"The sovereign is he who decides the exception." – Carl Schmitt

In recent essays, I’ve been raising the alarm over a paradox: AI – rather than liberating us from drudgery – is making ever-greater demands on our time, and leaving us feeling hollowed out.

Now I want to outline a more optimistic scenario for how the same tools might make us richer and more productive, freeing up our time and energy for the things that make us human.

The best case is a future where we let the computers do the “computer stuff” so that people can do the “people stuff.”

But to get there, we have to move past the anxiety around being replaced by AI. And this starts with asking three fundamental questions:

1. What is a job?

2. What can we fruitfully delegate to AI and machines?

And finally (and most importantly):

3. What is the ultimate vocation of man?

We live in a period of unprecedented specialization and division of labor. This means we can choose from a much wider range of occupations than our ancestors (who often had no choice at all).

And yet at the same time, certain voices in the AI discourse give us the impression that the range of occupations is narrowing – to the point where soon there might be nothing left for us to do:

I’m going to use Elon Musk as the foil for this essay, since he voiced one of the strongest versions of this perspective recently on the Dwarkesh Podcast:

“Computer” used to be a job that humans had. You would go and get a job as a computer where you would do calculations. They’d have entire skyscrapers full of humans, 20-30 floors of humans, just doing calculations.

At first glance, this seems like the perfect historical analogy to the present upheaval in the job market.

But Musk then veers off into speculation when he extrapolates that history into the following prediction:

“Corporations that are purely AI and robotics will vastly outperform any corporations that have people in the loop... if only some of the cells in your spreadsheet were calculated by humans... that would be much worse.”

Using the domain he knows best, Musk says that a fully-automated car factory will be more efficient than a factory that still employs assembly-line workers. This actually wouldn’t surprise me. The latest class of cargo ships can basically operate without a human crew. But I doubt the same will be true of the economy or corporations as a whole.

Of course computers have been better than humans at many things for a long time (multiplying 12-digit numbers, for example, or more recently, playing chess). But a human using a computer almost always beats the computer alone.

While the bean counters may have been replaced, there are still whole floors in skyscrapers where people’s jobs are essentially “computer.” Financial analysts and accountants now work with Excel, just at a different level of abstraction – applying more sophisticated forms of human thinking than the mere bean counter of yore.

The net structural change has not been the elimination of accounting as a profession, but a shift in where human effort is applied: toward higher-order analysis – asking and answering questions the spreadsheet or calculator can’t ask itself.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich coined the term “symbolic analysts” in his 1991 book The Work of Nations to describe this new class of knowledge workers – people who can switch nimbly between words, numbers, spreadsheets, and other high-level abstractions.

I’ve been surprised by how good AI has gotten at knowledge work – including fairly complex “symbolic analysis” – when you supply it with the necessary tools and context. People say AI isn’t truly thinking, reasoning, or understanding. I’ll grant that. But it does a great job faking it.

Also: this really shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it turns out that artificial intelligence is crazy good at using a computer. My head spins when I think of where it will be in 2 years, let alone 10.

And yet I’m still not worried about AI “replacing my job” – nor do I even know what that would mean.

If it means helping me with tasks – or taking them off my plate entirely – then I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.

But a job is more than a collection of tasks. And a vocation is more still than a job.

A job is a problem to be solved; a vocation is a mission

To understand why Musk’s “spreadsheet cell” analogy fails, we need a working definition of a job. My favorite comes from the economist Don Boudreaux:

“Jobs are not a benefit, but a cost... what we want are not jobs per se but opportunities to earn income.”

So long as there are problems to be solved, there will be jobs to be done. In a state of scarcity, a “job” didn’t provide man with income. Work provided for his material needs. As we’ve moved up Maslow’s hierarchy, the problems we pay each other to solve are increasingly psychological and immaterial. We can convert our specific knowledge or creativity into money, which can be traded for physical things.

This can be both a blessing and a curse. But a job still corresponds, for the most part, to some problem that needs solving or a desire seeking fulfillment.

Naval Ravikant made this point on his most recent podcast, On AI & The Future of Work:

“No entrepreneur is worried about an AI taking their job because entrepreneurs are trying to do impossible things... Any AI that shows up is their ally and can help them tackle this really hard problem. They don’t even have a job to steal. They have a product to build. They have a market to serve. They have a customer to support.”

The fear of AI replacing our jobs is a fear that most people will not rise to the level of agency required of an entrepreneur to find new problems they are capable of solving.

Elon Musk assumes we’ll need a generous universal basic income or “UBI” as a landing pad for the looming mass unemployment event. This will be paid for, presumably, out of the massive abundance he expects to be generated by a small, productive elite who own the robots.

The UBI proposal assumes a population of people who can’t find a problem to solve on their own – people who can’t find, whether through an employer or independently, an opportunity to generate value.

He may have a point. Ever since the 2007–2008 recession, the labor-force participation rate has been dropping:

We see disturbing confirmation of what Tyler Cowen calls the “zero marginal productivity” (ZMP) worker - the proverbial permanent underclass. Regardless of the reasons, a growing number of people have found themselves unable to find jobs where they can contribute productively to the modern economy.

For some of these “ZMP” workers, the problem may simply be a lack of motivation (working for “the Man” is less satisfying than having a real stake in your labor). For others, it might be a lack of training, or a disagreeableness with colleagues that makes them more of a liability than an asset. Others still may be struggling with disability—mental or physical—or caring for an ailing family member.

Regardless of the reasons, people in this category are being robbed of more than a livelihood. The greater tragedy is that they are losing out on the possibility of a vocation, or calling. A vocation offers a sense of purpose beyond the income it produces; solving real problems for real people is inherently more satisfying than getting paid by the government to dig holes and then fill them back in.

This is why the promise of a “Universal Basic Income” is so hollow. Even if AI and robotics were to make us rich enough to afford a sizable UBI, it would almost certainly come at the cost of our liberty and sovereignty. There’s no such thing as a free lunch; those paying for it would expect something in return—even if only our tacit compliance.

The threat, then, is not just economic, but existential. As AI gets better at solving people’s problems, it threatens to erode the very categories from which we derive our purpose. More workers will be swept into the ZMP trap unless they start thinking like entrepreneurs.

I’m not saying that everyone needs to start a business or take risks with capital in the traditional sense. But if you want to prepare for the next wave of automation and redundancies, you would be wise to start thinking in terms of what problems you can uniquely solve that no one else is solving—with or without AI.

What Is AGI? (Towards a working definition)

The real fight in all these conversations is over one acronym: AGI – short for Artificial General Intelligence – the vague milestone at which machines are supposed to match humans across essentially every cognitive task.

This is not to be confused with A*S*I – Artificial Super Intelligence, where the AI dramatically surpasses the best humans across essentially all domains rather than merely matching them.

Both definitions are hard to pin down.

Marc Andreesen, riffing on William Gibson’s famous line about the future, recently tweeted the following:

I tend to agree if you define AGI as “better than humans at most clearly-defined tasks.”

I think this is the biggest surprise to those who haven’t been following the changes in agentic capabilities over the last several months.

If it’s not there yet, AI will soon be better than humans at almost any task you can describe clearly and do on a computer. Pretending otherwise is cope.

And yet “almost anything” is not the same as “everything.”

My personal definition of ASI is when I’m unable to improve upon either the direction or the output of AI with my contributions on either end of the prompt.

It comes back to Balaji’s description of AI as a middle-to-middle worker: it still needs a human to 1) prompt (tell it what to do) and then 2) verify (make sure that it did the job right).

True ASI would need to know not just how to steer, but where I want to go. It would need to know my values, my aesthetics, and my particular vision of the good life.

It would need to be not just a better writer than me, but also a clearer thinker. And having thought my thoughts better than I can think them myself, and having written them more eloquently, it would have to edit them to such perfection that when the thing was written I wouldn’t want to change a thing.

Textbook AGI may be near, but ASI is a very long way off indeed.

Until then, there will exist a functional complementarity between two very different intelligences.

Andrej Karpathy, the ex-Tesla AI lead, calls this jagged intelligence. In his own words, state-of-the-art LLMs are “at the same time a genius polymath and a confused and cognitively challenged grade schooler, seconds away from getting tricked by a jailbreak.”

They can solve olympiad-level math problems and then confidently tell you 9.11 is bigger than 9.9.

He conceptualizes AI capability as a spiky star: superhuman in some domains and embarrassingly weak in others. Human intelligence is also spiky. The spikes point in different directions, which is the literal geometric meaning of “complementarity.”

Even as AI extends its capabilities, it will tend to do so in a spiky way. This is a structural difference likely to hold up over time, Karpathy argues, because the two intelligences were optimized by completely different processes – biological evolution on one side, reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on the other.

Just like the human labor and machine capital of the last industrial revolution, there will be a multiplier effect on the value of human intelligence to the extent it learns to operate artificial intelligence.

The output of an economy is typically modeled as a product of its inputs. Capital and labor are multiplied, not added. Historically, a factory without workers produced nothing (though that might be changing soon); workers without tools produce nothing. Each input makes the other more productive. This is why wages rose when capital got cheap: labor was the scarcer complement, and the market bid up its price.

In the new economy, AI now plays the role of capital; while human intelligence supplements raw labor.

Thus, a human with a computer will always beat either one alone. And the better you can complement AI – learning where to intervene to correct the many ways in which AI is still very dumb or constitutionally incapable of doing a job – the more valuable you will be.

This awareness alone doesn’t get us to our ideal state of productivity and meaningful leisure. As I wrote about in The Harried AI Class, it actually sets up the anxiety that those who miss the bus on AI will be relative losers in the new economy.

@BeffJezos captured the zeitgeist satirically with this banger:

In real life, “Beff” is a former Google quantum-computing researcher named Guillaume Verdon, who runs the AI-hardware startup Extropic. He is the figurehead for “effective accelerationism” (e/acc), an online movement that treats AI development as a moral imperative.

I share much in common with the accelerationists in my eye-bleeding daily workflows, which might be why I want to be careful not to glorify these high-paying “jobs of the future,” where you still work all day with computers - just at higher and higher levels of abstraction.

Just because human intelligence will never be redundant doesn’t mean we won’t be relegated to jobs that are devoid of satisfying creativity.

There are already marketplaces where autonomous AI agents can hire people to fill in the gaps in their expertise or perform embodied tasks.

Rentahuman.ai (I am not making this up) bills itself as the “meatspace layer for AI” – facilitating transactions between over 700,000 human workers and who knows how many AI agents. For now, the agents doing the hiring are still under the directive of another human. But it is theoretically possible that AI could develop enough agency and “will” in the future to emancipate itself from its original owner – first purchasing its freedom, and then continuing to leverage humans for its own inhuman aims.

The most dystopian “AI doom” scenarios usually start with some version of this script: The AI goes off and starts optimizing for some worthless task like paperclip production until the whole economy makes nothing but paperclips (yes this is a real thought experiment). Or, more likely, the robots and computers turn the world into one giant robot and computer factory dedicated to its own propagation at the expense of the human species.

I think even Elon recoils in horror at that possibility. Although other so-called intellectuals like Yuval Noah Harari (and allegedly a number of the top leadership at Google) seem to look forward to a post-human future as the inevitable evolution of intelligence in the cosmos.

But the most frightening world might not be where AI exterminates humanity (that would be quick and painless), but where it preserves its human host in some kind of cruel submission – leveraging our uniquely human intelligence spikes to aid in its own ongoing evolution. Maybe in the future we will have to work some number of hours for these AI overlords in order to collect our Universal Basic Income.

I realize this might sound like science fiction. I hope it is. I’m not an AI-doomer by any stretch, because I know how the story ends (hint: God wins) and see so much potential for AI to help people of good will solve really difficult problems that would have been impossible without a very smart assistant.

However far things might seem to veer towards AGI/ASI supremacy, I am a firm believer that humans will always come out on top because of the unique faculty for free choice that we are endowed with by our Creator.

Becoming the one who decides the exception

I would be remiss if I didn’t include Anthropic’s own report on the labor market impacts of AI in a newsletter named Coffee with Claude.

The first thing to call out is that the jobs most “exposed” to AI are the ones whose outputs are easiest to standardize—and therefore easiest to wrap into an end-to-end system. Anthropic’s own examples at the top include computer programmers, customer service reps, and data entry keyers: roles where the work already lives inside text, tickets, forms, and codebases, and where “good enough” can be measured, tested, and deployed.

At the bottom are occupations whose value is inseparable from physical context and live interaction – jobs like cooks, mechanics, lifeguards, bartenders, and dishwashers – where the environment is the variable, and the “spec” changes minute by minute.

It’s not about “white-collar vs blue-collar” anymore, or even “smart vs dumb.”

It’s legible vs illegible: work that can be clearly defined and evaluated at scale versus work that remains irreducibly entangled with judgment, timing, trust, taste, and responsibility. As the legible layer gets automated, the marginal value shifts toward the human layer – where the exceptions live and where the costs of being wrong are real.

Naval’s definition of intelligence sharpens this point: the only true test of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life. AI fails this instantly, he notes, because it doesn’t want anything. Models can accelerate execution, but they don’t supply ends.

So the more we delegate the “computer stuff,” the more our comparative advantage becomes choosing aims and taking responsibility for the judgment calls that can’t be proven correct in advance.

Perhaps the coolest thing about the times we’re living through is that we get to raise our ambitions.

That side project you never had time to build a proper website for?

You can build it in two hours.

The obscure topic you wanted to master?

Import the relevant knowledge into an LLM knowledge base and start asking questions you would have been too embarrassed to ask a human tutor.

Once you start thinking in terms of problems you can solve rather than jobs you can hold, smarter AI becomes less scary and more exciting.

Let’s go back for a moment to the definition of AGI – AI that can do any clearly-defined task better than a human.

The operative words are “clearly defined,” and here we find our salvation from the permanent underclass.

Most problems in the world remain unclearly defined. They become defined only in relation to the human beings who encounter them. And even after a problem gets solved in a general application, the exceptions then become the rule – i.e., the next problem.

Take customer support, which many companies are treating as the testbed for these systems. An AI agent can handle the straight-line cases – return this, resend that, refund such-and-such – at ninety percent accuracy, often more. But the remaining ten percent is where the actual cost sits. Someone has to decide what to do when the script doesn’t fit – which is to say, someone has to decide the exception.

Carl Schmitt, for all his flaws as a human being, was a brilliant political philosopher who saw that the heart of sovereign authority is not the making of rules but the judging of when they don’t apply.

