deep frustration with the political moment over the summer. It is easier to destroy than create.

Finally, I experimented with some cooperative writing this year. I published a guest post from my friend Tom about tennis, beauty, and narrative. I also co-wrote a piece with my buddy Peter about rescuing the good parts of stoicism from its own popularity, Is it Time for Post-Stoicism?

I didn’t really grow the blog this year—I slowed the pace of writing and didn’t write any posts that I expected to have much virality. And that is fine with me! I appreciate the ~700 of you that subscribe and the ~15,000 unique readers that have come through my corner of the internet this year.

Thanks to everyone for spending some of your valuable time with me. I’ve learned so much and had so many unique conversations thanks to this blog and the people I’ve met through it. Here’s to more learning and self improvement in 2026!

-Michael

Those of us living in the Front Range have been blessed recently with not only glimpses of the Northern Lights but also unusually good starts and ends to our days. This is no coincidence: winter sunrises and sunsets really are better, as I’ll explain (I take this small joy as some consolation in the Dark Times).

Sunrises and sunsets paint fiery hues across the sky because of the different wavelengths of visible light. White light travels through the atmosphere and is scattered by air molecules and particulates (“Rayleigh scattering”). Colors with shorter wavelengths (violets, blues, and greens) scatter more strongly than the longer wavelengths of oranges and reds. The increase in the amount of air mass light must travel through at sunrise and sunset, then, scatters out the blues and violets completely (and usually, but not always, the greens), leaving the amber skyscapes that I hope for on every predawn commute to go skiing.

When particulate matter like smog, wildfire smoke, or volcanic ash is trapped in the low atmosphere, sunsets are washed out because these particles scatter light evenly across the color spectrum (“Mie scattering”). Instead, you want all the “stuff” to be up high. The spectacular shades reported after large volcanic events, for instance, come from stratospheric pollutants blasted high into the atmosphere. The same goes for clouds: higher elevation clouds allow for reflection of the diffused light without blocking it from the viewer or washing out the light.

As we approach the winter solstice, the sun’s diurnal arc shortens. The sun’s low elevation in the sky means that light must pass through a thicker slice of the atmosphere for a longer time compared to the high solar altitude of the summer. Cold winter air is usually drier as well, creating less Mie scattering from water vapor. You can expect longer duration golden hours during the winter months, then, and more dramatic coloration.

Sunrises tend to be clearer and crisper as the air is cleaner in the morning. The colors can be more varied and muted, with some lavenders and cooler shades making an appearance. Sunsets tend to have more dramatic coloration as the day’s warmth creates wind that carries dust and other particles into the air, along with all of the aerosols caused by human activity.

Can you forecast good sunrises and sunsets? This Belgian CS student thinks he can, mostly based on cloud data. I’ll report back on the accuracy of the alerts!

Sunrises and sunsets, the bookends of our days, serve as potent metaphors. The daily dose of liminality is a reminder of changes in life.

I have a special affinity for sunrises. While everyone is awake for a sunset, sunrises feel privileged. Earned. When I think of being awake for a sunrise, I think of alpine starts on Kilimanjaro, or Humpback Rock, or Longs Peak; I think of the brightening horizon of the Atlantic off the Carolina coast; I think of new beginnings.

As of late, I’ve been wrestling with a number of transitions and realignments that feel like so many sunsets. And sunsets, beautiful as they are, often evoke a tinge of sadness. I face decisions about whether or not, and if so, how, to close a few chapters. Choices about doors to shut. Endings.

Facing the darkness of the night can feel like a scary proposition. But after every sunset, goes the truism, is a sunrise. And as I mentioned, I am partial to a sunrise.

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Yet, any halfway-decent movement will reach a point where it feels played out. The high modernist ideals of the 20th century failed to deliver fully on the promise of a legible, scientific world. The disused concrete monoliths of modernism paved the way for a postmodernist reaction that rejected grand narratives of truth and progress in favor of pluralism and relativism. Musical examples of these reactions abound: a new generation of musicians in the late 70s, feeling that once-cool punk rock had become formulaic and overcommercialized, forged their own post-punk movement led by groups like Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Joy Division. Post-rationalists (postrats) are not “just rats who post” but rather adherents who reject rationalism’s historical neglect of intuition, social and emotional vibes, and praxis. Post-impressionism, post-hardcore, postcolonialism: these movements all answer the shortcomings of the movements from which they spawned.

Stoicism’s resurgence in self-help and pop-psychology content brings along old shortcomings. So, after a few thousand years, is it time for a reaction? Is it time for post-Stoicism?

Why Meditations is your Hinge date’s favorite book

Stoicism has lasted this long for a reason. Popular pieces of Stoic writing, like Meditations, are chock-full of action-oriented, accessible philosophy. In the case of Marcus Aurelius, the context of his life makes the advice that much more compelling: private thoughts from an all-powerful emperor of Rome, deified immediately upon his death, who managed to avoid corruption by his office:

Claim your title to these epithets—good, decent, truthful, in mind clear, cooperative, and independent—and take care then not to swap them for other names: and if you do forfeit these titles, return to them quickly.

He promotes a spirit of both altruism and dedication to one’s craft:

You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for the money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?

Beyond the self-sacrificial, Marcus Aurelius preaches a long list of virtues. He suggests being true and honest to yourself even in the most public settings:

When you speak in the senate or to any individual, be straightforward and not pedantic. Use language which rings true.

He advocates mental fortitude and acceptance of fate in the spirit of the Serenity Prayer (although he doesn’t necessarily suggest how to achieve it):

The first step: don’t be anxious. Nature controls it all. And before long you’ll be no one, nowhere – like Hadrian, like Augustus.

And he throws in a bit of good, old-fashioned grindset. He knew how to Lock In:

Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. But make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion. People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time – even when hard at work.

Writing like this is legitimately helpful 2,000 years later. Marcus Aurelius shows deep concern with cultivating virtue, seeking truth, and, most critically, acting on these thoughts rather than simply philosophizing. This book is actually a personal journal, published posthumously, not a work of philosophy. Aurelius makes it clear that endless reflection will get you nowhere–virtually every moral claim is a call to action. (This guy knew his praxis.)

Where Stoicism falls flat, Or, why that Hinge date sucked

Why do we roll our eyes so hard at those anon Twitter accounts? And why is it that the worst grindset startup influencer you know has a tattoo referencing Meditations?1

Firstly, you can’t just not be anxious. It doesn’t work like that. Søren Kierkegaard wrote:

Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way, has learned the ultimate.

Emotions are useful. Of course, in the American masculine tradition, it’s admirable to steel yourself against your fate. But this ignores the real, pragmatic value of emotions. Plausibly, the evolutionary purpose of emotions is to help us survive, and emotions do so when we feel them proportionately to the environmental factors that trigger them. What gets people in trouble is too much or too little of an emotion, in the wrong scenario–not feeling them in the first place.

Resilience against hardship is good, but life is not all a matter of choosing one’s mental state. Real, physical events cause emotions. Sometimes these causes are systemic in nature, and an undue focus on action to solve one’s problems may obscure when an individual is caught in the gears of history. Other times, a stoic’s blind emotional endurance could lead them to neglect tractable solutions to personal problems that they do have the power to change. This point is obvious to mentally healthy leftists, but is lost on many of pop-Stoicism’s consumers.