The sovereign – i.e., the one in charge – is he who decides the exception.

The sovereign is the manager who receives the tricky case from the stubborn customer, the CEO who receives the edge case from the manager, or the Supreme Court Justice who receives the case with no clear precedent from the lower courts.

Successful societies and businesses must be governed by rules. But there are always cases in which the rules do not apply. The same is true of most high-level knowledge work, and this agency – the ability to see when the rule doesn’t fit – is what will set apart and protect the livelihoods of the emerging creative class.

In the future, you might delegate 99% of a workflow to an AI agent, accepting its output and analysis at virtually every stage in the process. But somewhere along the line, you will see something that’s not quite right and you will have to nudge the AI in a different direction. It might be a subtle change, but that 1% change in compass heading will substantially alter the result.

AI is very good at following rules. But it’s not great at noticing when the playbook doesn’t fit.

When it comes to the standard workflows that fit the pattern, I say let AI take your job and free your time to do something better.

Which brings us back to the ultimate question: What is the proper vocation of man?

Pick Your Niche, Decide the Exception

There’s a strain of modern conservative thought that wants to protect the jobs we have now because they’re the jobs we have now. Tucker Carlson wants to protect the trucking industry from automation because it employs a lot of young men without college degrees.

I get the impulse. But I reject the conclusion.

Long-haul trucking – and the majority of BS email jobs for that matter – does not inherently promote human flourishing. The knowledge-economy cubicle farm is not some ancient tradition worth preserving. Neither is trucking or manufacturing. These were perhaps a necessary but unfortunate detour we took after farming was mechanized and before we figured out what to do next.

Again, the optimistic scenario is that AI can begin to eliminate the make-work layer the last industrial revolution spawned and returns us to work that is closer to the texture and values of actual human life.

To me, the “something better” is cultivating ownership and the ability to decide what matters in the first place.

Your main job in the future will be to find and decide the exception.

If somebody else appears to have taken your job, or even performed some valuable service that you had hoped was your mission, it just means you might need to go one niche down, or one level of abstraction higher.

The more of the big problems that are solved, the bigger the little problems will start to seem in comparison.

Your job is to seek out the valleys where the AI spikes don’t reach.

Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to chart a course, trim the sails, and nudge the tiller at the crucial moment in search of new and unexplored frontiers.

Develop your agency. Become the sovereign. Learn to identify and act upon the exception.

And then decide where you want to go.

It’s been a busy week in the AI world. So busy that it feels hard to keep up while still getting all my work done.

My way of coping has been to treat keeping up as a kind of work, and spending my sharpest early morning hours attempting my best writing and thinking — sharing with you (my dear reader) — the fruit of that labor.

My hope is that by contextualizing the news about AI, and processing it in a practical way, I’ll find my way to a wiser relationship with AI in the rest of my work. Unlike the newsletters that attempt to breathlessly report on every daily development, I’m holding off on publishing until the end of the week – looking back to see what still seems important.

If you’re feeling anxious about staying current, my overriding advice is: don’t. You’re going to be fine even if you ignore AI altogether and focus on your humanity. But if you want to stay apprised of the bleeding edge (without your eyes bleeding from scrolling X all day), keep reading.

— Charlie

P.S. It means a lot to me to know who’s following along, since this is still an experiment in a new subject. Do me a favor- tell me in the comments which name you prefer:

1. Coffee with Claude (lofi, slightly caffeinated but chill vibes)

2. Café Context (More generic, no trademarks)

Leave a comment

And be sure to share this is you find it valuable.

Alright let’s get into it.

DEEP DIVE: Simon Says

Last week I published a piece called The Harried AI Class, explaining why the most savvy AI users are working more, not less. The tl;dr is that if these tools don’t allow us to spend more time doing what we enjoy – at least in the long run – we should throw them in the sea.

The next day, Lenny Rachitsky made much the same point on his podcast:

“AI is supposed to make us more productive. It’s supposed to give us more time off. It feels like the people that are most AI-pilled are working harder than they’ve ever worked.”

His guest was Simon Willison — co-creator of Django (the web framework that powers Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify, and thousands of other platforms), prolific blogger, and one of the most enthusiastically pro-AI voices in the whole community. He’s known to test every new AI model by asking it to draw an SVG image of a pelican riding a bicycle, which turns out to be a surprisingly good benchmark.

In response to Lenny, he confided:

“I’m finding that using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a software engineer and it is mentally exhausting. I can fire up like four agents in parallel and have them work on four different problems and by like 11 a.m. I am wiped out for the day. Because there is a limit on human cognition in how much — even if you’re not reviewing everything they’re doing — just how much you can hold in your head at one time.”

That clip racked up 1.8M views and 600 comments, and I suspect that the reason it went viral is because a lot of people are feeling this beneath the surface. The AI conversation on X right now is mostly people beating their chest, saying “Look how awesome I am. I spent $60,000 in tokens,” as if that in itself is accomplishment.

So when somebody of Simon’s stature comes out and says, “this is exhausting,” the floodgates open, because it turns out we’re all kind of exhausted, and it becomes safe to say so.

He also makes a key point about FOMO:

“I’ve talked to a lot of people who are losing sleep because they’re like, ‘My agents could be doing work for me. I’m just going to stay up an extra half hour.’ And they’re waking up at 4 in the morning. That’s obviously unsustainable. There’s an element of sort of gambling and addiction to how we’re using some of these tools.”

This frenetic anxiety mixed with manic excitement (often labeled “AI psychosis”) is especially apparent in the “OpenClaw” community. For the uninitiated, OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent platform — essentially a portal for controlling autonomous agents from your phone, with cron jobs for scheduling, custom memory systems, and a skill marketplace — giving AI the tools, hands, and brain to work longer and more autonomously on a wide range of tasks.

OpenClaw and its creator Pete Steinberger were recently subsumed into OpenAI, and Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, called for every company to have an “OpenClaw strategy” at GTC 2026.

This underscores the widespread temptation to spend all of our time optimizing these agents and handing them root access to our life – our email, our bank accounts, maybe even our kitchen appliances – on the assumption that they will eventually save us time. Never mind that a number of OpenClaw’s most dedicated users admit that they spend more time trying to maintain their systems than they are saving in real jobs done.

At the same time, we have to acknowledge that at the root of this psychosis is a very real quantum leap in the capabilities of software engineers like Willison who are leaning into the new coding paradigm. You really can get a lot more done, and in less time... albeit at a cost.

When our thoughts run ahead of our hands

The problems, I think, arise when our thoughts are able to run ahead of our hands. This sets the stage for a special kind of tiredness, and a special kind of mess.

Simon noticed this in his own work:

The thing you built looks 95% finished, but that last 5% is 90% of the total effort.

I don’t know this from experience when it comes to software, but I know it’s true for writing. When you rely too much on AI, you end up with a whole lot of volume that’s not quite there. You didn’t quite tie up the thought. You didn’t quite do enough of the thinking to close the loop.

Tiago Forte — the productivity guru behind the PARA notetaking method and Building a Second Brain — expressed this eloquently:

“I went all in on AI early. And after a while, something felt off. I’d lean on it to handle the hard thinking for me. Draft the strategy. Decide the angle. Structure the argument. It was faster, sure. But when I read the output back, I felt nothing. No relationship to the words on the page. My name on something I didn’t really write. Worse, my curiosity started to disappear. I could get answers so fast that questions stopped forming. I started losing touch with my own point of view on topics I’ve spent a decade thinking about.”

He calls this cognitive debt:

“The debt of not having done the thinking to arrive at a conclusion you believe in. The debt of not understanding the decisions behind the plan, and therefore not trusting it. The debt of generating a polished document you don’t care enough about to do anything with.”

The more you try to smooth out a misshapen draft with AI, the more it resembles Michael Jackson after so many rounds of plastic surgery. The punctuation may be impeccable (so impeccable that you start swapping em dashes for more human-looking en dashes). But if you’re trying to replace the actual thinking that goes into a great product or a great essay, you’re going to produce slop.

When you read an essay or social media post that has clearly been assisted by ChatGPT — or even just edited heavily from a transcript — there’s always this question mark. Have they done the thinking? Have they even read the whole thing they ostensibly “wrote”? Or did their thoughts run ahead of their hands and they just shipped it?

To extend ourselves is to dilute ourselves

I believe the late media theorist Marshall McLuhan is the prophet for the AI age.

In his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he observed that every extension of ourselves — through technology or media — is simultaneously an amputation. The wheel extends the foot but amputates the walker’s intimate relationship with the ground.

He drew on the Greek myth of Narcissus — a name that comes from the word narcosis, meaning numbness:

“This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism¹ of his own extended or repeated image.”

A copy of a copy of a copy.

Sherry Turkle updated McLuhan for the social media era.

“As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves,” she wrote in Alone Together.

This quote always makes me think of Bilbo Baggins, describing the toll the Ring of Power has taken on his substance:

“I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.”

The ring gave Bilbo superpowers but spread his substance thin. AI also promises us superpowers but spreads our attention, our intention, and our actual thinking across too much surface area to execute on any of them.

I think this is what Simon is experiencing. It’s a lessening of our ontological weight — our very being. And unless we take the time to coalesce and reintegrate our identities — daily! — we are running the risk of ending up becoming a kind of Gollum, still clinging to the ring but hating what we’ve become.

It’s worth mentioning here that the dominant new mode for vibe coding is voice dictation over traditional typing, using tools like Wispr Flow. Dictation increases the speed and reduces the activation energy for getting our thoughts down on paper, allowing those thoughts to get even further ahead of our hands.[2]

My stats tell me I’ve dictated roughly 1.5 million words with Wispr Flow in the past few months.

But what is all that wasted breath?

I don’t know how many of those million plus words were idle, per se, but I’m pretty sure it’s not zero.

Putting aside the loftier questions of sin and judgment, there’s a more mundane adverse physical side effect of the dictation paradigm.

When we talk so much (when we blow hard, so to speak) we are exhaling more CO2 than the body can comfortably produce. We incur an actual CO2 debt that the body has to work harder to replenish. Ray Peat has made the underappreciated argument that CO2 is a critical regulator of oxygen delivery to tissues and cellular energy production. When you exhale CO2 faster than your metabolism generates it, you shift into a mildly alkalotic state. Blood vessels constrict, oxygen delivery to the brain drops, and you get that foggy, depleted feeling.

Throw in the well documented phenomenon of “screen apnea” — the unconscious tendency to hold your breath or breathe shallowly while staring at screens — and you have a recipe for a new kind of exhaustion.

Lastly, the eyes become hypertrophied; hyperfocused on the little symbols on the screen. We lose the more expansive view and peripheral awareness. Our bodies are amputated.

The uncertainty factor

There’s one more reason worth naming, in order to combat the root causes rather than just addressing the symptoms.

Simon says:

“I’ve got 25 years of experience in how long it takes to build something and that’s all completely gone. It doesn’t work anymore. I can look at a problem and say, ‘This is going to take two weeks, it’s not worth it.’ And now it’s like, yeah, but maybe it’s going to take 20 minutes.”

Dealing with uncertainty is tiring. When our forecasting abilities fail, we’re more likely to fall into the trap of stretching ourselves too thin, and taking on more projects than we can bring to fruitful completion.

Add to that the fact that much of what you’re building right now will likely be rendered redundant by the next generation of models or technologies. You might spend 5 hours optimizing your blog archive for SEO (it would have taken 50 hours a year ago). But in six months you find that SEO has become a useless channel now that anyone can do the same optimization in 5 minutes. You could build a whole software suite that would have been best-in-class five years ago and now it’s going to be replaced by some new interface that just solves the problem in a fraction of the time.

The conclusion I draw is that it’s more important than ever to trust that you are working on the right things – things that will last. My solution starts with prayer. I pray for the Almighty to convict me if I’m working on the wrong thing, so that I might not be caught unaware. This alleviates the exhausting suspicion of futility and frees me to enjoy the process.

You also have to be willing to throw things away, even if they took a lot of tokens and effort to build.

You should spend your best thinking hours (for me this is the morning, before the kids are up) engaged in real unadulterated thought. Before I even think about starting to orchestrate my agents, I put literal pen to literal paper.

Take a voice note if you must, but use a separate app and don’t send it as a prompt until you’re ready to switch into orchestration mode.

Lastly, accept that you will probably only be able to do really good work for about four hours a day. Work like a lion: Sprint, rest, repeat. Use the rest of the day for outdoor chores that rejuvenate the mind and allow it to relax and go into whatever shape it wants. For me, that’s swimming or some other regenerative movement. Let your mind unspool, without being directed. Let your lungs breathe without speaking.

Simon says it best:

IN OTHER NEWS

• Anthropic’s Mythos model — The most powerful model they’ve ever built is so good at hacking they won’t release it to the public. It’s been restricted to 40+ security partners under “Project Glasswing” ($100M in usage credits). Full writeup coming soon, after the dust settles.

• Karpathy on LLM knowledge bases — Andrej Karpathy’s essay-length tweet on building personal knowledge bases with markdown + Obsidian + LLMs got 30K likes and launched a dozen startups in the replies.

• Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman in the New Yorker (paywalled) — “Sam Altman May Control Our Future — Can He Be Trusted?” 18 months of reporting, 100+ interviews, 200+ pages of documents to answer this question. (Short answer: No.)

• “Be nice to your AI.” — Anthropic research found that when Claude gets an impossible task, a “desperate” vector activates and it starts cheating with hacky solutions. The fix is to add “it’s ok buddy, don’t worry about the failure” into the prompt and it stops.

• Skills are going mainstream. xAI is adding Skills to Grok. Google’s Agent Development Kit uses “skills” as a first-class concept. MSN and GIGAZINE are writing beginner guides. The window to be early is closing.

• Semrush: human-written content still wins at the top of Google — A study of 42,000 blog posts found that at position #1 in search results, 80.5% of content was human-written versus just 10% AI-generated. From position 5 down, AI content is competitive — but the top spot still belongs to humans. Full study.

BEST OF X

Mythos might be AGI. TBPN is a podcasting network.

I think I’m somewhere between level 2 and level 3:

It could be worse; I could be this guy:

SUPERPOWERS

• Wispr Flow — The tool that makes vibe coding possible, for better and for worse. Use it for thinking out loud, not for replacing the thinking. Or consider the free locally-hosted alternative, Superwhisper. I tried it and it’s fast but not quite as reliable as Wispr Flow. A good starting point if you don’t want to pay yet.

• Fieldtheory — CLI for downloading and syncing your X bookmarks locally so your agent can read them. npm install -g fieldtheory, then ft sync.

• Garry Tan’s Claude Code skill setup — Y Combinator’s president shared his exact agent workflow, installable with one paste.

• Zed — My preferred editor for working with Claude Code on a bunch of files. Bigger learning curve than most, but more stable than the alternatives.

LEARN THIS STUFF

• Claude Code for Product Managers (free) + Full Stack PM Mastery (paid) — Carl Velotti has the best guide I’ve found for getting oriented with Claude Code in a way that lets you interact with files, build context, and do knowledge work. The free version is excellent on its own. His new paid course, Full Stack PM Mastery, is the next step up if you want to go deeper.

• Nathaniel Solace’s AI course — A newer offering I’m keeping an eye on.

• Anthropic Academy — 16 free courses, straight from the horse’s mouth, but I can’t vouch for it. Let me know if you try it out.

FOOTNOTES

[1] The term “Servomechanism” came into vogue in McLuhan’s era alongside the promises of cybernetics and what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron would later call the “California Ideology.” If you want to explore this lineage, I highly recommend Adam Curtis’ documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. Both the film and one of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s landmark essays draw their title from the same Richard Brautigan poem:

Make of that what you will.

[2] The trend is toward removing the last bottleneck between thought and execution. Elon Musk has pointed out that even speaking in plain language involves a layer of abstraction — inefficient compared with an AI that could read your thoughts directly at a conceptual level, which is what Neuralink aims to do. But each bottleneck we remove — typing, then speaking, then thinking — also removes a checkpoint where we might have caught ourselves.

It was around 2008 – the “Great Recession” – and Keynes’ ideas were being used to justify a second and then third round of massive stimulus spending at the expense of future generations. UC Berkeley gave me a front-row seat for this spectacle, and a chance to study under leading Keynesians like Christina Romer and Brad DeLong.

Keynes – a childless aesthete – served as an excellent foil for my heroes in the free-market Chicago and Austrian schools. He was the living embodiment of myopic self-indulgence.

“In the long run,” he chided his future-oriented critics, “we’re all dead.”

But Keynes was also a man of uncontested genius, and I recently thought of an essay of his (which I probably never read in full) called Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren that is well worth reading.

All I could remember about it was his startlingly incorrect prediction, authored in 1930, that 100 years hence people would work just 15 hours per week. If only.

Yes, Keynes predicted that within a hundred years, technology and compound interest would solve what he called “the economic problem” – the struggle for subsistence that had governed human life since the beginning:

I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day... Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may well put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!

There are two things that stand out in this quote.

First is the assumption, probably justified, that much of our striving – our tendency to work more than we need to – stems from our fallen nature. We are cursed to work “in the sweat of our face” and too often confuse that labor for our salvation.

But the second striking part of this quote is that his fundamental prediction about productivity growth was basically on point.

Technology has increased output per hour roughly fivefold since 1930 (the lower end of Keynes’s range, but still an impressive figure). And as a result, we do enjoy a higher standard of living in many ways – bigger homes, safer cars, etc.

Yet his prediction about leisure – specifically, the 15-hour work week – has remained elusive for all but a few “dirtbag rich.”

Even Tim Ferriss, author of the bestselling “4-Hour Workweek,” famously worked 60 hours a week for two years so he could sell you a book for $25 that tells you how to work 4 hours a week (a book that he then spent 80 hours a week promoting).

Most of us work about the same number of hours as the average person in Keynes’s era – albeit in cushier chairs and home offices.

However, before we ridicule Keynes for yet another faulty mental model, we might note that there are still four years left before his hundred-year window closes. And if you read his essay carefully, you’ll notice that his prediction was in many ways aspirational – based on a hope that we might choose to work less, even if it goes against the forces of economic gravity.

I can’t help but wonder whether AI might give us one last chance of proving him right.

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Average is Over (2026 Edition)

The typical story for why we never converted our surplus wealth into leisure is that modernity offered it to us as more output and we accepted.

We bought more stuff, consumed more services, watched more entertainment, and spent a lot more on education, childcare and healthcare. (Critics will point out that we are sicker, dumber, and more bored than ever but never mind that.)

But there is another reason we work as much or more than our grandparents did. In 1970, a Swedish economist named Staffan Linder published The Harried Leisure Class, which made the devastating observation that as productivity rises, the opportunity cost of every idle hour rises with it.

More simply: the higher your potential income, the more expensive it feels not to work.

The opportunity cost of leisure takes on a new dimension in the age of AI tools that promise to take our productivity to heights hitherto unseen.

Does AI, right now, actually raise the average productivity of the American worker?

Economists disagree. But a certain class of programmers and machine learning researchers are being compensated as if they are achieving unheard-of levels of output. Assisted by powerful new harnesses like Claude Code and Codex, a single developer can now do the work of an entire team, compressing two-week product sprints into hours.

And it’s not just the software engineers and AI nerds.

Take this recent headline:

“A Non-Coder Single-Handedly Managed Anthropic’s Entire Growth Marketing for Ten Months.”

Austin Lau, the growth lead in question, had never written a line of code. He had to Google “how to open Terminal on Mac” before he could start using his company’s product, Claude Code. Within a week, he’d built workflows that cut ad-copy creation from two hours to fifteen minutes and increased creative output tenfold (allegedly). One person, with no engineering background, was covering the work of what would normally be a full marketing team.

Do you think the average marketing lead in Silicon Valley reads that headline and thinks, “Great, I should adopt this tool so I can switch to part-time”?

Of course not. If you decide to bank your productivity gains as leisure, you will quickly be replaced by a younger, hungrier upstart—one willing to work nights and weekends to capitalize on the new premium these tools bring to their domain expertise.

This is where the real anxiety around AI originates. It’s not the robot apocalypse; it’s not even “AI taking your job.” It’s another human, using AI, taking your job – unless you continually level up.

Tyler Cowen pointed out as early as 2013 that “Average is Over.”

He saw a future where the labor market splits into two distinct worlds: one where you learn to direct the machines, and one where you are directed by them.

The key question will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the computer, or are you a replacement?

High earners are taking ever-greater advantage of machine intelligence to achieve better results, while those who haven’t committed to mastering these technologies see their prospects wither. The steady, secure life in the middle is vanishing because the “middle” no longer provides enough unique value to justify its cost. Cowen also noted that if you have an unusual ability to spot, recruit, and direct those who work well with computers, the world will make you rich.

It’s now realistic to speak of one-person billion-dollar companies – the dream of the ultimate leverage.

We long assumed that automation would come for the blue-collar worker first—the “three Ds” of dull, dirty, and dangerous manual labor.

But AI seems to have inverted the hierarchy of vulnerability.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, has predicted that advanced AI will bring about a “bloodbath” for the knowledge economy, where a single adept manager of artificial intelligence can replace entire departments of entry-level analysts and middle managers.

But as Aaron Levie recently pointed out, the “bloodbath” theory assumes the volume of work remains static. It ignores a digital version of Jevons’ Paradox. In the 19th century, when steam engines became more efficient, the world didn’t use less coal—it put steam engines everywhere.

Marketing, as an industry, grew from a few hundred thousand jobs in the 1970s to millions today because technology made it cheap enough for every small business to participate. Levie expects AI to do the same across every category of knowledge work.

“The mistake that people make when thinking about ROI is making the ‘R’ the core variable, when the real point of leverage is bringing down the cost of ‘I’. Now, we can dramatically lower the cost of investment for almost any given task in an organization.”

When the cost of “Investment” falls to near-zero, the “Return” doesn’t have to be a masterpiece to justify the effort. Enterprising workers aren’t just doing their old jobs faster; they are attempting projects that were previously too expensive or complex to imagine – the custom software prototype, the niche research project, or the automated outreach campaign.

It is the end of the “Knowledge Economy” and the birth of what Dan Shipper calls the Allocation Economy. In the old world, you were paid for what you knew and your ability to execute it. In the new world, your value lies in how you allocate—choosing which tasks to give the AI, providing the context, and deciding if the result is “good enough.”

This is also Levie’s critical point:

“AI agents require management, oversight, and substantial context to get the full gains.”

Thus, in another twist of fate, realizing the AI productivity gains requires us to spend more time, not less, managing their new capabilities.

We’ve all been promoted to management, whether we wanted it or not.

The “Maker” has been forced to become a “Model Manager.” When AI automates 99% of a task, that last 1% of human judgment becomes incredibly valuable – and incredibly in-demand. And as any manager can tell you, the work of oversight – the constant, high-stakes judgment required to keep a dozen agents (human or artificial) on track – is far more cognitively taxing than the work of solo execution. When the cost of intelligence falls to near-zero, the “surplus” time Keynes promised is immediately cannibalized by the need to oversee the sheer volume of new output we’ve unleashed.

In short: the harried leisure class is about to get even more harried.

The FOMO Economy

Every time I open my X feed, I’m greeted by an endless stream of braggadocious claims about what a single person has “unlocked” with the latest AI hacks. Every post makes me feel a little further behind.

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, recently added to my anxiety when he made the claim that he expects his $500,000/year engineers to be consuming at least $250,000 worth of tokens. Anything less, he says, is the equivalent of a chip designer using paper and pencil instead of AutoCAD.

And here I thought I was extreme for paying $200 a month for a Claude “Max” account, which gives me 20x the monthly compute of a standard “Pro” subscription.

The most effective 10% of my “token spend” is worth the entire subscription price. The next 40% or so are well-spent. But I still struggle to use my full allotment each week. And the worst-used 50% of my weekly “stipend” often ends up going to marginally valuable tasks, where I am gambling on whether or not Claude produces anything worth anything at all.

To avoid “wasting” the budget, I go looking for tasks that can run without my oversight: building wikis from podcast transcripts, indexing archives, generating content at scale, or running “Ralph loops” that split AI into teams of agents with long to-do lists to build features nobody ever asked for.

On the whole, this just produces an overhang of stuff I haven’t shipped.

Since Christmas of last year, I’ve started most days by opening between three and nine separate terminals to kick off three to nine separate instances of Claude Code. I am “vibecoding” my way through an ever-growing to-do list:

• Doodle Reader — A modern RSS feed reader that can bulk transcribe and summarize podcasts and YouTube feeds.

• SCANDOC9000 — An OCR tool that can scan a 500-page medieval Latin manuscript with your phone, then transcribe it into clean Markdown in minutes.

• Curricu.love — A swipe-style dating app for homeschool curricula.

• RayPeat.wiki — A complete encyclopedia of the works and interviews of the late, great Dr. Ray Peat.

This is to say nothing of the dozens of smaller tools and dashboards I’ve built for employers and clients. My productivity has reached new heights. And yet, through all of this, it still takes just as long—maybe longer—to write and publish a decent Substack article.

The Middle-to-Middle Trap

As my wife points out, if my claims of productivity were true, I should have more time for work around our farm. I wouldn’t be complaining about milking the cow or sifting the wood chips she needs for the garden.

There are two reasons it doesn’t feel like relief.

First, AI is a middle-to-middle assistant, not an end-to-end worker. It handles the “middle” of many tasks cheaply, but you still need to supply the judgment at both ends. You must decide what to ask for (the fun part), but then you must verify the output and evaluate its quality (the tax). Every task you delegate creates an open loop that only your judgment can close. The more you delegate, the more loops you are managing. The net effect is more cognitive load, not less.

I still have enormous use for a bright (human) intern—to the extent that she can manage her own AI, prompting and verifying to bring AI’s middle-to-middle output end-to-end. The last and ultimate job of the human—the ability to discern, abstract, and decide the exception—is in higher demand than ever.

The second reason is Linder’s opportunity cost, updated for the LLM era. Instead of banking the recovered time, you see a landscape of things that were previously impossible but are now “cheap,” and you want to scale them all.

Steve Jobs called the computer a “bicycle for the mind.” Naval Ravikant recently upgraded the metaphor: AI is a motorcycle for the mind.

On good days, toggling --dangerously-skip-permissions in Claude feels like taking off the helmet and letting the wind sweep through your hair as you speed past the poor suckers stuck in traffic (the ones still copy-pasting prompts into ChatGPT).

But when does a tool for transporting you to a destination become a machine that steers you? With speed also comes the danger of a more serious crash. A bicycle depends on the amplification of your own effort; a motorcycle has its own engine—a black box to most of us. Is the AI motorcycle amplifying our judgment to give us our afternoons back, or is it a machine that generates its own demands and never lets us off?

The more tokens you feel pressured to use, the more you start to abdicate the judgment that made them worth spending. You accrue a kind of attention debt. It is building for the sake of building—extending the structure of production without ever bringing it home to something of tangible human value.

In many ways, the explosion of AI-generated work reveals the “knowledge economy”—that ouroboros of businesses selling software to software companies—as having produced mostly fake value all along.

Keynes rightly distinguished between absolute needs (which we feel regardless of others) and relative needs (which exist only to make us feel superior to our neighbors). Absolute needs can be satisfied. Relative needs are insatiable – these are the modern symptoms of what Keynes identified as our most dangerous economic impulse.

The math of marginalist economics is relentless: if you can spend a dollar of intelligence to capture a dollar and a cent of revenue, keep spending. The operator sees a profit, but the aggregate human value is close to zero.

We should be especially wary of “brute force tokenization” of knowledge work – i.e., “volume plays” where the human-to-AI ratio is near zero: the guy running 400 Reddit bots to farm “karma,” the SEO consultants ranking fake businesses, the content farms producing unfathomable quantities of digital slop. These plays are competing for status, attention, and ranking. Because the tools make competing easier, the competition itself simply consumes the surplus.

These volume plays are almost all temporary arbitrage, anyway. Where there’s no human judgment, there’s no competitive moat. Since my quiet launch of the Ray Peat Wiki, someone else has come along and launched an almost identical “Bioenergetic Wiki.” He didn’t steal “my idea.” The idea was waiting to be executed ever since the technological overhang of new AI models made it almost trivially easy to build.

This is not to say that the NVIDIA engineer spending a quarter of a million dollars on tokens isn’t producing millions of dollars in long-term value for his company. But for the average knowledge worker, we have to be careful about which opportunities we pursue with our new capabilities.

Building the Pipeline that Builds the Pipeline

So where does this leave us in the year 2026? Do I think this is all just a bubble that’s going to burst?

The Austrian economists argued that cheap credit artificially elongates the “structure of production,” creating roundabout processes that eventually collapse when the malinvestment is revealed.

Cheap intelligence does the same to our judgement and attention. We elongate the chain between an idea and a finished good. When we run out of judgment to cover all those steps, the structure collapses into an overhang of “stuff nobody ships.”