And yet, Meditations is all about action until it comes to accepting Fate. In Greco-Roman culture, people could not change their pre-determined fate. Instead, their task was to meet their destiny with dignity, thereby confirming the quality of their character. People had pre-determined degrees of character, with mythological heroes (and the ruling class) possessing the greatest virtue, of course. The whole system is rather rigid, and it neglects a key aspect of the Serenity Prayer: having the wisdom to know what is within your ability to change. While Meditations lauds accepting one’s fate, avoiding excessive fatalism seems to be a better path to actual virtue. The Stoic recommendation can easily slip from purposive action to helpless acceptance of one’s circumstances (or faults).

Lastly, this mindset is fundamentally conservative. A blindness to root causes neglects systemic causes of suffering in society. A bias toward accepting fate is necessarily a bias to accepting the status quo. This is probably why the anon Twitter accounts tend to be political conservatives, interspersing quotes from Epictetus with pictures of milkmaids and yearnings for homesteads.

Rescuing the good parts of Stoicism

If “post-” movements are reactions, what would make a good post-Stoicism?

We want to rescue the good parts. Being a good person is about action, not just philosophy. Promote the virtues of honesty, truth-seeking, and frankness in both actions and words. “If it is not right, don’t do it: if it is not true, don’t say it.” You should cultivate mental fortitude, but you should be sure to exercise it in its proper context. We should aspire to be the best versions of ourselves we can be.

But we need to add in a healthy dose of emotional maturity. Do not blindly suppress anxiety and emotions: acknowledge the value and role of feelings. Don’t be overly fatalistic. Don’t blame everything an individual does on character or destiny, but instead leave room for the influences their environment has on them.

And most importantly, please do not pretend that recapturing a virtuous life means consuming the right “Stoic” grifter content, lest you end up falling down the trad-adjacent rabbit hole that seems to have consumed so many hobbyist philosophers today.

In short, be a Stoic, but maybe consider going to therapy, and try acknowledging structural causes of problems even as you bias yourself toward action (your date might benefit from this part). More concisely, as Marcus Aurelius wrote in his timeless style:

Waste no more time arguing about what a good person should be. Be one.

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I had a great time writing this post with one of my best friends from high school, Peter. Peter is in my weekly article club, is better than me at throwing a frisbee (but worse at skiing), and is a researcher doing work in AI safety and interpretability living in New York.

I consume a lot of written content. I rely on a number of people to identify this content for me among the overwhelming deluge of words that the human race (and, increasingly, AI) produces every day.

Dan Frank has done some great writing recently about being a good citizen of the “infovore-blogosphere”, even launching his own grant to encourage the internet to take a shape that he favors. David Sasaki has been proactive in promoting good community on my corner of the internet in a way I admire. No Magic Pill had also suggested that I create a “favorites” section on the blog to share essays/posts/content that I think is important.

So, in the spirit of good internet citizenship, I have added a Monthly Links tab to my homepage that shares the more interesting things I’ve come across each month, sometimes with a short note, other times presented as-is. It begins in June 2025, when I happened to start keeping records of what I’ve been consuming. I’m copying No Magic Pill here, as I don’t want to spam the inboxes of people who subscribe to me with links that they haven’t necessarily asked for—just know that they’ll always be there on the homepage!

Link to Links

I also wanted to share a few of the aggregators that I find most valuable, in no particular order:

Splitting Infinity by Sam Harsimony: Monthly links, mostly focused on technology and science.

DYNOMIGHT: Irregular linkposts with high-quality context.

Daily Links by Readsfast.substack.com: Interesting selection of well-explained daily links on, well, basically everything I would find interesting.

LinkMachineGo: Roughly one link per roughly one day.

No Magic Pill: As already mentioned, a repository of monthly links, presented without commentary. Some underrepresented topics from other aggregators listed here are mountaineering, training, and finance.

Gwern: Self-recommending.

Zvi’s Don’t Worry About the Vase Monthly Roundups: Franky, this can be too much content but I’ll still peruse every once in a while, especially if one of the targeted roundups is on a topic of particular interest.

Astral Codex Ten’s Monthly Links: Self-recommending.

Marginal Revolution: The lack of context can be infuriating but also, self-recommending.

Happy reading!

1a) Putting any chemicals (caffeine, nicotine, other drugs) in my brain is not good for sleep quality. 1b) Drinking is particularly bad for sleep.

2) Vigorous exercise before sleep harms my sleep quality.

3) I feel my best when I sleep for 8-9 hours.

Collecting this data feels useful. But can I actually use it to improve anything about my health? Is any of this actionable? An honest reckoning points to “no.” Unfortunately, more data is not more information. I already knew these so-called insights before collecting all of that data. And so do you.

“Wearables” have proliferated like kudzu across the health and wellness landscape. Smartwatches, wristbands, armbands, and rings track various biometrics, notably heart rate, sleep duration and quality, stress levels, blood oxygen levels, and body temperature—even, I’m told, menstrual cycle tracking. But, I wonder, to what end?

I am not picking a fight with activity tracking apps (i.e. Strava), though some day I probably will.1 Instead, I am motivated by a concern that health wearables represent misplaced effort and may even actively harm users.

My Primary Concerns: Devaluing embodied knowledge and exacerbating health anxiety

A common business-school adage says “you can’t improve what you don’t measure.” I’ll go on the record as saying this is another shortcoming of management-consulting brain; there are plenty of complex systems that you can improve without direct measurement, and your body is one of them.

In a hyperscientific convenience poll I’ve been conducting in group messages, at work, in the sauna, and at trailheads, I’ve investigated why and how people in their 20s-40s buy and use wearables. You’ll note that my sample skews young, healthy, and outdoorsy, which is also where my conclusions will be most valid (because that describes me).

By far the most commonly-cited reason for seeking out wearables has been SLEEP. People are, understandably, concerned about their time spent horizontal. I’ve written about my own prioritization (or lack thereof) of sleep multiple times and it was my own driving motivation to wear a smartwatch nonstop for years. The second most common item of concern was heart rate. Relatedly, some of the mountain athletes with whom I’ve spoken highlighted the training and recovery-related metrics these devices provide. HRV (heart-rate variability) tracking, training load management, and readiness scores all fall into this category. Though it came up in my sampling, I will be excluding from this discussion menstrual cycle tracking as I, unsurprisingly, have no perspective to contribute on this point beyond “this seems useful” (though I don’t know the alternatives).

In each of the use cases mentioned above, there are insights you can glean from these measurements. I don’t deny that. What I do deny is that these insights are marginal in a meaningful sense, beyond what you already know based on basic scientific knowledge and signals from your own body.

When I drink five beers or go to sleep at 3am, I don’t need a machine learning algorithm synthesizing insights from “50+ health and wellness metrics” to guess that I’m going to have shitty sleep (in fact, just one beer will do it). Nor do I need a Readiness Score or Training Status to tell me when I’m strained and need to rest; every time my watch has ever flashed one of these notifications, my body had already made it clear that I was pushing it too hard by being sore, exhausted, or hinting toward sickness. As I mentioned in the opening, we all already know how to sleep well. Our bodies are giving us plenty of signal to work with regarding recovery, when we’re getting sick, and what feels good or bad. We just need to listen and act on it.

Furthermore, this level of optimization is misplaced effort unless you’re already at the frontier of health interventions, which most people, Bryan Johnson notwithstanding, are not. Worrying about your average resting heart rate or changes to your HRV are the law of triviality incarnate: users giving disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Michael Pollan said about diets: “eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Most athletes should take a Pollanian approach to health, too: exercise, not too much. Sleep plenty.