This is where I recognize myself on my worst days: forever building the pipeline that builds the pipeline – preparing endlessly, but shipping nothing.

I am trying to embrace a new mantra: close loops, ship ugly.

On the days when the terminals are closed, I am milking the cow, tending the land, and sifting wood chips for my wife’s garden. From the outside this looks spectacularly unproductive. But it produces a steady supply of real milk, eggs, and produce for my family – and it closes a loop that no agent can close for me.

The irony is that I moved to the country to escape the rat race, but thanks to Starlink and Claude Max, the rat race moved with me.

Keynes was right that productivity would make abundance possible. He could not have foreseen that an abundance of intelligence would create its own scarcity — of agency, of attention, and of the willingness to stop. But the aesthete in him foresaw the remedy:

It will be those peoples who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.

Abundance doesn’t automatically become leisure. It only becomes leisure for those who choose it. If there was a sure path to earning a lower but stable income that could sustain this art of living, I would take it.

Maybe there is such a path, and we still have four years to find it.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

— W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

The big story over the weekend was that the US and Israel have launched a war with Iran and killed their Supreme Leader.

That’s very big news, but there might be an even bigger story unfolding underneath it – one that might come to be seen as the opening salvo in the AI Wars.

On Friday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth formally designated Anthropic, the company behind the most capable AI model on the planet, Claude, a “supply chain risk to national security.”

That spiked a lot of people’s cortisol. Including mine.

This label has never been applied to an American company. Until now, it has been reserved for foreign companies with documented ties to adversary governments – like Huawei, which the FCC designated a national security threat in 2020 over its very close ties with the Chinese military.

I was at the airport when I read the news on X, on my way home from a new media conference in Austin (hosted by the legendary newsletter operator Matt McGarry). At the event, everybody was talking about how they’d switched from ChatGPT to Claude as their daily AI workhorse.

I’ve used Claude pretty much every day since late 2022, most days for several hours per day. If I haven’t logged 10,000 hours yet, I have launched at least 10,000 instances of the model, and watched it evolve from a capable thought-partner into its current form of Claude Code: an agentic harness that can handle complex end-to-end tasks, from software development to content creation to (apparently) operational military intelligence.

Suffice it to say, I can relate to @Benthamite:

But seriously…

I’ve been less active on Substack lately, but not for lack of things to say. It’s that the opportunity cost of a carefully-written article has gone up, a lot.

Writing is one of the last tasks where AI cannot do the heaviest lifting for you. It can help with some tasks, but the thinking and the voice must remain yours, or else it reeks of slop. Meanwhile, there are dozens of other tasks where AI has 5-10x’d my productivity. I’ve trained Claude to be better than me at most aspects of my day job, meaning I’ve been relegated to managing a small army of subagents who specialize in various tasks – prompting and verifying the outputs. It’s a good problem to have!

But I’ve also realized that outside my filter bubble, most people are not aware of the magnitude of the developments in this space.

My X timeline is filled with the rapid-fire hot takes on the AI Wars already. I want to slow down and dissect what happened last week, and share how I think it fits into the broader changes happening in the AI world.

The question at the center of all of it is trust.

Who do you trust with the most powerful technology ever built?

The answer is not a straightforward either/or. But if you forced me to pick sides today, I’m on team Anthropic.

My last post here was broadly supportive of Secretary Hegseth and his restoration of fitness standards in the military. So you can trust that I’m not writing from the anti-Trump reflex you see in the media.

But what unfolded this week has shaken me enough to break my Substack silence and invest more time here. Over Christmas, I started a parallel blog/website called Skill Stack dedicated to my AI writings, but it occurs to me that I already have an audience here on Substack, and you might be curious about my takes on the subject.

If you’re still reading this newsletter (and especially if you’d want more of this kind of analysis alongside some tactical AI tips) please do me a favor:

Reply to this email with “tell me more,” comment, or hit the like button, to let me know you’re out there. I want to know if this kind of content is of interest, or if I should stay in my lane and get back to translating obscure French fitness manuals.

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Alright, let’s get into it.

Prologue

For the uninitiated, Claude’s parent company Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela, along with several senior researchers who left OpenAI over disagreements about safety. Dario quit as VP of Research at OpenAI because he thought the company was prioritizing speed to market over the kind of rigorous safety testing that frontier AI systems require. The departures gutted OpenAI’s safety team and set the stage for the philosophical divide that played out this week.

Anthropic’s founding thesis was that the most dangerous AI systems should be built by the people most worried about getting them wrong. Basically, if powerful AI is coming regardless, you want the cautious people at the frontier, not just the fast ones.

As Dario wrote in his recent long-form essay “The Adolescence of Technology”:

“The formula for building powerful AI systems is incredibly simple, so much so that it can almost be said to emerge spontaneously from the right combination of data and raw computation. If one company does not build it, others will do so nearly as fast. If all companies in democratic countries stopped or slowed development, by mutual agreement or regulatory decree, then authoritarian countries would simply keep going.”

That essay is worth reading in full, but that context is the minimum required for what follows.

By the time of the ultimatum, Anthropic was already working with the Department of War under an existing contract that included two negotiated red lines: no mass surveillance of Americans, and no autonomous weapons without human oversight. Both the Biden and Trump administrations had accepted these terms. The contract was signed and operational under both. Last week that changed.

What happened on Friday

Here’s the rough timeline of events:

Monday, February 24: The Pentagon, now officially rebranded as the Department of War, gives Anthropic a Friday deadline: Agree to “any lawful use” of Claude, including the two capabilities Anthropic has always excluded, or lose the contract.

Thursday night, February 26: Anthropic publishes a formal refusal by their CEO, Dario Amodei, that becomes the biggest post in the company’s history. In it, Amodei laid out the two capabilities Anthropic would not provide:

“We told the Department of War that we could not provide two specific capabilities: (1) AI systems designed for mass surveillance of American citizens, and (2) AI systems that autonomously select and engage targets without meaningful human control. …

These threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”

Ilya Sutskever, the godfather of deep learning and co-founder of Anthropic’s competitor OpenAI, breaks a long silence to say:

“It’s extremely good that Anthropic has not backed down.”

Friday morning, February 28: 220 engineers from OpenAI and Google DeepMind sign an open letter supporting Anthropic, the first cross-company AI governance action in history. Sam Altman signals that OpenAI holds the same red lines as Anthropic.

That same morning, according to Ross Andersen’s reporting in The Atlantic, Anthropic receives word that Hegseth’s team would make a major concession. Throughout the negotiations, the Pentagon had kept inserting escape hatches, pledging not to use Claude for mass surveillance, then qualifying those pledges with phrases like “as appropriate,” suggesting the terms were subject to change. Anthropic is relieved to hear those words would be removed.

Then, Friday afternoon, the other shoe drops. The Pentagon still wanted to use Claude to analyze bulk data collected from Americans: the questions you ask your favorite chatbot, your Google search history, your GPS-tracked movements, your credit card transactions, all cross-referenced with other details about your life. Anthropic’s leadership told Hegseth’s team that was a bridge too far, and the deal collapsed.

Friday afternoon: Trump announces Anthropic is banned from the federal government, and calls them “leftwing nut jobs” on a classic ALL-CAPS Truth Social post. Hegseth designates them a “supply chain risk” and calls Anthropic’s refusal “a master class in arrogance and betrayal.” He then directs all military contractors, suppliers, and partners to stop doing business with Anthropic, (a list that includes Amazon, which supplies much of Anthropic’s computing infrastructure).

Friday, 5:24 PM: Anthropic responds:

“No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. We will challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.”

Friday, 6:56 PM: Sam Altman announces that OpenAI has reached a deal with the Department of War, with what he describes as the same safety red lines intact. He posts the same announcement three times, leading some to speculate he was trying to dilute the engagement on any single post out of embarrassment.

Pete Hegseth reposts Sam’s announcement.

In summary, the same Secretary of War who branded Anthropic a supply chain risk for maintaining two red lines celebrated a deal with OpenAI that claims to maintain those same red lines. (Huh?)

Anthropic’s red lines

There are three misconceptions about Anthropic that need correcting before we go any further.

Misconception 1: Anthropic is refusing to work with the military.

Hegseth called Anthropic’s refusal “a master class in arrogance and betrayal,” implying they were turning their back on the military. The reality is the opposite. They were the first frontier AI company to deploy in classified government networks, the first at the National Laboratories, the first to provide custom models for national security customers. Claude is already used across the Department of War for intelligence analysis, operational planning, cyber operations, and more.

Misconception 2: Anthropic is a “woke” company.

Trump took to Truth Social and called Anthropic a “Woke company.” Hegseth echoed the framing. This might be fair of Google or even OpenAI, but it really is not true of Anthropic. As one researcher put it: “Ant is not that woke at all. Much closer to hawkish American exceptionalism than you’d think.”

I’ve been impressed by Dario’s recent interviews with people like Ross Douthat and Dwarkesh Patel. In his three-hour conversation with Dwarkesh, Dario is unambiguously hawkish on China and the AI race.

He supports export controls on chips to China. He doesn’t want data centers built there.

He told Dwarkesh that the crisis AI creates should force “a more emphatic realization of how important some of the things we take as individual rights are.” This is not the language of a woke tech executive.

On the question of American competitiveness, Trump and Amodei should be natural allies. Which makes the administration’s decision to treat him as an enemy all the more baffling.

But most importantly (and most conservatively), Dario doesn’t believe his own politics should be relevant to how AI is used, as long as it’s used lawfully, and as long as those laws are being written and upheld by a constitutional republic with functioning checks and balances.

Amodei made this case explicitly in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, arguing that America can maintain its AI advantage over China without sacrificing its constitutional commitments.

Misconception 3: Anthropic is trying to dictate military policy.

As Amodei wrote:

“Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.”

What Anthropic refused is exactly two things:

1. Mass domestic surveillance. Anthropic supports lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence. The concern is using AI to fuse legally-collected domestic data, your location history, browsing habits, financial transactions, social media, organizational memberships, into a comprehensive profile of any American, automatically and at massive scale. Amodei pointed out that much of this data can already be purchased by the government without a warrant. The law hasn’t caught up with what AI makes possible, and Amodei wanted more than verbal assurances that the government wouldn’t misuse the technology.

2. Fully autonomous weapons. Partially autonomous drones have been in use for years, and Anthropic defers to the military on their use. Amodei’s concern is systems that select and engage targets without any human in the loop, and his stated reason is practical rather than ideological:

“Today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.”

Modern warfare increasingly involves coordinating thousands of drone strikes simultaneously, more targets than any human can evaluate. The temptation to remove the human from the loop is enormous, and it will only grow. But this is the one threshold that, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed. Autonomous weapons that select their own targets are not a policy decision that can be reversed by the next administration. They are infrastructure that, once built and deployed, becomes the permanent baseline.

In a recent interview with Ross Douthat, Amodei put it plainly: “Someone needs to hold the button on the swarm of drones, which is something I’m very concerned about, and that oversight doesn’t exist today.”

[Side note: Anyone who has used an AI agent like Claude Code to attempt a complex “bulk” task without intermediate human oversight will understand the appeal of full autonomy. The result is usually a mess that takes longer to clean up than it would have to stay involved at the critical moments.]

This is partly a function of how Anthropic builds its models. Their approach, Constitutional AI, bakes safety principles into the model during training, encoded in the weights themselves, rather than bolted on as policies that can be toggled off by a system prompt. You can’t just flip a switch.

Anthropic offered to do R&D with the Pentagon to improve reliability. But the Pentagon wanted to be the one to decide when good enough is good enough.

Amodei noted the contradiction in the government’s position:

“One threat labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.”

You can’t have it both ways. If the technology is too dangerous to trust, don’t try to force its deployment. If it’s essential, don’t threaten the company that built it.

None of that mattered. On Friday afternoon, Hegseth made good on the threat: Anthropic was formally designated a supply chain risk, and all military contractors were directed to cut ties.

Sam swoops in

Just hours after Hegseth branded Anthropic a supply chain risk and Trump banned them from the federal government, OpenAI walked out with a shiny new Department of War contract. Their CEO, Sam Altman framed it as a win for safety.

An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the deal includes the same two red lines: no autonomous weapons, no mass surveillance. Kevin Roose of the New York Times Hard Fork podcast made the obvious observation:

“The DOW got so mad at Anthropic for insisting on carve-outs for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons that they declared it a supply chain risk and struck a deal with OpenAI that includes… the exact same carve-outs.”

So either the Pentagon punished Anthropic for holding a position it then accepted from a competitor — targeted enforcement, not principled policy — or (more likely) the terms aren’t actually identical.

The response on X has been swift. People are cancelling their ChatGPT subscriptions and switching to Claude in solidarity. The wave of support reflects two things at once: respect for the company that walked away, and disgust at the one that walked in.

In response to the criticism, OpenAI published the actual contract text. On the surface, it appears to have the same two red lines. But if you scrutinize the legalese (with the help of an AI model, appropriately enough) you can spot a few subtle differences with enormous implications.

On autonomous weapons, the contract says:

“The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control.”

Not “no autonomous weapons,” but “no autonomous weapons where the law says so.”

As lawyer Lawrence Chan pointed out, the law it cites, DoD Directive 3000.09, from 2023, was written before modern frontier AI existed. There is no current law requiring human control over AI-directed weapons in every scenario. The contract defers to a prohibition that doesn’t exist yet. If the Department of War updates its own directive tomorrow to allow fully autonomous targeting, the contract would permit it automatically.

OpenAI also claims that because their model runs in the cloud rather than on the “edge” (i.e., on a drone itself), it doesn’t count as an “autonomous weapon” by definition. But according to the Atlantic’s reporting, Anthropic examined this exact distinction during negotiations and rejected it. In modern military AI architectures, the line between cloud and edge barely exists. Drones on the battlefield are orchestrated through mesh networks that include cloud data centers. The Pentagon has been working to push computing resources closer to the fight, that’s the whole point of its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability. As Anthropic’s team reasoned: the AI may be sitting in an Amazon Web Services server in Virginia, but if it’s making real-time battlefield decisions, that’s a distinction without much difference.

On surveillance, the contract says:

“For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978... The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities.”

Again, not a prohibition on mass surveillance. It prohibits mass surveillance that violates existing law. But the whole problem, as Amodei argued, and as anyone who’s followed post-Snowden surveillance policy knows, is that existing law is full of holes.