In summary, these devices pathologize health anxiety. In fact, the inspiration for this polemic stemmed from visiting a friend who has a history of diagnosed health-related anxiety. The guy is in his late twenties, in fantastic physical shape, and eats well: in short, he’s healthy. Shortly before my visit, though, he discovered a small bump in his leg and has gone to a few doctors about it. He admitted that his Oura ring was reporting higher indicators of stress and heart rate in line with his concerns over the leg lump. As he was describing these stats, I could actually see his heart rate increasing in real time. There was a negative feedback loop going on here: observing his stress levels increasing was increasing his stress levels further.2

Upon reflection, I realized I was doing the same thing with sleep. The very act of measuring sleep led to an observer effect, whereby knowing I’d be registering a bad score would cause additional stress, which would worsen the score, etc. etc.. Sometimes when I’d wake up feeling refreshed, I’d look at my watch and see a bad score relative to how I felt, and then actually begin to feel worse. The measurements were creating a self-fulfilling prophecy!

One friend in the sauna almost convinced me that the gamification of some wearables (e.g. the WHOOP data streak) can incentivize healthier behaviors. But in reality, this kind of structure is Goodhart’s Lawing you into optimizing for device usage (to the benefit of the tech company) rather than optimizing for health outcomes. If all of the concerns above (and in the appendix) are valid, then increased use of the device does not mean you’ll be healthier. If using the devices does create net stress, then using it more will only worsen outcomes.

In short, I’ve started taking off my watch at night and am ignoring my insurance company’s offers of free and discounted rings, watches, and bands. Until the tech advances enough to where my watch can sing me lullabies to make me snooze faster and sleep deeper, I’ll be doing things the old-fashioned way: when someone asks me “how’d you sleep?” I’ll answer frankly, based on how I feel, without glancing down at my watch screen.

Appendix: Other, less interesting concerns with wearables

Do wearables work?

Frankly, I’m punting on this one. Different wearables use different measurement techniques, and folks I’ve talked to that have multiple wearables (e.g. a Garmin smart watch AND an Oura ring) report different results between the two. There may be external validity issues with comparing across wearables, but for now let’s grant that the measurements are at least somewhat accurate.

Who wants you to use them?

Though I’ve all but given up on efforts against the technology panopticon that now defines our lives (2012-Michael would be ashamed), it’s still worth asking: cui bono? There is a lot of money to be made in pathologizing your health anxiety. The “consumer wearables” sector is broad, and it’s hard for me to disaggregate things like glucose monitors for diabetes or ECG monitors for people with cardiac problems, but guessing a market size of $40-$60 billion today, projecting to grow to well north of $100 billion by 2030 seems quite safe. Companies continue to develop more and new ways to collect your health data—Apple’s recent announcement of their newest AirPod Pro 3, for instance, includes heart rate monitors in the earbuds!

Selling the devices is one thing, but having access to all of that sweet, sweet data is another incentive. Reading the privacy policies for a few large wearables companies like Fitbit (owned by Google) or Oura, I can confirm that these companies state they do not sell user data to third parties. Frankly, though, it is unclear how and if the companies could use this data in training AI models, a more recent concern. But even if the companies pinky promise they are being responsible with your data, as noted in a research report released by Mozilla last year, the data is still vulnerable to security breaches, handling by third-party vendors, and probes by governmental authorities. Examples of sloppy or negligent security abound.

Insurance companies want in on the action too. More health data means better actuarial predictions by the insurance companies, perhaps someday leading to the insurance holy grail of the personalized premium. My health insurer, Aetna, offers discounts to buy and monetary rewards for connecting biometric devices to their insurance app. While it’s all carrots for now, providing gift cards for hitting a certain step goal, for instance, there are limited legal protections preventing the companies from turning to the stick. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, for instance, prevents insurers from discriminating against people based on their genetic information. So while your insurer can’t deny coverage to someone with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy because of a read of their genome, nothing is stopping them from noticing their smartwatch is registering consistent atrial fibrillation, a lower-than-average amount of exercise, and distorted recovery times and connecting the dots. And to go back to the previous section, what if the devices aren’t accurate, but users are nonetheless financially penalized for “bad” biometric readings?

A month ago, I was climbing in the flatirons before work with a friend named Jake. We had just downclimbed from the summit of the fifth flatiron, completing the classic Regency-Royal Arch-Fifth Flatiron link.

The city of Boulder stretched out before us. Roads crisscrossed the plains in the shimmering heat. The slanted formations of the flatirons in the foreground dwarfed the background buildings of the downtown mall, both visible to our left. To our right, the skyscrapers of Denver clustered like a metal forest thirty miles to the southwest.

“You know what I think about sometimes?” Jake asked, looking to the eastern horizon where the July sun was already high overhead despite the early morning hour. Commuters filled the highway into Boulder, flowing like the South Platte River. A squirrel clambered across a branch below us. A distant jackhammer blasted away at some urgent road construction.

“This is as wild as it gets. This is as undeveloped as this place is ever going to be.”

Jake’s comment tickled something in my mind. It reminded me how, as we had run to the base of the climb, we had seen a fox making its way through the tall switchgrass. The fox stood peering at us for a moment before darting into the brush. On the jog out, I felt preoccupied.

Does the world move only in one direction? From wild to civilized? Untamed to domesticated? Primeval to developed? As soon as I had written Jake’s comment in my notes app to revisit later, I was already inventing counterexamples.

In high school, my friend Thomas was into urban exploring, a strange hobby involving misdemeanor trespassing in abandoned buildings. I joined him on a few outings to crumbling textile mills where we clambered through long-broken windows, wore respirators to avoid breathing in the asbestos falling from disintegrating ceilings, and marveled at the effects of graffiti, erosion, and time on once-proud factories. Surely, these buildings are more wild now than when they were in operation?

What about New York City’s highline, the former rail line converted into a public park? Didn’t the speed at which the waters of Venice and the skies of Los Angeles cleared of pollution in the strictest days of the COVID lockdowns illustrate how fast the resilient planet could, and can, rewild?

Yes, the above things are true. I can think of those edge cases, and I want to avoid the false Manicheanism of “Good Untouched Nature” and “Bad Developed Land.” But I’ve sat on the idea of this essay for a month. I wrote paragraphs, tweaked them, scrapped them. I queried friends. Nothing felt right. Finally, this afternoon I sat on the floor of my room and stared at my bookshelf.

On a hunch, I plucked a weathered copy of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac from between a collection of Barry Lopez essays and Young Men and Fire, both of which were gifted to me by a different friend (also named Jake). A look at the table of contents validated my premonition. I turned to the penultimate section: Wilderness.

Mirroring Jake’s comment way back in 1949, Leopold wrote:

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. Invasions can be arrested or modified in a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, or for science, or for wildlife, but the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.

Leopold’s definition of wilderness, “the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization,” is… problematic. His anecdotes like “No living man will see again the long-grass prairie, where a sea of prairie flowers lapped at the stirrups of the pioneer” erase thousands of years of human history before said pioneer.

Yet beneath these simplifications, his words prompted some deep emotional resonance. Wilderness “in the full sense of the word” does strike at a chord of truth. The frontier is closed. I will never see the long-grass prairie. In my lifetime, the cities of the Front Range will only grow their skylines taller and spread their footprints wider.

Leopold’s land ethic says “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” So while Jake may not have been correct per se that this was as wild as it will ever be in Boulder, he was correct in some spiritual sense. If believing there is a difference between a timbered National Forest and a tract of old-growth Wilderness trees makes me guilty of buying into the idea of a mythical wilderness, then send me to jail. I’d rather be right to Leopold than to Cronon.

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• Sit on my front porch in a foldable chair in the sun and look at clouds. No music, no books—chatting with friends or roommates in person preferred, on the phone allowed.

• Make a dent in the growing pile of books on my bedside table.

• Write letters to some friends and family.

• Learn how to sew buttons back onto shirts.

• Go rock climbing.

• Write more in my personal journal.

• Write more blog posts.

• Design stupid stickers related to niche inside jokes and mail them to my friends with no context.

• Become a regular at the coffee shop near my house.

• Play more board games.

Physical activity, community, and thinking. A concise summary of the good life. Notably, these things are all free, or close to it.

This exercise reminded me of an essay that my social studies teacher in high school shared with the students in his AP Government and Politics class: David Brooks’ The Haimish Line.

Haimish, as defined by Brooks, is “a Yiddish word that suggests warmth, domesticity and unpretentious conviviality.” His essay proposes the existence of an “invisible Haimish Line.” As people get richer, they tend to spend their new wealth on more privacy, bigger spaces, and luxury at the cost of that which is Haimish; thus, “You’ll find multiple generations at a Comfort Inn breakfast area, and people are likely to exchange pleasantries over the waffle machine. At a four-star hotel’s breakfast dining room, people are quietly answering e-mail on their phones.”

Haimish is the difference between your favorite dingy dive bar and a craft cocktail lounge. Put in a context my friends would understand, it’s storm-chasing at a rustic motel near Wolf Creek drinking PBRs instead of a glitzy weekend of après-ski espresso martinis in Vail. You’re drawn to choosing the objectively “worse” experience because there’s something ineffable to it that makes it more… haimish.

I often wondered why my teacher had shared this essay in an AP Government and Politics class. It caught my interest, sure enough, considering I’m sitting here writing about it a decade (!) later. But how did it relate to the objectives of the class... at all?

It didn’t. The essay does not relate to the College Board’s curriculum. It had nothing to do with structures and functions of the U.S. government, the political behavior of its citizens, and the legal principles that shape American politics. Rater, it related to my teacher’s goal of nurturing thoughtful students, and I’m thankful that he had the chutzpah to prioritize that over the top-down pressures of pedagogical optimization.

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We all walk on a hedonic treadmill, and at first glance this is both a blessing and a curse.

The blessing: people are resilient and can return to a happiness set point quickly, even after big negative shocks.

The curse: improvements in material well-being rarely translate into more happiness because your expectations and desires rise commensurate with your material gains.

Brooks again:

People are often bad at knowing how to spend their money — I’ve been at least as bad as everybody else in this regard. Lottery winners, for example, barely benefit from their new fortunes. When we get some extra income, we spend it on privacy, space and refinement. This has some obvious benefits: let’s not forget the nights at the Comfort Inn when we were trying to fall asleep while lacrosse teams partied in the hallways and the rooms next door. But suddenly we look around and we’re on the wrong side of the Haimish Line.

Perhaps the supposed downside of the hedonic treadmill is really another benefit. You don’t need to spend lots of money to be happy because you can’t spend lots of money to be happy. Remember my list above.

I’m already seeing myself and my friends drifting toward the other side of the Line. After a ski weekend in Steamboat last winter, having crammed ten people into a three bedroom Airbnb, a few of us swore we were done: no more bed-sharing; no more gear taking up so much space you can’t walk without knocking over skis and falling over duffels; no more competing to cook in chaotic conditions.

So, yes, I may spring for my own bed for next January’s trip. But if and when I do, I’ll be sure to pull out my lifestyle compass to do a bit of hedonic orienteering. Something warm is lost when your crew isn’t all together, forced into the same common space by necessity even at the cost of sleep and some sanity.

Stay south of the Haimish Line, friends.

Photos by Andrew Pinkham.

A young boy enters the room and sees the wooden metropolis. He approaches the girls and spends a moment examining their tower. He walks around the construction, glances at the girls, then snatches a block from the foundation.

The tower collapses.

The girls cry.

The boy watches them, smiling.

Creation takes time, effort, cohesion. Expertise. It requires competence. It needs the building of consensus. Things have to function properly for a creative act to be successful; creation is fragile. You can’t build things alone; you must work together in an act of cooperation.

The act of destruction is far easier than the act of creation. It requires less care. A path of unilaterality is not only possible, but often preferred. The removal of any element, no matter how small, can break a functioning system.

Masonry arches are held together by the forces of gravity: wedge-shaped stones, called voussoir, stacked on top of each other distribute forces down and out into the abutments of the arch. At the apex of the arch, the keystone locks all of the other pieces together in a cohesive system. The removal of a any single voussoir will cause an arch to buckle inward and collapse. Cessation of function is the point of destruction.

Both creation and destruction are an exercise of power. The asymmetry of effort required in each of these acts means that those who lack competence or a positive vision for the future, who nevertheless love the exercise of power, will necessarily demolish more than they create.

This asymmetry exists in epistemology as well: as said in Brandolini’s Law, “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” I know this fact from my own experience. Our political moment is rife with this reality.

It feels like we are fighting an uphill battle to make the world a better place, and I only hope that capability, passion, and desire to build can outweigh the desire to destroy, despite the asymmetry.

I have worked in clean energy for my entire career because I believe in the power of new technology and the scalability of capitalism to make our world healthier, richer, and, yes, more sustainable. I have a positive vision of a bright future, but that vision is now darkened by clouds of destruction.

Beyond the naked self-enrichment in the ill-named Big Beautiful Bill, it reads as full of policy with an intent to annihilate. The ideology behind it seems to lack a constructive vision for what a good world looks like, instead recalling idealisms of a false past. It is an ideology of, beyond all else, scarcity. It is completely zero-sum.

The world is not zero-sum. Some have known this since at least antiquity. I write these words with a small silver Roman denarius sitting on my desk next to me. The weathered face of Marcus Aurelius, stamped in the silver nearly two thousand years ago, looks at me, and I can almost hear him saying the words from his Meditations:

Have I done something for the common good? Then I too have benefited. Have this thought always ready to hand: and no stopping.

https://5calls.org/

Title image: Arch of Marcus Aurelius, Tripoli, Libya

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I wrote this in 2024 in the weeks following Rafael Nadal’s retirement. The 2025 French Open—the first one without Rafa—stirred up a lot of the same emotions I felt when I first wrote this piece. Those feelings were accentuated in the masterpiece final between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, who are quickly establishing themselves as the new faces of the game, showing shades of the Nadal-Federer rivalry. Big thanks to Michael for being kind enough to feature this on the blog.

Also, you have to believe me when I say I wrote this without having read the David Foster Wallace piece, Roger Federer as Religious Experience. Seriously. It was only after I shared this with a few friends that I learned about it and it left me feeling kind of silly; He talks about some of the same things, and then some, much more eloquently, obviously. Do yourself a favor–as I wish I had done–and read it at your earliest convenience.

In his book The Anatomy of Story, screenwriter John Truby lays out the characteristics of a compelling relationship between a hero and their opponent. Though they might have different motivations, means, or abilities, opposing characters compete for the same goal, and a story arises through their conflict. The opponent is the most effective means of defining the hero; we learn about the hero through how they interact with and react to the opponent. The more compelling the opponent, the more we learn about the hero, and the better the story is. Truby says:

Michael Tucker, whose YouTube Channel, “Lessons from the Screenplay” I really enjoy, takes this idea and maps it onto Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. The story revolves around Batman, the Joker, and the battle for their shared goal, the “Soul of Gotham City.”