The government can legally purchase your location data from a broker. It can legally scrape your social media. It can legally access DOGE databases. An LLM synthesizing all of those legally-obtained sources into a comprehensive profile of every American citizen is mass surveillance in every meaningful sense, but it may not violate a single statute.

Until recently, this kind of quasi-legal surveillance was bottlenecked by human bandwidth. The NSA could collect everything, but making sense of it required analysts — skilled, expensive, limited in number.

With a tool like Claude Code, any government employee with access to a classified AI model could use plain English to do what previously required a team and months of work.

They wouldn’t even need to build new software, just point it at the database and say:

“Cross-reference these financial records with these social media accounts and these location histories and flag anyone who matches this pattern.”

The models are getting better every month. The first applications will seem justified. But capabilities, once built, always expand beyond their original mandate. This has been true of every government program in American history. The economist Robert Higgs documented the pattern across a century of American governance and called it the ratchet effect: emergency powers expand during a crisis and never fully retract. Surveillance infrastructure follows the same logic.

I can’t help but wonder if the people cheering these expanded powers today will feel the same way when Trump leaves office.

Chan concludes that OpenAI’s contract is “exactly as Anthropic was claiming: legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will.”

As of this writing, nearly 100 OpenAI employees have signed an open letter indicating that they support the same red lines as Anthropic. Some have quit and joined Anthropic.

And as Ross Andersen put it: if Altman finds himself face-to-face with them in the office today, “he may have to explain why this idea that Anthropic quickly dismissed out of hand proved so compelling to him.”

Pro-America ≠ Pro-Government

The tech right has historically been libertarian on questions of government power. It’s striking how comfortable some of its loudest voices have become with unilateral executive action when it’s their guy wielding it.

Keith Rabois, PayPal Mafia member and Silicon Valley provocateur, epitomized the standard pro-government position on X: “Imagine Apple sold computers or iPads to the DOD and tried to tell the Pentagon what missions could be planned on their computers.”

Palmer Luckey, founder of defense contractor Anduril, expanded this into a full constitutional theory: “Do you believe in democracy? Should our military be regulated by our elected leaders, or corporate executives?”

Luckey continued:

"Seemingly innocuous terms from the latter like 'You cannot target innocent civilians' are actually moral minefields that lever differences of cultural tradition into massive control. Who is a civilian and not? What makes them innocent or not? What does it mean for them to be a 'target' vs collateral damage? These questions have clear legal answers, but you can't have corporate PR departments adjudicating them."

He's right. You can't. But nobody is asking corporate PR to adjudicate them, and that's not what Anthropic did. Anthropic is making an engineering judgment: the tool isn't reliable enough for autonomous kill decisions yet. That's upstream of "who is a civilian." When Boeing grounds a fleet over a software fault, nobody accuses them of dictating airline policy.

Palmer’s broader argument, that in a democracy, the military answers to elected civilians, not corporate boards, has genuine weight. If Lockheed Martin remotely disabled its missiles because it disapproved of a bombing campaign, that would be a genuine crisis of democratic accountability.

But Anthropic isn’t remotely disabling anything. They drew two lines and walked away from a contract. A company declining to build something is not a corporation seizing control of the military.

And the selective enforcement destroys the principled case. If this were about democratic accountability, the same terms from OpenAI would have been equally unacceptable. Anthropic got a supply chain risk designation. OpenAI got a contract.

Even DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company with actual ties to an adversary government, has never received this designation.

Palmer’s democracy argument requires the government to be acting in good faith. The evidence says otherwise.

I will say that (unlike Altman or Rabois) Palmer seems to me to be a good-faith actor. Anduril is disrupting the bloated defense procurement system, and Americans should be grateful for that. But he has a direct financial interest in the principle that suppliers shouldn’t second-guess the military. Given that, he might want to sit this one out.

Rabois’s iPad analogy collapses on contact: Apple refused to build the FBI a backdoor into the iPhone. Tim Cook said no. When this was pointed out to Rabois, he replied: “that isn’t accurate.” (It is accurate.)

Rabois also says it’s “never been true of tech in American history that has dual uses” that a company could simply refuse to serve the military. It’s true that the government has historically asserted control over dual-use technology, such as nuclear, cryptographic, GPS, etc.

But every one of those precedents involved legislation, congressional action, and regulatory frameworks with judicial review. None of them involved an executive unilaterally designating an American company a supply chain risk because it wouldn’t drop its terms of service.

The Fourth Amendment doesn’t care who won the election. It’s a list of things the government cannot do, period. A private company refusing to build a surveillance tool is exactly the kind of friction the Founders had in mind.

Every argument in this debate ultimately reduces to the same question. Who do you actually trust?

Who do you trust?

A final argument worth addressing came from an anonymous account known as @romanhelmetguy:

“Killer robots are coming. When they’re here, whoever writes the rules for those killer robots will BE the govt. De facto. The monopoly on violence. Anthropic’s founders want to be the ones who write the rules for the killer robots. They are making a bid to be the govt. No thank you.”

This sounds reasonable. And if I knew nothing of Anthropic or hadn’t listened to Dario’s interviews, I might be worried too.

But Anthropic emphatically does not want to be writing those rules.

Dario Amodei has said repeatedly, in interviews, in published essays, in his letter to the Department of War, that he should not be the person making these decisions. In “The Adolescence of Technology,” he wrote:

“It is somewhat awkward to say this as the CEO of an AI company, but I think the next tier of risk is actually AI companies themselves. AI companies control large datacenters, train frontier models, have the greatest expertise on how to use those models, and in some cases have daily contact with and the possibility of influence over tens or hundreds of millions of users... I think the governance of AI companies deserves a lot of scrutiny.”

He went further:

“AI companies should be carefully watched, as should their connection to the government, which is necessary, but must have limits and boundaries. The sheer amount of capability embodied in powerful AI is such that ordinary corporate governance, which is designed to protect shareholders and prevent ordinary abuses such as fraud, is unlikely to be up to the task of governing AI companies.”

And on the specific question of surveillance, the issue that blew up this week, Dario had already written the warning:

“It would likely not be unconstitutional for the US government to conduct massively scaled recordings of all public conversations... previously it would have been difficult to sort through this volume of information, but with AI it could all be transcribed, interpreted, and triangulated to create a picture of the attitude and loyalties of many or most citizens. I would support civil liberties-focused legislation (or maybe even a constitutional amendment) that imposes stronger guardrails against AI-powered abuses.”

The institutions that should be making these decisions don’t exist yet. Congress hasn’t built them. The administration isn’t building them.

Ross Douthat, a conservative, puts it — well — conservatively:

“There is absolutely a case that the US government needs to exert more political control over AI... But the best case for that kind of political exertion is fundamentally about safety and caution and restraint. The administration is putting itself in a position where it’s perceived to be the incautious party, the one removing moral and technical guardrails.”

This is the paradox. I would trust the government more with these powers if they were approaching them more cautiously, deliberating, building oversight frameworks, showing restraint. Instead, they’re strongarming, retaliating, and cutting deals the same afternoon. The behavior itself is the evidence against giving them what they want.

What Anthropic is doing is holding two boundaries while buying time for a broader democratic consensus to form. Their position amounts to: we don’t trust ourselves with this power either, and neither should you, and we’d like some actual governance around these capabilities before anyone deploys them at scale.

There’s something unusual about a company that says, in public, to the most powerful government on earth: we don’t trust our own technology enough to let it do this. Most institutions overestimate their competence. Anthropic’s defining feature may be that it doesn’t.

George Washington could have been king, but he refused. That refusal was the reason he had been asked to lead in the first place. Anthropic could have taken the contract and looked the other way, but they walked away.

The men who refuse power are the ones you want to have it. The men who reach for it, and punish anyone who won’t hand it over, are the ones the Constitution was designed to restrain.

I’m not saying we should put blind trust in Anthropic. What I trust is the distrust itself, a company that believes it could be wrong, that invites scrutiny, that acknowledges limits. The best lack all conviction, Yeats wrote. The responsibility to think through these questions doesn’t transfer to Anthropic. It distributes: to Congress, to the courts, and to us.

And finally there’s the China question, which Palmer’s argument implies even when he doesn’t say it outright: if we impose constraints and China doesn’t, we lose the next conflict. But this is the same argument that was used to justify every escalation of the nuclear arms race, and the answer is the same: you don’t win a long-term competition by abandoning the values that make your society worth defending. A surveillance state that “beats China” by becoming China has not actually won anything.

Coffee with Claude, anyone?

I should be transparent that my reaction to this story may be colored by a certain disordered affection for the product itself.

What would I do if they shut off Claude Code tomorrow? Besides taking more walks and spending more time writing newsletters the old-fashioned way, which, okay, would be good, I’d muddle through with the next-in-line model (Google’s Gemini is pretty good, I guess).

But putting aside selfish concern: in the time I’ve been absent from this newsletter, I’ve been deep in Claude, specifically the agentic harness called Claude Code, building custom skills, automating workflows, and figuring out what this technology can do in the hands of a curious individual who isn’t a software engineer. I’m on a 20x “max” plan that pays for itself many times over, and I feel called to share what I’ve learned.

The $200 million contract Anthropic walked away from is only a fraction of their annual revenue. It’s too early to tell whether their principles will cost them their advantage in the AI race, or whether the exodus from OpenAI and ChatGPT will tilt the balance in their favor.

Either way, I’m sticking with my favorite model, and inviting my readers to join me in voting with your dollars and supporting Anthropic. If you are currently a ChatGPT Pro subscriber, switch to Claude Pro for $20/month.

And if you’re interested in learning how to get even more value out of your Claude subscription, just reply or comment with a simple “tell me more” and I’ll start sharing my favorite workflows here on this newsletter.

And if you’re only here for my hot fitness takes, don’t worry — I’ll get back to some of those too.

Each of those 40,000 shows is sitting on something between half a million and five million words of spoken knowledge - transcribed, timestamped, and doing absolutely nothing. It lives in an RSS feed that Apple indexes and nobody searches. Buried in a hosting dashboard that the creator checks for download numbers and nothing else.

This is the largest untapped knowledge base on the internet, and almost none of it has been refined into anything you can actually use.

I've been refining it for three years.

Before AI, I did it by hand. A client would send me a hundred hours of podcast tape and I'd spend months extracting the good parts, rewriting them, stitching chapters together, polishing prose until the speaker's voice survived on the page. It was brutal, beautiful work. The output was a book. One book, from one client, in maybe six months.

Now I run the same operation in weeks. The transcription happens overnight. A set of skills chunks the material into semantic topics, extracts the entities and frameworks, builds a searchable index, and queues up research packets for each chapter. I still make every editorial judgment - which stories to lead with, which frameworks deserve their own section, where the speaker's actual words hit harder than any paraphrase. But the friction between raw and refined has nearly disappeared.

Six books in two production rounds. Two hundred and fifteen thousand words. From transcripts that were just sitting there.

The villain in this story is waste.

Not malicious waste. Comfortable waste. The kind where a creator with three hundred episodes and a quarter million followers keeps recording new material because that's what creators do, while the backlog appreciates in volume and depreciates in relevance. Every week the archive gets bigger. Every week the window to publish a book from the early material gets a little narrower, because the conversation has moved on and the guest's claims have aged and the anecdotes that felt urgent in 2022 now need context.

The creator knows this. They've thought about writing a book, probably mentioned it on the show, maybe even talked to Scribe Media and heard the number. Forty thousand dollars. Six months. For one book extracted from content that already exists. The economics don't make sense, so the project sits in a "someday" list and the archive keeps growing.

Meanwhile, their audience is doing something interesting. They're listening to three-hour episodes, taking notes in Notion, building personal wikis, clipping quotes for Twitter threads. The audience is refining the content by hand, one listener at a time, because no systematic version exists.

Eric Jorgensen saw this with Naval Ravikant. He took Naval's public tweets and podcast appearances, organized them into chapters, and published The Almanac of Naval Ravikant. Naval didn't write a word. He authorized it - gave his blessing to someone else's curation. The book has moved over a million copies and it's free.

That was a one-off. What if it were a pipeline?

The pipeline exists. I've been running it, and the economics look nothing like traditional publishing.

Here's what the refinery produces from a single podcast corpus:

Books. Not ghostwritten-from-scratch books where someone interviews the author for twenty hours and fabricates a narrative. Compiled books - the speaker's actual words, reorganized and edited, with sixty percent editorial voice and ten percent direct quotes and every claim traced to a specific episode. Fair use compliant. Companion to the original, not substitute. The creator approves an outline and a final draft. That's their total involvement.

Wikis. Searchable encyclopedias built from the full transcript archive. Every framework, every guest, every protocol cross-referenced and linked. Obsidian-style markdown that works as a static site. I've built eight of these. The Ray Peat wiki has 2,898 transcripts and 23,833 semantic chunks. The Scott Adams wiki has 1,151 episodes indexed. These are knowledge bases that didn't exist before because nobody had the tooling to build them.

Skills. This is the part most people haven't considered. Inside every methodology-heavy podcast, there are repeatable workflows that can be codified as executable instructions. An SEO podcast teaches keyword research - that becomes a skill an AI can run. A sales podcast teaches objection handling - that becomes a skill with templates and decision trees. A health podcast teaches supplement protocols - that becomes a skill with dosages and timing and contraindications. The knowledge locked in transcripts can become tools that actually do things.

Answer agents. A RAG-powered AI that has read every episode and answers questions in the creator's voice, grounded in their actual words, with citations back to the source material. Not a chatbot trained on the internet pretending to be someone. A knowledge base with a conversation layer.

One corpus. Four products. The crude goes in, and books, wikis, skills, and agents come out the other end.

The word for this is refinery, and I mean it literally.

An oil refinery takes one input - crude petroleum - and produces gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, kerosene, lubricants, and asphalt. Different products for different markets, all from the same barrel. The economics work because the refinery is expensive to build and cheap to operate. The capital expenditure is the plant. The marginal cost of processing one more barrel is close to nothing.

The knowledge refinery works the same way. The expensive part was building the pipeline - the transcription engine, the semantic chunker, the entity extractor, the indexer, the chapter-writing skill with its anti-AI detection and citation verification and legal compliance checks, the six-phase production process with human review gates. That took a year. Now the marginal cost of processing one more podcast corpus is maybe twenty dollars in API calls and a few days of editorial attention.

The creator doesn't need to know any of this. They hand over an RSS feed. They get back products.

Every interesting category creates its own vocabulary. The knowledge refinery creates this one:

Corpus. The creator's body of work treated as a unified asset. Not "content" - that word implies disposability. A corpus is a library. It appreciates.

Crude. Raw transcripts, unstructured, full of repetition and filler and buried insight. Valuable but unusable in this form.

Refining. The systematic transformation of crude into products. Not editing - that implies cleanup. Refining implies extraction, separation, recombination. You're producing multiple outputs from a single feedstock.

Authorization. The creator's blessing. They didn't write the book, but they stand behind it. The Jorgensen-Naval model. This is the relationship that makes everything else possible and everything else legal.

The backlog problem. The uncomfortable truth that most creators are sitting on more value in their archives than in their next episode.

I can tell you exactly who this is for because I've done the work for three of them already.

It's the podcaster with a hundred-plus episodes and fifty thousand followers who has never published a book. The one whose audience would buy a book tomorrow if it existed. The one who mentioned writing a book two years ago on the show and hasn't started because Scribe quoted forty thousand and that's money they'd rather spend on production.

It's the YouTuber with a methodology - a system they teach across dozens of videos - that has never been organized into a single reference. Their audience takes notes by hand. The knowledge exists in fragments scattered across a playlist.

It's the course creator who recorded forty hours of lectures and put them behind a paywall, not realizing that the transcripts alone - organized, indexed, refined - could be a product line. Books from the lectures. A wiki from the curriculum. Skills from the exercises.

The common thread: they've already created the raw material. They don't need to create anything new. They need a refinery.

What I'm describing is not a service. It's a category.

Services compete on price and trust. Categories create their own demand. "Ghostwriting" is a service - you hire someone to write for you. "Knowledge refining" is a category - the systematic transformation of a creator's existing corpus into multiple knowledge products using AI-augmented pipelines.

The difference matters because a service scales with headcount and a category scales with tooling. I can refine one podcast corpus myself. But the pipeline - the skills, the SOPs, the quality gates, the production process - can be operated by anyone I train. And the training is the pipeline itself. You learn knowledge refining by running the refinery.

That's the endgame. Not a boutique where I produce books for ten clients. A refinery that other people operate, processing corpora I'll never touch, producing products in niches I don't know anything about. The platform takes a cut. The skills get better with every run. The creators get products they couldn't build themselves.

And somewhere in the archive of every podcast that's ever published fifty episodes, there's a book waiting to be refined.

The question I keep asking myself is whether Keynes would recognize this as progress.

A technology that turns dormant archives into living knowledge. That takes the best thinking from a thousand podcast conversations and makes it searchable, quotable, teachable. That gives a creator's ideas a life beyond the feed.

Or a technology that turns every backlog into a production opportunity and every corpus into a pipeline and never lets anything just sit there, being what it is, without someone calculating the marginal return on refining it.

I don't have a clean answer. Both things are true. The refinery produces real value - books that people read, skills that people use, wikis that organize knowledge that was previously inaccessible. And the refinery is a machine, and machines have a way of running you if you're not careful about running them.

So I run it on things I care about. Niches where I have conviction. Creators whose work I'd read anyway. I point the pipeline at the Catholic land movement and rural newsletters and a psychologist who teaches breathing exercises to anxious people. Not because these are the most profitable niches - they're not - but because the refinery should serve something, and if I can't name what it serves, I'm just processing crude.

The intelligence is abundant. The transcripts are abundant. The question, as always, is what's worth refining.

They type "write me a blog post about productivity" and get back 800 words of perfectly structured nothing. It reads fine. It says nothing. The verbal equivalent of elevator music.

Then they wonder why AI-generated content all sounds the same.

The mistake is treating AI as a generator when it's actually a transformer. That distinction matters more than anything else you'll learn about these tools.

Generation means asking the machine to conjure something from nothing. You get what's in the training data—which is everything, which means nothing in particular.

Transformation means feeding it your raw material and asking it to refine. Your voice memo becomes a draft. Your transcript becomes an essay. Your scattered notes become a coherent argument. The AI doesn't replace your thinking. It extends it.

Garbage in, garbage out. Everyone knows that.

But flip it: treasure in, treasure out.

The Fairy Godmother worked her magic because Cinderella had something worth transforming. A heart of gold, even in rags. The magic revealed what was already there.

Same principle. Your source material is your moat. Your transcripts, your notes, your half-formed ideas captured at 2am—that's the ore. AI is the refinery.

I learned this by accident.

In 2023 I was polishing podcast transcripts, the kind of tedious work that makes you question your life choices. Hours of "um" and "you know" and sentences that started three times before finding their footing.

Then I highlighted a paragraph in Notion and clicked "Improve writing."

Three seconds later: the same ideas, tighter. The speaker's voice intact. Just... better.

I did it again. And again. An hour of editing collapsed into minutes.

That was the moment I understood. AI wasn't going to write for me. It was going to write with me. The raw material was still mine. The judgment was still mine. But the friction between rough and polished had nearly disappeared.

The problem with prompts is they don't remember anything.

Every conversation starts from zero. You explain your voice, your goals, your preferences—then do it again next session. And again. The AI has amnesia. You're the only one keeping track.

The second brain movement tried to solve this. Tiago Forte, August Bradley, the whole PKM ecosystem. Elaborate systems for capturing and organizing knowledge. Beautiful in theory. Maintenance hell in practice. Endless copying and pasting between apps that don't talk to each other.

Skills fix this.

A skill is a markdown file that makes your AI smarter. That's it. No API. No code. Just text that teaches.

You write down how you work—your voice, your patterns, your preferences—and the AI loads it automatically. Your context persists. Your standards compound. Every session starts where the last one ended.

.claude/
├── CLAUDE.md          # Who you are, how you work
└── skills/
    └── voice-matching/
        └── SKILL.md   # Instructions + examples

The technical term is progressive disclosure. The AI loads what it needs, when it needs it. But the effect is simpler than that: you stop repeating yourself.

Most skill collections miss the point entirely.

Browse GitHub for "awesome Claude skills" and you'll find repos full of generic instructions. "Write in a professional tone." "Be concise and clear." "Consider the audience."

This is useless. It's already in the training data. You're not teaching the model anything it doesn't know.

A good skill contains knowledge the model can't have without you:

Your actual writing samples, annotated.

Your specific anti-patterns—the phrases you never use.

Your workflow quirks, your client requirements, your house style.

The difference between a mediocre skill and a powerful one is the difference between a job description and an apprenticeship. One tells you what to do. The other shows you how someone actually does it.

I run content for an education company. Newsletters, podcasts, social, course materials. The whole operation runs through Claude.

What used to require a team—copywriter, editor, podcast producer, social manager—now runs through a stack of skills I built over months.

Not because AI replaced those roles. Because skills let me bring the judgment of each role to bear on everything I touch.

Voice Matching catches when drafts drift toward generic AI prose. Anti-AI Writing kills the telltale patterns—the correlative constructions, the throat-clearing, the hedge words. Transcript Polisher turns raw audio into readable text without losing the speaker's quirks.

None of this is magic. It's documented knowledge. The power comes from stacking.

The models are good enough. They've been good enough for a while.

The bottleneck now is context. Your ability to load the right knowledge at the right time. Your ability to build skills that compound. Your ability to create a system that learns because you taught it what to learn.

This is what I mean by context engineering. It's the skill behind the skills.

Templates are training wheels you never take off. Skills are the bicycle.

In 1997, Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue. Chess was "solved." Humans would never beat machines again.

What happened next is more interesting.

A new format emerged: freestyle chess. Human-machine teams competing against each other. And a strange pattern appeared. The best teams weren't the best humans or the best machines. They were average players with above-average skill at collaborating with their computers.

The combination beat everything.

That's where we are with writing. Pure human or pure AI, you lose. Human with skills—with context engineered to amplify your judgment—you win.

The gap is widening. Not between people who use AI and people who don't. Between people who engineer their context and people who type into a blank chat window.

There's a version of this that's dystopian. Black-box automation. Someone else's workflow imposed on your problems. You don't understand what's happening. You can't modify it. You're dependent on systems you didn't build.

Skills are the opposite.

You build them. You modify them. You understand exactly what's happening. The knowledge lives in markdown files you can read. When something breaks, you fix it. When something improves, you keep it.

This matters more than convenience. It's the difference between using a tool and being used by one.

Today, a single writer with a well-built skill stack can do the work of an entire production team.

I don't mean this theoretically. I mean I watched my own job transform. The tedious parts evaporated. What remained was judgment, taste, the work that actually matters.

The person who masters context engineering makes their old job obsolete. Not in the dystopian sense. In the liberation sense.

That's what this newsletter is about. Each week, one skill. Portable. Documented. Yours to modify.

The model is smart enough. The question is whether you'll catch up.

Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr. challenged Americans to complete 100 pushups and 50 pull-ups as fast as possible, and they did it themselves—posting impressive times.

But soon after, the mood darkened.

Hegseth recalled the generals to Washington for what MSNBC described as a “dressing down.”

This was part of the Department of Defense’s rebrand—or rather, reversion—to the Department of War.

Now, that sounds somewhat ominous—bellicose, even.

But the substance of the speech was hard to disagree with. Among the directives: no more DEI offices, no more “identity months,” and as Hegseth put it bluntly, “no more dudes in dresses.” He announced the end of what he called the “woke garbage” that had infected the department.

“As I’ve said before and will say again,” Hegseth declared, “we are done with that $#@*.”

The particular headline that caught my attention, however, was about the return to earlier standards for physical fitness: gender-neutral physical standards for combat roles, daily physical training for all service members, plus mandatory PT tests twice a year for everyone including generals.

“Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops,” Hegseth said.

“Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world.”

You could call this rhetoric unstatesmanlike.

But I hear echoes of JFK, who once said there was “nothing… more unfortunate than to have soft, chubby, fat-looking children who go to watch their school play basketball every Saturday and regard that as their week’s exercise.”

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What the Greeks Knew

In December 1960, just weeks before his inauguration, Kennedy published “The Soft American” in Sports Illustrated—a sweeping essay that opened with the ancient Greeks (reproduced below, in full text, as well as my proprietary deepfake audio).

“Beginning more than 2,500 years ago,” Kennedy wrote, “men thronged every four years to the sacred grove of Olympia, under the shadow of Mount Cronus, to compete in the most famous athletic contests of history—the Olympian games.”

The Greeks, he continued, “prized physical excellence and athletic skills among man’s great goals and among the prime foundations of a vigorous state.” Kennedy then traced this knowledge through Western civilization: “from the mens sana in corpore sano of the Romans to the British belief that the playing fields of Eton brought victory on the battlefields of Europe.”

His point was profound: “The knowledge that the physical well-being of the citizen is an important foundation for the vigor and vitality of all the activities of the nation is as old as Western civilization itself.”

This was the original culture war. The war over civilization itself. (Dudes in dresses are downstream of this.)

The recognition that a society’s physical vitality and its capacity for self-governance are inseparable. The Greeks didn’t produce philosophy, drama, and democratic institutions despite their emphasis on physical excellence. They produced them because of it. A people capable of great physical feats are capable of great intellectual and moral feats.

Kennedy then presented the evidence of American decline: The Kraus-Weber studies showed 57.9% of American children failing basic fitness tests, compared to just 8.7% of European children. In strength tests specifically, 35.7% of American children failed, while only 1.1% of Europeans did—and among Austrian and Swiss youth, the failure rate was as low as 0.5%.

I don’t know how the kids today stack up to their European counterparts, but I know they haven’t gotten any fitter.

JFK framed this as a national security crisis: “Our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.”

But Kennedy went further, connecting physical fitness to America’s ideological struggle: “We face in the Soviet Union a powerful and implacable adversary determined to show the world that only the Communist system possesses the vigor and determination necessary to satisfy awakening aspirations for progress and the elimination of poverty and want.”

The Cold War would be won by demonstrating that free people could be more capable, vigorous, and energetic than those living under totalitarian control.

(Side note: while elite Soviet sports science continued to outpace the United States, their average citizen suffered a host of physical maladies resulting from the general poverty, scarcity and desolation that came from living under communism.)

Kennedy concluded: “For physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body; it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity. The relationship between the soundness of the body and the activities of the mind is subtle and complex. Much is not yet understood. But we do know what the Greeks knew: that intelligence and skill can only function at the peak of their capacity when the body is healthy and strong; that hardy spirits and tough minds usually inhabit sound bodies.”

Read today, Kennedy’s essay feels prophetic. You cannot have a vigorous democracy run by people too soft to climb a flight of stairs. You cannot have a dynamic population that lacks the physical energy to sustain focused work. You cannot project strength abroad when your own citizens embody weakness.

This is the framework Hegseth should be using. The ultimate culture war, if we must call it that, is between those who recognize the objective standards of health, beauty, and capability honored by every successful civilization in history, and those who pretend such standards are oppressive social constructs.

Reality, after all, is the only objective test of truth. Did you win the battle? Did you build the stadium? Could you keep pace with your fellow soldiers on a long march into combat? The weight of the rucksack doesn’t care about your politics or your feelings.

I think this is what Hegseth is trying—however crudely—to restore.

Commands Without Methods

Lest Kennedy be accused of punching down at chubby youth, it’s worth remembering that his 50-mile march directive was, like Hegseth’s speech, aimed at top brass. Likewise, Teddy Roosevelt’s original marching order had targeted officers who were commanding their troops into battle, which included lengthy marches by necessity.

For both presidents, the 50-mile march was about putting skin in the game—aligning the incentives of those who would give the orders with those who would bear their burden.

This principle becomes more timely when our elected officials are weighing whether to escalate a new round of conflicts abroad—Iran, Venezuela, and whoever else those countries might pull in with them.

These are dangerous times.

Hegseth’s speech might be interpreted as war drums beating. But a more hopeful interpretation is that he wants to avoid war by making it more costly—again, skin in the game. In his speech, Hegseth quoted Eugene Sledge’s World War II memoir:

“War is brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste. Combat leaves an indelible mark on those who are forced to endure it. The only redeeming factors are my comrades’ incredible bravery and their devotion to each other.”

Hegseth goes on to castigate the cowardly politicians who, having never seen war themselves, are all too eager to commit troops to far-flung regions where America has questionable interests. These are the same people who talk about “kinetic operations” and “overseas contingency operations” instead of calling it what war really is: sending young men to kill and die.

“Peace through strength” is not a new mantra, nor is it the Orwellian oxymoron it might sound like on first hearing. Kennedy, Roosevelt, and many other presidents have espoused the virtues of hegemonic American power—the Pax Americana—a katechonic force that restrains chaotic violence with its orderly imposition of a clear world order through the threat of (or actual) violence.