Midway through the movie, the Joker finds himself in an interrogation room with Batman, who is trying to beat information on the whereabouts of two hostages out of him. After receiving a few brutal blows to the head, the Joker delivers a withering line through laughter: “You have nothing to threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength.” As Tucker explains, the Joker is exploiting Batman’s moral code of refusing to kill, thereby nullifying Batman’s power of intimidation. Batman could easily end the Joker’s reign of terror by killing him, but he can’t bring himself to do it. It’s a great demonstration of Truby’s rule. The targeted and specific attacks on Batman’s weaknesses push the limit of his resolve and force him to change as a character in order to win the battle for Gotham’s soul. The climax of the movie has a few hundred lives at stake–there is no doomsday weapon that will destroy the entire city–but it’s much more engaging than your average superhero movie when put into the context of the actions and motivations of the characters that have pushed the plot to that point.

I grew up watching a lot of tennis. My mom, who has played all her life, ensured that the TV was tuned to the later rounds of every grand slam. We were up late watching the US Open, up early for Wimbledon and the French, and sometimes up in the middle of the night for the Australian Open (or at least watching the replay the next day). My brother, dad, and I didn’t have a say in the matter; if a tournament was on, we would be watching. Men’s, women’s, singles, doubles—it made no difference.

This was in the mid 2000s. We had the privilege of watching Serena Williams dominate a sport in a way that we may never see again. We watched the Bryan brothers showcase their twin telepathy on the doubles court. And on the men’s side, we breathlessly watched one of the greatest sports rivalries ever unfold between Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal.

Each held the record for most men’s grand slam titles at one time. Each ended the other’s record-breaking winstreak on their respective best surfaces. Tournament after tournament, these two were on a collision course from opposite sides of the bracket. Occasionally, a challenger would pull off an upset and prevent the two from meeting. Occasionally. Together, they won 11 consecutive majors, from the 2005 French Open to the 2007 US Open, and six consecutive majors on two other occasions. Through the course of their careers, they played forty matches against each other, with many of their battles hung in the annals of tennis history. Their 5-set showdown in the 2008 Wimbledon final is regarded by many to be the greatest tennis match of all time.

I’ve recently picked tennis back up after years of not playing. Naturally, I’ve been spending a lot of time watching pro highlights, lessons, and swing analysis videos. But I find myself returning to old footage of those head-to-head clashes of Federer and Nadal. Watching them play is hypnotic [Editors note: watch the video above]. Their styles complemented each other so well: a showdown between artist and warrior. Cursed—or blessed—to be contemporaries, each would have been the best player in the world by a wide margin and would have racked up countless more titles if not for the other.

Federer was the embodiment of a graceful player. Boasting a flawless compact forehand, a pretty one-handed backhand, and incredible feel at the net, he could easily control the pace of play against his opponents. He possessed an incredible ball striking ability and computer-like shot selection. He moved around the court effortlessly with no wasted movements, always seeming to be in the perfect place at the right time. He made it look easy. His flat and penetrating groundstrokes found their marks with sharpshooter precision, lending his game well to faster surfaces like hardcourts and grass. He holds the record of eight Wimbledon titles and a joint-record of five US Open titles. As a clean-shaven Swiss guy who dressed smart, his persona and game exuded elegance. He looked right at home in those Rolex ads.

Nadal dressed like a pirate, grunted loudly with every shot, and played like a wind-up toy that was wound too tightly. An aggressive behind-the-baseline lefty, he twisted his body like a pretzel to uncoil on the ball with astounding power. Whereas Federer made the game look easy, Nadal made it look like a grueling contest of brute force. He would rip winners out of thin air from defensive positions. His wicked forehand is regarded by many to be the best in the history of the game. The whiplike movements of his wrists and arms generated enormous topspin on his groundstrokes, which caused the ball to sink and kick high into the air off the bounce. Tennis researcher John Yandell has analyzed the spin rates of tennis balls hit at full force by several of the game’s top players. Most of the players he’s measured generated spin rates between 2,000 to 3,000 rpm. He’s clocked Nadal forehands as high as 4,900 rpm. Such spin-drenched shots forced his opponents to play deeper and hit weaker shots from above their preferred “strike zone”, at which point Nadal would capitalize and run them ragged around the court. His style of play was tailor-made for slower, more spin-sensitive clay courts, earning him the moniker of “King of Clay.” 14 of his 22 grand slam titles were won at the French Open, the only grand slam to be played on the surface.

Federer’s one-handed backhand was a bit of an oddity. It was an elegant shot—his down-the-line passing backhand is my favorite shot in all of tennis—but the one-handed backhand is not favored at the highest level of the game today. About 80% of pros use a two-handed backhand for its superior stability and control. To the extent that Federer had a weakness in his game, it was his high backhand. Due to the mechanics of a one-handed swing, it was more difficult for him to get on top of high balls and hit with the same drive as if he was hitting them at chest-level or below. Balls above his strike zone forced him to play softer, loftier shots or a shallow slice, creating offensive openings for his opponents. Often, he would even step around the ball to hit his stronger forehand, opening up much more of the court for opponents to hit winners into.

As a left-handed player, Nadal’s best shot—his topspin-heavy crosscourt forehand, one of the best shots ever of its kind—naturally targeted Federer’s weakest shot. He would send looping balls to Federer’s high backhand over and over and over again, waiting for a weak shot to punish. And it was a strategy that worked extremely well. On clay, where his forehand was most potent, Nadal boasted an astonishing 14-2 record against Federer.

They were a Trubian pair, plucked out of fiction. Nadal was the perfect opponent for Federer—It's what made watching them so compelling. Federer, regarded as the more well-rounded player, dictated the pace of play against other opponents, but Nadal constantly kept him on the defensive by repeatedly hammering the ball to his Achilles Heel. Nadal’s vicious groundstrokes reached corners of the court that his opponents couldn’t, but Federer’s uncanny positioning and movement were the best retort the game had to offer. They were great foils, showing how different the game could look at the top level. Ultimately, Nadal had the edge on their head-to-head record, having won 24 of their 40 matches, but Federer maintained a winning record on grass and hardcourt.

What is perhaps most surprising about their rivalry is the deep level of respect they have for one another. Though they traded minor slights early in their rivalry, the majority of their time as contemporaries was characterized by reverence and even friendship—far from the acrimony that might be expected from generational rivals. They both seemed acutely aware that their legacies were inextricably linked, and embraced the rivalry as something that was larger than either one of them, all to the benefit of the game. They leveraged their rivalry to put on numerous charity matches, and seemed to have a good time together off the court. They shared the doubles court for the last match of Federer’s career at the 2022 Laver Cup, which came with its fair share of misty eyes from both of them.

It’d be a disservice not to mention Novak Djokovic while talking about Federer and Nadal. Coincidentally nicknamed “The Djoker,” he emerged onto the scene a few years later, around 2010, officially ushering in the “Big Three” era. It took him a few years to start his ascendency in earnest, but the heights he has reached as a player and his sustained dominance are resolute. There is no weak part of his game: he wins because he’s technically better than his opponents in every facet of the game. He’s the supervillain doomsday weapon, and he has all the accolades to show for it. He’s gone on to surpass both Federer and Nadal for the outright record of men’s slam titles, establishing himself as the game’s greatest player pretty uncontroversially.

He has his share of classic matches against Federer, Nadal, and others, but I can’t help but find it sort of dull. He has incredible physical ability and superhuman talent, which can and should be appreciated, but there isn’t the same flicker of magic of the Federer-Nadal rivalry. He is beyond fiction.

In a heartwarming letter to Nadal commemorating his retirement in late 2024, Federer said, “You challenged me in ways no one else could.” He credited Nadal for making him reimagine his game, going as far as changing his racket head size in an attempt to gain an edge. Federer closed the message by saying, “And you know what, Rafa, you made me enjoy the game even more.” I think he was speaking for us all there.

A pancake in the morning feels indulgent—something to do on a lazy Saturday. I can understand an occasional breakfast-for-dinner pancake, perhaps coupled with some eggs and hashbrowns. I love some butter and syrup. Throw some fruit in there? Sure.

Ross seemed keen on pancakes at any time, though, and especially in the afternoon. Eventually, I realized that Ross was frying up a cake seemingly every day.

I had to confirm. One day, I confronted him in the kitchen. “Hey man… What’s the deal with the pancakes?”

He responded, almost laconically, “Daily cake,” and proceeded to flip his pancake.

Ross does indeed make a pancake every day. Sometimes it’s a well-earned post ride snack. Other times, a midday pick-me-up. This guy eats a lot of pancakes—our house could be an IHOP with this kind of throughput.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ross has refined a thorough system. He always uses Kodiak Cake mix. He prepares the batter in an aluminum cup, first cracking an egg and adding water before putting in the batter. This ordering, allegedly, keeps the batter from sticking to the sides of the cup. Some days, the cake is of modest size; other days demand a cake the size of the pan. He’s particular about his toppings:

Topping variations aside, the Daily Cake itself is a consistent, comforting routine—not only to Ross, but also to me.

I’m not sure why the constancy of this cake grabbed my attention, but I’ve found myself thinking about it in the abstract on more than one occasion. I’ve brought it up to friends (“Did you know Ross makes a pancake every day?”) and queried them, trying to extract some kind of meaning from this ritual. “He probably just likes pancakes,” they say, reasonably. But I’m sure there’s something else there. Is it just a habit? Hobby? Addiction?

After some more consideration, I think I’ve got it. Despite his many reps, things still go wrong. Sometimes, the flip doesn’t go as planned, the batter is the wrong consistency, or a careless stretch of inattention leads to a charred cake. This isn’t a pursuit of perfection, as I once presumed. It’s an acknowledgement of the impossibility of it.

I’m guilty of a certain degree of perfectionism. The Daily Cake reminds me of its futility and the importance of not only accepting imperfection, but embracing it. Things will go wrong. That is okay. You can still eat your daily cake, and it will make your day that much better. With that said, Ross, I hope your next pancake flip is clean and produces a flawless flapjack.

As I’ve (probably over-)promoted on this platform, I hosted a 50k ultramarathon out of my backyard called Slos. Against all good sense, I plastered my address all over the internet and invited all who would come to join me and my friends in a senseless, masochistic endeavor: to run 6.75-mile laps of Mount Sanitas from my house, five times (or so).

The first racer opened my gate at 6:25am as I was finishing setting up the aid station. Brendan had somehow heard about the race online and had flown in from Virginia, solo, to join us in our Sisyphean effort that day. Minutes later, friends and strangers alike began to stream into my yard in greater numbers. By the time my co-host Jack and I delivered our pre-race meeting to review the course and the rules (there were no rules beyond “please don’t say this is a race to any park rangers, please don’t sue us for getting hurt doing this stupid event, please have fun”) at 7am, we had thirty racers assembled.

With our speech delivered, the race began. The group thinned out as we made our way through my neighborhood to the trailhead. The south ridge of Mount Sanitas is an absolute slog uphill, gaining 1,110 feet of elevation in just a mile, and so everyone was ultrarunning this section—and by ultrarunning, of course, I mean hiking.

We threaded our way through throngs of hikers enjoying the beautiful spring morning to summit in good time. The smooth run down Lions Lair trail off the backside of the mountain felt easy and fun. I’ve heard it said that when you’re running an ultra, if you feel bad, eat something; if you feel good, slow down. At least I remembered the first half of the adage that day…

Back at the house, my roommates were graciously setting up tents, drinks, and snacks. By lap two, our Chief Party Officers were playing music, drinking beers, and cooking quesadillas for the runners as additional waves of single-lappers joined the race. Runners starting and ending laps intersected at the base of the mountain, exchanging cheers and high-fives. I got to talk to almost everyone who participated, whether on the trail or at the aid station, meeting new people, discovering hidden connections, and shooting the shit with good friends.

A bit after lunch, our DJ finished his single lap and started his set. The party at the aid station was in full swing, more single-lappers were arriving, and the unrelenting sun was getting HOT.

At the end of the third lap, I realized my low volume of training (i.e., not training) was going to prevent me from completing the prescribed five laps, but after a lengthy hang at the aid station I departed for a fourth and final lap. I’d never run more than twenty miles in one go and hadn’t run more than a half marathon or so all year. Even still, I managed to crawl down Lions Lair back to the house to complete a fourth lap in time to learn how to mix songs with our DJ, eat a whole package of Oreos, and dominate in Mario Kart Double Dash on a TV set up in the backyard.

Tons of folks made it three or four laps, but only four brave souls persevered through the heat and finished the entire race’s five laps: in order of finishing, Shay, Kate, Luke, and Kyra. As promised, there was no prize for first.

The party continued through the afternoon and into the evening, well after Kyra crossed the finish line and we sprayed the finishers with champagne. All day, I watched as people exchanged phone numbers and made plans for future activities. I was invited to a weekly gravel ride. I heard new friends planning a ski attempt of a 14er later in the week. Community!!!

Anthropologists have defined culture in a million ways, but I prefer Geertz’s focus on a search for meaning. Yes, culture is about behavior, how you dress, what you eat, how you speak. But ultimately these things inform what is important to a people. Their beliefs and their values. The why of their lives.

I live in a chosen culture. I’ve written a lot about Boulder and its absurdities, but Slos race day made clear that despite valid complaints, there is something special here. This kind of culture is different from one you’re born into by nature of where you live, or your ethnicity, or your religion. While less foundational than one of these capital-C Cultures, this chosen culture is no less central to my life. This culture is one of athletes, one of people who love and want to protect the land they live on and the public lands they own, and people who enjoy self-imposed tribulations. Above all, it is a culture that values experience.

And so, sitting under a tent back at the house, alternating between cups of Gatorade and cans of Montucky Cold Snacks, I felt like Geertz’s spider. If culture is a web, then Jack and I got to sit at the center of it last week. Telarian, we spun silky threads that connected a group of people, at least for a day.

Our record-keeping was poor, but I believe we convinced between 40-60 people to run at least a lap of Mount Sanitas that day. Our whiteboard counted 105 laps, for 710 miles and 724,000 thousand vertical feet. These dozens of people, from around the Front Range and as far away as North Carolina and Virginia, for some reason chose to spend their day in pursuit of such a pointless and hard thing. They exercised their free will in such a way to create meaning out of something that is meaningless. They created culture.

I’m happy to have played a role in facilitating this day. For those who couldn’t join… we’ll see you next year!

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Photos courtesy of the talented and generous @cocotakesphoto. Thanks so much!

Hello everyone,

In just a few short days, Boulder’s premiere backyard ultramarathon, Slos, will kick off from my backyard. Despite La Sportiva’s best efforts to steal our thunder, we are determined to make this race a success. Also, congrats to all of the racers who are now subscribers to my blog! I tried sending out a mass email but it went to people’s spam, so this distribution method is what we’re going with (This whole event was just a ploy to get more email addresses).