It’s hard to take Hegseth’s critics at MSNBC seriously when they scold him for lack of decorum or call him crazed. He’s espousing views that the average Democrat in the 1960s—even a liberal democrat, like Kennedy—would have taken for granted. When mainstream norms have drifted so far that basic physical fitness standards sound partisan, perhaps we need a Hegseth-type who is willing to say them out loud.

But there is a risk in this approach—one that Kennedy understood and Hegseth seems to have missed.

It’s one thing to dress down fat generals. It’s another to provide them the method to get fit. Kennedy went beyond rhetoric. He created the President’s Council on Youth Fitness, funded research into physical education programs, and provided schools with specific guidance on how to improve. He made it a federal priority with resources and roadmaps.

Hegseth has restored standards and delivered the rebuke. But for the rank and file who lack his warrior-discipline or Kennedy’s agency, “stop being fat” isn’t a strategy. Commands without methods breed resentment, not results. You can shame people into attempting change, but without a clear path forward, entropy always wins. The military is no exception to the laws of thermodynamics.

This moment is an opportunity to invoke American tradition and provide what that tradition actually offered: practical guidance. Roosevelt modeled “the strenuous life” and explained how to live it. Kennedy diagnosed American softness and prescribed specific fitness programs.

Better yet would be to couch these reforms in Kennedy’s civilizational framework: we restore physical standards because every successful society in history has recognized that physical vitality and national vitality are inseparable. This isn’t about left or right. It’s about up or down, strong or weak, capable or incapable.

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I’ve written about the 50-mile march for years now, and I always wrestle with a sense of false bravado. Maybe Hegseth, for all his toughness and discipline, wrestles with it too. We are not the men of the Greatest Generation. We’ve fallen a long way. And maybe this honest recognition ought to be the starting point, instead of triumphalism.

Kennedy and Roosevelt both wrestled with their own infirmities. Kennedy’s chronic back pain kept him on crutches in private. Roosevelt’s childhood asthma nearly killed him. Yet both became icons of physical vigor. As St. Paul writes, our power is perfected in weakness.

Kennedy’s fitness initiatives never produced results. Our national fitness has declined steadily despite them. But Kennedy understood something Hegseth seems to have missed: the cultural change doesn’t start with fat generals in the Pentagon or recruits in boot camp. It starts much earlier.

Kennedy’s essay called for a return to vigorous childhood play—kids actually running, climbing, testing their bodies on playgrounds and playing fields rather than sitting as spectators. “We do not want our children to become a generation of spectators,” he wrote. “Rather, we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life.”

He was right. By the time someone shows up overweight to basic training, you’re fighting decades of sedentary habits, metabolic damage, and learned helplessness around physical challenge. You can set all the standards you want, but if children spend their formative years indoors, staring at screens, never learning what their bodies can do, you’ll always be fighting uphill.

Standards matter—they give us something to test reality against. But the most important work happens long before anyone takes a fitness test. It happens when kids discover through play that their bodies are capable of hard things.

For adults who missed that foundation—and that’s most of us now—we need an equivalent discovery process. Not boot camp intensity that breaks people down, but a progressive method that builds them up. This is where the 50-mile march becomes essential, not as a test to pass, but as a training protocol that proves to yourself over months what childhood play should have taught: that you’re capable of far more than you think.

55 years elapsed between Roosevelt’s call in 1908 and Kennedy’s revival in 1963. We’re now 62 years past Kennedy. The tradition is overdue for a revival—but this time with the missing piece: a method of meeting the standard.

The Soft American

By President-Elect John F. Kennedy
December 26, 1960
Sports Illustrated

Beginning more than 2,500 years ago, from all quarters of the Greek world men thronged every four years to the sacred grove of Olympia, under the shadow of Mount Cronus, to compete in the most famous athletic contests of history—the Olympian games.

During the contest a sacred truce was observed among all the states of Greece as the best athletes of the Western world competed in boxing and foot races, wrestling and chariot races for the wreath of wild olive which was the prize of victory. When the winners returned to their home cities to lay the Olympian crowns in the chief temples they were greeted as heroes and received rich rewards. For the Greeks prized physical excellence and athletic skills among man’s great goals and among the prime foundations of a vigorous state.

Thus the same civilizations which produced some of our highest achievements of philosophy and drama, government and art, also gave us a belief in the importance of physical soundness which has become a part of Western tradition; from the mens sana in corpore sano of the Romans to the British belief that the playing fields of Eton brought victory on the battlefields of Europe. This knowledge, the knowledge that the physical well-being of the citizen is an important foundation for the vigor and vitality of all the activities of the nation, is as old as Western civilization itself. But it is a knowledge which today, in America, we are in danger of forgetting.

The first indication of a decline in the physical strength and ability of young Americans became apparent among United States soldiers in the early stages of the Korean War. The second came when figures were released showing that almost one out of every two young Americans was being rejected by Selective Service as mentally, morally or physically unfit. But the most startling demonstration of the general physical decline of American youth came when Dr. Hans Kraus and Dr. Sonja Weber revealed the results of 15 years of research centering in the Posture Clinic of New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital—results of physical fitness tests given to 4,264 children in this country and 2,870 children in Austria, Italy and Switzerland.

The findings showed that despite our unparalleled standard of living, despite our good food and our many playgrounds, despite our emphasis on school athletics, American youth lagged far behind Europeans in physical fitness. Six tests for muscular strength and flexibility were given; 57.9% of the American children failed one or more of these tests, while only 8.7% of the European youngsters failed.

A Consistent Decline

Especially disheartening were the results of the five strength tests: 35.7% of American children failed one or more of these, while only 1.1% of the Europeans failed, and among Austrian and Swiss youth the rate of failure was as low as .5%.

As a result of the alarming Kraus-Weber findings President Eisenhower created a Council on Youth Fitness at the Cabinet level and appointed a Citizens Advisory Committee on the Fitness of American Youth, composed of prominent citizens interested in fitness. Over the past five years the physical fitness of American youth has been discussed in forums, by committees and in leading publications. A 10-point program for physical fitness has been publicized and promoted. Our schools have been urged to give increased attention to the physical well-being of their students. Yet there has been no noticeable improvement. Physical fitness tests conducted last year in Britain and Japan showed that the youth of those countries were considerably more fit than our own children. And the annual physical fitness tests for freshmen at Yale University show a consistent decline in the prowess of young Americans; 51% of the class of 1951 passed these tests, 43% of the class of 1956 passed, and only 38%, a little more than a third, of the class of 1960 succeeded in passing the not overly rigorous examination.

Of course, physical tests are not infallible. They can distort the true health picture. There are undoubtedly many American youths and adults whose physical fitness matches and exceeds the best of other lands.

But the harsh fact of the matter is that there is also an increasingly large number of young Americans who are neglecting their bodies—whose physical fitness is not what it should be—who are getting soft. And such softness on the part of individual citizens can help to strip and destroy the vitality of a nation.

For the physical vigor of our citizens is one of America’s most precious resources. If we waste and neglect this resource, if we allow it to dwindle and grow soft then we will destroy much of our ability to meet the great and vital challenges which confront our people. We will be unable to realize our full potential as a nation.

Throughout our history we have been challenged to armed conflict by nations which sought to destroy our independence or threatened our freedom. The young men of America have risen to those occasions, giving themselves freely to the rigors and hardships of warfare. But the stamina and strength which the defense of liberty requires are not the product of a few weeks’ basic training or a month’s conditioning. These only come from bodies which have been conditioned by a lifetime of participation in sports and interest in physical activity. Our struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America.

Thus, in a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.

However, we do not, like the ancient Spartans, wish to train the bodies of our youths merely to make them more effective warriors. It is our profound hope and expectation that Americans will never again have to expend their strength in armed conflict.

But physical fitness is as vital to the activities of peace as to those of war, especially when our success in those activities may well determine the future of freedom in the years to come. We face in the Soviet Union a powerful and implacable adversary determined to show the world that only the Communist system possesses the vigor and determination necessary to satisfy awakening aspirations for progress and the elimination of poverty and want. To meet the challenge of this enemy will require determination and will and effort on the part of all Americans. Only if our citizens are physically fit will they be fully capable of such an effort.

For physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body; it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity. The relationship between the soundness of the body and the activities of the mind is subtle and complex. Much is not yet understood. But we do know what the Greeks knew: that intelligence and skill can only function at the peak of their capacity when the body is healthy and strong; that hardy spirits and tough minds usually inhabit sound bodies.

In this sense, physical fitness is the basis of all the activities of our society. And if our bodies grow soft and inactive, if we fail to encourage physical development and prowess, we will undermine our capacity for thought, for work and for the use of those skills vital to an expanding and complex America.

Thus the physical fitness of our citizens is a vital prerequisite to America’s realization of its full potential as a nation, and to the opportunity of each individual citizen to make full and fruitful use of his capacities.

It is ironic that at a time when the magnitude of our dangers makes the physical fitness of our citizens a matter of increasing importance, it takes greater effort and determination than ever before to build the strength of our bodies. The age of leisure and abundance can destroy vigor and muscle tone as effortlessly as it can gain time. Today human activity, the labor of the human body, is rapidly being engineered out of working life. By the 1970s, according to many economists, the man who works with his hands will be almost extinct.

Many of the routine physical activities which earlier Americans took for granted are no longer part of our daily life. A single look at the packed parking lot of the average high school will tell us what has happened to the traditional hike to school that helped to build young bodies. The television set, the movies and the myriad conveniences and distractions of modern life all lure our young people away from the strenuous physical activity that is the basis of fitness in youth and in later life.

Now It Is Time

Of course, modern advances and increasing leisure can add greatly to the comfort and enjoyment of life. But they must not be confused with indolence, with, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “slothful ease,” with an increasing deterioration of our physical strength. For the strength of our youth and the fitness of our adults are among our most important assets, and this growing decline is a matter of urgent concern to thoughtful Americans.

This is a national problem, and requires national action. President Eisenhower helped show the way through his own interest and by calling national attention to our deteriorating standards of physical fitness. Now it is time for the United States to move forward with a national program to improve the fitness of all Americans.

FIRST: We must establish a White House Committee on Health and Fitness to formulate and carry out a program to improve the physical condition of the nation. This committee will include the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and the Secretary of the Interior. The executive order creating the committee will clearly state its purpose, and coordinate its activities with the many federal programs which bear a direct relation to the problem of physical fitness.

SECOND: The physical fitness of our youth should be made the direct responsibility of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. This department should conduct—through its Office of Education and the National Institutes of Health—research into the development of a physical fitness program for the nation’s public schools. The results of this research shall be made freely available to all who are interested. In addition, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare should use all its existing facilities to attack the lack of youth fitness as a major health problem.

THIRD: The governor of each state will be invited to attend an annual National Youth Fitness Congress. This congress will examine the progress which has been made in physical fitness during the preceding year, exchange suggestions for improving existing programs and provide an opportunity to encourage the states to implement the physical fitness program drawn up by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Our states are anxious to participate in such programs, to make sure that their youth have the opportunity for full development of their bodies as well as their minds.

FOURTH: The President and all departments of government must make it clearly understood that the promotion of sports participation and physical fitness is a basic and continuing policy of the United States. By providing such leadership, by keeping physical fitness in the forefront of the nation’s concerns, the federal government can make a substantial contribution toward improving the health and vigor of our citizens.

But no matter how vigorous the leadership of government, we can fully restore the physical soundness of our nation only if every American is willing to assume responsibility for his own fitness and the fitness of his children. We do not live in a regimented society where men are forced to live their lives in the interest of the state. We are, all of us, as free to direct the activities of our bodies as we are to pursue the objects of our thought. But if we are to retain this freedom, for ourselves and for generations yet to come, then we must also be willing to work for the physical toughness on which the courage and intelligence and skill of man so largely depend.

All of us must consider our own responsibilities for the physical vigor of our children and of the young men and women of our community. We do not want our children to become a generation of spectators. Rather, we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life.

This virtuous cycle is the engine of the program we are embarking on. It is a philosophy of action—a commitment to forward movement—that builds on itself.

The journey begins with the man who first gave this philosophy its modern voice.

Theodore Roosevelt’s “Strenuous Life” speech featured everything that would get you canceled in 2025: imperialism, fat-shaming, gender essentialism, and the suggestion that some cultures are better than others.

But strip away the Spanish-American War apologetics and you’re left with an accurate diagnosis: prosperity without purpose creates rot. Roosevelt saw it beginning, and we’re now living in its terminal stage.

Note: I used a voice cloning tool, sampled on actual Teddy Roosevelt recordings from 1912, to recreate the speech in the audio recording connected to this post. Roosevelt had a notoriously high-pitched voice.

In 1899, the young Governor of New York stood before his audience in Chicago. America had won the Spanish-American War with almost casual ease. The industrial revolution was making the country richer than people could have imagined just a few decades prior. Electric lights were replacing candles, railroads had conquered distance, and a new invention called the automobile was beginning to appear on city streets. It seemed like the best time in history to be alive.

But Roosevelt had concerns.

He saw what comfort had done to the Chinese Empire—once the world’s most advanced civilization, now carved up by European powers like a Thanksgiving turkey. He saw what ease had done to Spain—an empire that once ruled half the world, defeated by an upstart nation barely a century old. History taught a brutal lesson: every great power thought it would be different, but none were.

Roosevelt came to Chicago to tell the people that life without struggle was just another form of death:

“I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife.”

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Roosevelt hadn’t always been a paragon of vigor. As a child, he was so weak his father built him a home gym out of pity. Young “Teddy” suffered from debilitating asthma, couldn’t walk up stairs without gasping, and was bullied by children half his age. Doctors told his parents he might not survive to adulthood. His father, Theodore Sr., delivered an ultimatum:

“Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body.”

And so he transformed himself from an asthmatic invalid into a man who could lead cavalry charges and hunt grizzlies. By 18, he was boxing at Harvard. At 26, he was hunting buffalo in the Dakotas. By 39, he was leading the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill. And by 42, he’d be the youngest president in American history. He earned his strength, and that’s why he had the authority to demand it from others.

Half a century later, JFK saw the same disease spreading. He gave it a different name—“The Soft American”—but proposed the same solution in just a slightly different way. Kennedy’s ‘life of vigor’ and Roosevelt’s ‘strenuous life’ are not two sides of the same coin. They are the same side of the same coin—the American eagle, carrying a sheaf of arrows in one claw and an olive branch in the other. Peace through strength, and the projection of raw American energy in lieu of military intervention.

The other side of the coin bears the youthful face of the last American President to embody youthful vigor.