I won’t be sending out another email here unless a major logistical issue crops up, but feel free to check the website or instagram @slos.run for updates up to race day.

Same mountain. Different lap. You’ve all been waiting, but the time is finally here: Several Laps of Sanitas.

Race Day Logistics

Date: May 3, 2025

Starting Line/Aid Station/Finish Line: My house

Time: For those running the entire race, the starting gun will be going off at 7am sharp. I will be trying to get ahold of a starting gun, yes. For those not running the full 50k, a second wave of racers & the full party cookout will get started at 11am.

Just to reiterate: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO RUN THE FULL RACE. You don’t have to do anything. Why are you even thinking about coming? I don’t even know if I’m going to be able to run the full race. Lots of people will just be hanging or doing a lap or two.

Map: See link to a map here. Also shown below:

Directions: Starting in my backyard, racers will run through the Dewey westbound alley to the Mount Sanitas trailhead, follow the Mount Sanitas trail up the south ridge to the summit, descend Lions Lair and Sunshine Canyon back to my house via the first alley you intersect heading northbound on 4th street, and repeat, five times. Or fewer. It doesn’t really matter. You have to touch the fence for a lap to count.

Prizes: Not necessarily for first place, but definitely for the last finisher. There are going to be some stickers. We have a sock sponsor, Dust, who has provided free pairs of socks for the first dozen finishers. Thank you Dust!

Aid Station Food & Beverages: We will be providing unlimited water and some assorted snacks and hydration mixes at the aid station. With that said, we encourage runners to bring their own preferred specialist foods like gels/drink mixes/etc. to ensure you’re properly fueled. Donations of food/snacks/drinks and/or cash to help fund the aid station & merch fund would be greatly appreciated. @michaelbatemanii via Venmo or reach out for other means, with "Slos" as the subject.

I’ve run a combined total of roughly 50 kilometers in the entire month of April, so you could say that I’m really going into this with a high level of preparation. I heard there’s going to be a DJ. Special thanks again to Jack Barker and Taylor Woolley for making this thing happen. We are excited to run, eat, drink, and be merry with you all.

The second I’m in the backcountry, all concerns about the healthiness of food—the ingredients, how it’s prepared and where it comes from, the amount of sugar in it, how natural or organic or ‘whole’ it might be—disappear faster than a handful of chocolate covered espresso beans proffered on a skin track. I devour Red 40, added sugars, and high fructose corn syrup with glee. The only concern I have is “how many calories are in this, and where are the next calories coming from?”

I’m friends with some talented athletes. Some of them—the Skratch Labs and LMNT-powder drinking, GU and Maurten-gel eating hardos—keep up with the latest in high-performance athlete food technology. Though I’ve bought plenty of packs of the stuff, I’m not wholly convinced that the difference in marketing form is matched by a difference in performance substance as compared to the cheaper gas station fuel alternatives.

In my everyday life, I have a boring diet. I eat large meals of mostly plants and grains. No meat, sometimes fish at restaurants. I don’t really eat snacks beyond bowls of yogurt and protein bars. I don’t eat any frozen food, aside from the occasional frozen pizza on Dungeons and Dragons nights. If I go to the grocery store hungry, I buy the same stuff as if I go when I’m full.

I have some sinus problems that make it hard for me to taste and smell, which probably plays into the absence of desire around stereotypically “bad” food. I also have internalized a certain degree of health-related discipline and corresponding shame—I do care a lot about the condition of my body, and believe that your diet equals your wellness. I guess I’d say my body is a temple.

But on a long run, or a multi-pitch climb, or a big backcountry ski, my body is not a temple. I ate a whole box of Welch’s Fruit Snacks by myself on a recent hard ski day. I drank a half-gallon of chocolate milk after running a half marathon last month. My body is not a temple. It is a machine. It is a furnace, burning hot enough to run off of anything. It is a garbage incinerator. At least, that’s what I tell myself when I pull up to the gas station to fill up my car with gas and my backpack with snacks.

Last weekend I was supposed to ski the Grand Traverse, a 37 mile backcountry ski race from Crested Butte to Aspen. It was cancelled due to unseasonably warm temperatures melting out the snow bridges over river crossings, lack of snow on the trail, and general snow instability. The inspiration for this quick note was my plan to dump roughly three-thousand calories of peanut M&Ms directly into one of my pockets for quick access throughout the race. Though I didn’t get to ski the GT, I did share my peanut M&Ms with friends driving back from Arapahoe Basin yesterday. Happy April!

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As I inspect the snow in more detail, and invest more effort in learning about snow science, I find myself seeing more in the snow. Perhaps it’s the whiteness of the snow bringing to mind a blank canvas, but lately I’ve found myself thinking of my friend from college, Mary Royall, and her art while skiing.

Mary Royall, “a contemporary artist, light chaser, and color enthusiast based in Brooklyn, NY,” has written about a practice she calls “light foraging” where she paints the imprints of light and shadow from trees and then takes them back to her studio to “explore the shape of the light.” Mary Royall has been fighting chronic pain issues for some time and was recently diagnosed with Lyme disease. Upon this diagnosis, she wrote:

In the winter, the leaves have been thinner and the light has been more sparse, but it’s still there. Looking at the light, and bringing it to life on canvas, I’ve realized that it looks exactly like my pain. They are one in the same — organic, sometimes spidery and scarce, sometimes round and whole.

The shape of the light is the shape of pain and joy and fear and love, and all the messy in between things.

Mary Royall is a documentarian of light. To date, she has fixated on the glow of sunlight through the leaves of a tree, or the shadow cast by a windowpane at sunrise, or the reflections of a beam of light through a jug of water. If her muse ever runs dry, though, I think she should look to snow.

The interplay of snow and light is not only of utmost practical importance to the enjoyment and safety of the backcountry skier; learning to understand the snow is like learning to read. There are stories written in every corniced ridgeline and undulating powderfield. Nature hides meaning in leeward drifts, natural slide paths, and sugary facets. These stories are tales of weather, of time, and of movement. Acquiring the literacy to read these stories unlocks not only power, but also new layers of beauty.

Over this past winter, I’ve been conducting my own light foraging every time I’ve gone out skiing. I’ve focused my attention on the snow, its color and shape, the interplay of dark shadow and blinding light and wind and rock and sky. I’m not just saying this for a blog post—I’ve truly had moments where I’ve stopped mid-run and taken my goggles off to absorb everything I could about what I was seeing in the snow.

I absorbed how crystalline powder glitters like diamonds under a bluebird sky:

I observed the albedous glow of moonlit snow illuminating the night as well as any lantern:

I saw jagged alpine rock contrast with the pure white of corniced snow on a ridgeline. I noticed how shadows cast by the overhanging ice, the rock, and deposits of wind-drifted snow paint lines on the massive canvas of the mountain just as granules of ice carve miniscule sculptures across sastrugied snowfields.

A primary motivation for my time spent in the mountains is in experiencing the sublime. Viewing Mary Royall’s art has helped me articulate a new way to experience the false mundanity of a gust of wind throwing snow into my face, clouds passing over the sun, and purple alpenglow kissing a ridgeline. There is information and meaning in each of these unassuming occurrences—it’s up to you to find it.

For more beautiful photography from my friends, and thoughts on dryness rather than snow, see this post:

Yeah, I'm losing my edge.
I'm losing my edge.
The kids are coming up from behind.
I'm losing my edge.
I'm losing my edge to the kids from France and from London.
But I was there!

I knew an alarm would blare just a few hours later at 5am to kick start an early ski day. Yet I couldn’t stop the lyrics running through my mind. So for the next hour or so, I thought about how I was there.

I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids.
I played it at CBGB's.
Everybody thought I was crazy.
We all know.
I was there.
I was there.
I've never been wrong.

I’m about to be 28. I read Doing Good Better by William MacAskill when the Centre for Effective Altruism was sending out free copies of the book in 2016. I browsed the Silk Road on the dark web in high school. My reddit account is as old as I was when I discovered the site. I fretted over existential AI risks in college dorm rooms in 2015 and 2016. I was there!

I used to work in the record store.
I had everything before anyone.

But I'm losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent.
And they're actually really, really nice.

I saw Bitcoins selling for $7 a pop. I subscribed to /r/WallStreetBets years before the pandemic. I have a collection of all the best Gwern posts from 2015 to 2020. I listened, in the spring of 2017, to a reading of Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person by Scott Alexander in my college literary and debating society. In an interview for a college scholarship, I said that if I could have dinner with anyone alive, it would be Elon Musk (that was 2014, well before he lost his mind). But I was there. I was there!

I'm losing my edge to the kids whose footsteps I hear when they get on the decks.
I'm losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978.
I'm losing my edge.

To all the kids in Tokyo and Berlin.
I'm losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties.

I'm losing my edge, but I was there.
I was there.
But I was there.

I’m still discovering great new music. But my intellectual milieu, though the quantity of interesting content coming at me every day via blogs, podcasts, substacks, book recommendations, linkposts, twitter, and forwarded emails from friends is almost overwhelming, it all feels like… it feels like I’m losing my edge.

Perhaps this is getting older. Maybe I’m becoming set in my ways. Plasticity is decreasing. But the people I’m reading and listening to, for the most part, feel established, or that they fit into an existing establishment.

If my media diet was a house party, until recently I felt like I was stumbling into weird conversations and meeting interesting new people in every room I entered. Learning about crypto or Effective Altruism in the 2010s felt like doing some consciousness-expanding drugs for the first time. My understanding of the world changed after every party.

Now, when I arrive at the party, it’s with the knowledge of where all of the cliques and subgroups like to hang out. It feels like an explored space, albeit interesting. Dwarkesh is interviewing everyone who walks through the front door. The abundance liberals, wearing “I’m with Ezra” t-shirts, argue about permitting with centrist Democrats in the living room. A group of Lesswrongers eagerly writes blog posts around the kitchen island. An Effective Altruist is giving way too much conversational space to a Thiel fellow, doing his best to ignore the Democratic Socialist pulling at his sleeve asking about systemic political solutions. The crypto guys are doing whippets in the walk-in closet. Tyler Cowen is roaming, making oblique comments that could be references to anyone or no one at the party, refusing to explain himself. The party is still fun, but it’s… different.

I don’t want to stop growing and changing my mind. I don’t want to stagnate in the cognitive environment that feels comfortable to me. I don’t want to lose my edge.

I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.
I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.

I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know.

In early 2024, Vitalik Buterin published a blog post The end of my childhood:

One of the [event organizers] was the 21-year-old Nicole Sun, and a year earlier she had invited me to visit a hacker house in South Korea: a ~30-person gathering where, for the first time that I can recall, I was by a significant margin the oldest person in the room.

When I was as old as those hacker house residents are now, I remember lots of people lavishing me with praise for being one of these fancy young wunderkinds transforming the world like Zuckerberg and so on. I winced at this somewhat, both because I did not enjoy that kind of attention and because I did not understand why people had to translate "wonder kid" into German when it works perfectly fine in English. But watching all of these people go further than I did, younger than I did, made me clearly realize that if that was ever my role, it is no longer. I am now in some different kind of role, and it is time for the next generation to take up the mantle that used to be mine.

When VITALIK BUTERIN is saying that he too is losing his edge to the kids coming up from behind, where do you turn? Who do you read? What do you listen to? What blogs, websites, aggregators do you check?

I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody. Every great song by the Beach Boys. All the underground hits. All the Modern Lovers tracks. I heard you have a vinyl of every Niagra record on German import. I heard that you have a white label of every seminal Detroit techno hit - 1985, '86, '87. I heard that you have a CD compilation of every good '60s cut and another box set from the '70s.

I hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record.

What are the kids up to these days? Surely it’s not just AI, right? Where are the weird, boundary-pushing conversations happening? What is the new intellectual movement? What is outside of the Overton window of the people who popularized talking about the Overton window?

In case you missed it, the one place I’m not losing my edge is in hosting large, dumb social events. On May 3, 2025, I am hosting a 50k in Boulder, Colorado called Slos: Several Laps of Sanitas. You don’t have to do all of the laps—you don’t have to do any of the laps—and there is a party at the start line/aid station/finish line. See you there!

During one of those Sanitas seminars, between yapping about our latest deals at work and planning weekend adventures, we conceived of an idea. This idea was nothing novel. It represents no innovation or creativity. The only degree to which it was notable was how dumb it was. That was the point.

“What if we did an ultramarathon of nothing but laps of Mount Sanitas?”

Between the two of us, we figured we knew enough people committed to the bit, folks with questionable mental health, and/or hardos to convince a few others to join us in this conquest of the useless. And so, with the aid of the talented Taylor Woolley, it is my honor to introduce:

Slos, or Several Laps of Sanitas, is an 50k race in Boulder, Colorado. Starting in my backyard, racers will run to the Mount Sanitas trailhead, follow the Mount Sanitas trail up the south ridge to the summit, descend Lions Lair and Sunshine Canyon back to my house, and repeat, five times. Or fewer. It doesn’t really matter. You have to touch the fence for a lap to count.

My house will serve as the starting line, finish line, and aid station. People will be grilling in my backyard and drinking beers while we run, doing their best to tempt us away from finishing the prescribed 5 laps.

DATE/TIME
May 3rd, 2025 - 7:00 am

START/FINISH/AID STATION
Mapleton Hill, Boulder, CO

MAP

DISTANCE
1 Lap = 6.76 miles, 5 Laps = 33.8 miles

ELEVATION
1 Lap = 1,379 ft, 5 Laps = 6,895 ft

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

How do you pronounce “Slos”? ‘Slos’ rhymes with ‘boss.’

Is there a prize for winning? Maybe. Probably. Almost certainly there will be something for the person who travels the farthest to run with us. Seems like there should be an award for “best outfit.” Perhaps a “slowest finisher” award. No promises on anything.

Is there a cut-off time? Absolutely not. You can run all night if you want to.

Is there a mandatory gear list? You should probably wear shoes, but I understand some people swear by barefoot running.

Do I have to sign up? Please sign up here so we know how many people are showing up.

Do you have to run all five laps? No. You don’t have to do anything. Why are you even thinking about doing this “race”? You can join for five, one, none, or ten for all I care.

Is this a commercial event? No. This event is pure masochism—we will derive absolutely zero financial benefit.

Will there be merch? Maybe. Depends on how many people sign up and if there is interest. Taylor made some sweet art.

Will there be treats? Water, snacks, post-race beers, & vibes will be provided. With that said, donations of matériel are appreciated.

What if I have a question that isn’t covered here? Ask it in the comments. Send me an email. I’ll update the FAQ as needed.

Sign up here:

Slos.run

Race updates via the instagram @slos.run & via email once you sign up.

Remember that trying hard is good, actually. See you in May.