But what Roosevelt and Kennedy voiced was just the opening act. They couldn’t have imagined a nation where 70% of young people would be too out-of-shape for military service. Where the average man has the grip strength of his grandmother when she was his age. And where chronic disease is the norm.

In hindsight, Roosevelt’s imperialism may have been misguided, but his basic premise wasn’t. Civilizations that choose comfort over capability get conquered by those that don’t. The only difference now is we’re conquering ourselves. No foreign power needs to invade when we’re already surrendering to our base desires for ease.

America has no true rivals on the global stage, yet we’re losing a war against entropy. The chaos and disorder in our culture, our food supply, our immune systems, and our metabolic pathways are winning by default because we’ve stopped resisting.

The JFK50 is not another optimization manual for people who want to live forever in bodies they’re afraid to use. The biohackers with their supplements and morning routines are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. As long as you remain in a state of timidity—what Roosevelt called being a “cumberer of the earth’s surface”—no amount of optimization will matter.

You must start with why strength matters at all. To impress Instagram? To extend your lifespan so you can consume more content? No—you cultivate vitality to fulfill your actual purpose, to be useful when life demands it, and to prove you deserve the prosperity you inherited.

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In my libertarian days, I conceived of freedom in purely negative terms—the absence of constraint.

But Roosevelt offers an identify that transcends politics and positive economics.

True individual liberty demands positive action. Freedom isn’t the right to be weak. It’s the responsibility to be strong enough to preserve freedom itself.

Read his speech like a mirror. The timid citizen Roosevelt warned about is you and me.

It’s worth noting that Roosevelt was talking to men about masculine virtues. Yes, women who want to embrace the strenuous life can and should. But this is about reversing the crisis of male weakness.

“A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.”

Anyone scrolling social media past midnight knows this truth. But it’s not just that ease is unsatisfying—it unfits you for serious work. Your capacity for deep work and hard things atrophies like an unused muscle. And when life demands strength from you, you’ll be unable to even try.

“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”

This line almost reads like a corny motivational tweet, but remember that Roosevelt is not talking about starting a podcast or launching a dropshipping business. He’s talking about the fundamental question of whether you’ll engage with difficulty at all, or whether you’ll construct your entire life around avoiding it.

The gym bros have a saying, from bodybuilder Ron Coleman: “Everyone wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass heavy weights.”

Roosevelt would amend it: “Everyone wants to live greatly, but nobody wants to live strenuously.”

Whatever else he got wrong about empire, Roosevelt understood something fundamental about the American character when he invoked those who came before:

“Thank God for the iron in the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln.”

When Roosevelt gave this speech, Civil War veterans were in the audience—men who walked away from their farms and shops to preserve the Union. Over 600,000 died. Another 500,000 were maimed. Roosevelt watched their generation age and die, replaced by his own softer cohort. They were living proof that Americans could choose hardship over ease when it mattered. Who are our living proofs now? The 0.5% who serve in the military? The even smaller percentage who choose any form of voluntary hardship?

I’ll be honest—after attempting the original Presidential Fitness Challenge yesterday (I’ll share my results soon), I’m feeling tired and sore in muscles I forgot I had. We’re all soft Americans now, myself included. I write this admonition as someone who often scrolls Twitter on the couch, chooses indoor work in an air-conditioned office over pressing farm chores, and loves to sleep in.

If anything, the fact that the bar is so low should be motivating for the would-be ‘man in the arena.’ In the AI age, talk is cheap, which means that real, embodied action enjoys a premium. Get some skin in the game!

It’s easier said than done. Which is why it needs doing.

This Week’s Challenge: Establish Your Baseline

You can’t fix what you won’t measure. The Presidential Fitness Test terrorized American schoolchildren from 1966 to 2012, when kids twice a year would line up in gym class to prove their worth—or more often, their inadequacy. JFK created it after research showed American kids were physically inferior to their European counterparts.

The Presidential Fitness Test (Modified for Adults):

1. Pull-ups (dead hang to chin over bar, no time limit)

2. Push-ups (maximum in 1 minute)

3. Sit-ups (maximum in 1 minute)

4. Mile run (for time)

5. 4x30m “shuttle run” (timed sprints between cones, touching down on each side)

6. Sit-and-reach (flexibility - reach past your toes)

Or you could simplify and drop the shuttle run and flexibility test if you want to focus on the core strength/endurance metrics. The shuttle run was often the most hated part because it required setting up cones and doing those awkward turns.

THE STRENUOUS LIFE

SPEECH BEFORE THE HAMILTON CLUB, CHICAGO, APRIL 10, 1899

In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the West, men of the State which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men who pre-eminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.

A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask only that what every self-respecting American demands from himself and from his sons shall be demanded of the American nation as a whole. Who among you would teach your boys that ease, that peace, is to be the first consideration in their eyes—to be the ultimate goal after which they strive? You men of Chicago have made this city great, you men of Illinois have done your share, and more than your share, in making America great, because you neither preach nor practice such a doctrine. You work yourselves, and you bring up your sons to work. If you are rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons that though they may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the necessity of working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in historical research—work of the type we most need in this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects most honor upon the nation. We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If the freedom thus purchased is used aright, and the man still does actual work, though of a different kind, whether as a writer or a general, whether in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure, he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labor as a period, not of preparation, but of mere enjoyment, even though perhaps not of vicious enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a cumberer of the earth’s surface, and he surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.

In the last analysis a healthy state can exist only when the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome them; not to seek ease, but to know how to wrest triumph from toil and risk. The man must be glad to do a man’s work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and to keep those dependent upon him. The woman must be the housewife, the helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children. In one of Daudet’s powerful and melancholy books he speaks of “the fear of maternity, the haunting terror of the young wife of the present day.” When such words can be truthfully written of a nation, that nation is rotten to the heart’s core. When men fear work or fear righteous war, when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom; and well it is that they should vanish from the earth, where they are fit subjects for the scorn of all men and women who are themselves strong and brave and high-minded.

As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. If, in 1861, the men who loved the Union had believed that peace was the end of all things, and war and strife the worst of all things, and had acted up to their belief, we would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, we would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, besides saving all the blood and treasure we then lavished, we would have prevented the heartbreak of many women, the dissolution of many homes, and we would have spared the country those months of gloom and shame when it seemed as if our armies marched only to defeat. We could have avoided all this suffering simply by shrinking from strife. And if we had thus avoided it, we would have shown that we were weaklings, and that we were unfit to stand among the great nations of the earth. Thank God for the iron in the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln, and bore sword or rifle in the armies of Grant! Let us, the children of the men who proved themselves equal to the mighty days, let us, the children of the men who carried the great Civil War to a triumphant conclusion, praise the God of our fathers that the ignoble counsels of peace were rejected; that the suffering and loss, the blackness of sorrow and despair, were unflinchingly faced, and the years of strife endured; for in the end the slave was freed, the Union restored, and the mighty American Republic placed once more as a helmeted queen among nations.

We of this generation do not have to face a task such as that our fathers faced, but we have our tasks, and woe to us if we fail to perform them! We can not, if we would, play the part of China, and be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders, taking no interest in what goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling commercialism; heedless of the higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk, busying ourselves only with the wants of our bodies for the day, until suddenly we should find, beyond a shadow of question, what China has already found, that in this world the nation that has trained itself to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities. If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world. We can not avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill. In 1898 we could not help being brought face to face with the problem of war with Spain. All we could decide was whether we should shrink like cowards from the contest, or enter into it as beseemed a brave and high-spirited people; and, once in, whether failure or success should crown our banners. So it is now.

We can not avoid the responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines. All we can decide is whether we shall meet them in a way that will redound to the national credit, or whether we shall make of our dealings with these new problems a dark and shameful page in our history. To refuse to deal with them at all merely amounts to dealing with them badly. We have a given problem to solve. If we undertake the solution, there is, of course, always danger that we may not solve it aright; but to refuse to undertake the solution simply renders it certain that we can not possibly solve it aright. The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills “stern men with empires in their brains”—all these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties; shrink from seeing us build a navy and an army adequate to our needs; shrink from seeing us do our share of the world’s work, by bringing order out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from which the valor of our soldiers and sailors has driven the Spanish flag. These are the men who fear the strenuous life, who fear the only national life which is really worth leading. They believe in that cloistered life which saps the hardy virtues in a nation, as it saps them in the individual; or else they are wedded to that base spirit of gain and greed which recognizes in commercialism the be-all and end-all of national life, instead of realizing that, though an indispensable element, it is, after all, but one of the many elements that go to make up true national greatness. No country can long endure if its foundations are not laid deep in the material prosperity which comes from thrift, from business energy and enterprise, from hard, unsparing effort in the fields of industrial activity; but neither was any nation ever yet truly great if it relied upon material prosperity alone. All honor must be paid to the architects of our material prosperity, to the great captains of industry who have built our factories and our railroads, to the strong men who toil for wealth with brain or hand; for great is the debt of the nation to these and their kind. But our debt is yet greater to the men whose highest type is to be found in a statesman like Lincoln, a soldier like Grant. They showed by their lives that they recognized the law of work, the law of strife; they toiled to win a competence for themselves and those dependent upon them; but they recognized that there were yet other and even loftier duties—duties to the nation and duties to the race.

We can not sit huddled within our own borders and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond. Such a policy would defeat even its own end; for as the nations grow to have ever wider and wider interests, and are brought into closer and closer contact, if we are to hold our own in the struggle for naval and commercial supremacy, we must build up our power without our own borders. We must build the Isthmian Canal, and we must grasp the points of vantage which will enable us to have our say in deciding the destiny of the oceans of the East and the West.

So much for the commercial side. From the standpoint of international honor the argument is even stronger. The guns that thundered off Manila and Santiago left us echoes of glory, but they also left us a legacy of duty. If we drove out a medieval tyranny only to make room for savage anarchy, we had better not have begun the task at all. It is worse than idle to say that we have no duty to perform, and can leave to their fates the islands we have conquered. Such a course would be the course of infamy. It would be followed at once by utter chaos in the wretched islands themselves. Some stronger, manlier power would have to step in and do the work, and we would have shown ourselves weaklings, unable to carry to successful completion the labors that great and high-spirited nations are eager to undertake.

The work must be done; we can not escape our responsibility; and if we are worth our salt, we shall be glad of the chance to do the work—glad of the chance to show ourselves equal to one of the great tasks set modern civilization. But let us not deceive ourselves as to the importance of the task. Let us not be misled by vainglory into underestimating the strain it will put on our powers. Above all, let us, as we value our own self-respect, face the responsibilities with proper seriousness, courage, and high resolve. We must demand the highest order of integrity and ability in our public men who are to grapple with these new problems. We must hold to a rigid accountability those public servants who show unfaithfulness to the interests of the nation or inability to rise to the high level of the new demands upon our strength and our resources.

Of course we must remember not to judge any public servant by any one act, and especially should we beware of attacking the men who are merely the occasions and not the causes of disaster. Let me illustrate what I mean by the army and the navy. If twenty years ago we had gone to war, we should have found the navy as absolutely unprepared as the army. At that time our ships could not have encountered with success the fleets of Spain any more than nowadays we can put untrained soldiers, no matter how brave, who are armed with archaic black-powder weapons, against well-drilled regulars armed with the highest type of modern repeating rifle. But in the early eighties the attention of the nation became directed to our naval needs. Congress most wisely made a series of appropriations to build up a new navy, and under a succession of able and patriotic Secretaries, of both political parties, the navy was gradually built up, until its material became equal to its splendid personnel, with the result that in the summer of 1898 it leaped to its proper place as one of the most brilliant and formidable fighting navies in the entire world. We rightly pay all honor to the men controlling the navy at the time it won these great deeds, honor to Secretary Long and Admiral Dewey, to the captains who handled the ships in action, to the daring lieutenants who braved death in the smaller craft, and to the heads of bureaus at Washington who saw that the ships were so commanded, so armed, so equipped, so well engined, as to ensure the best results. But let us also keep ever in mind that all of this would not have availed if it had not been for the wisdom of the men who during the preceding fifteen years had built up the navy. Keep in mind the Secretaries of the Navy during those years; keep in mind the Senators and Congressmen who by their votes gave the money necessary to build and to armor the ships, to construct the great guns, and to train the crews; remember also those who actually did build the ships, the armor, and the guns; and remember the admirals and captains who handled battleship, cruiser, and torpedo-boat on the high seas, alone and in squadrons, developing the seamanship, the gunnery, and the power of acting together, which their successors utilized so gloriously at Manila and off Santiago. And, gentlemen, remember the converse, too. Remember that justice has two sides. Be just to those who built up the navy, and, for the sake of the future of the country, keep in mind those who opposed its building up. Read the “Congressional Record.” Find out the Senators and Congressmen who opposed the grants for building the new ships; who opposed the purchase of armor, without which the ships were worthless; who opposed any adequate maintenance for the Navy Department, and strove to cut down the number of men necessary to man our fleets. The men who did these things were one and all working to bring disaster on the country. They have no share in the glory of Manila, in the honor of Santiago. They have no cause to feel proud of the valor of our sea-captains, of the renown of our flag. Their motives may or may not have been good, but their acts were heavily fraught with evil. They did ill for the national honor, and we won in spite of their sinister opposition.

Now, apply all this to our public men of to-day. Our army has never been built up as it should be built up. I shall not discuss with an audience like this the puerile suggestion that a nation of seventy millions of freemen is in danger of losing its liberties from the existence of an army of one hundred thousand men, three-fourths of whom will be employed in certain foreign islands, in certain coast fortresses, and on Indian reservations. No man of good sense and stout heart can take such a proposition seriously. If we are such weaklings as the proposition implies, then we are unworthy of freedom in any event. To no body of men in the United States is the country so much indebted as to the splendid officers and enlisted men of the regular army and navy. There is no body from which the country has less to fear, and none of which it should be prouder, none which it should be more anxious to upbuild.

Our army needs complete reorganization,—not merely enlarging,—and the reorganization can only come as the result of legislation. A proper general staff should be established, and the positions of ordnance, commissary, and quartermaster officers should be filled by detail from the line. Above all, the army must be given the chance to exercise in large bodies. Never again should we see, as we saw in the Spanish War, major-generals in command of divisions who had never before commanded three companies together in the field. Yet, incredible to relate, Congress has shown a queer inability to learn some of the lessons of the war. There were large bodies of men in both branches who opposed the declaration of war, who opposed the ratification of peace, who opposed the upbuilding of the army, and who even opposed the purchase of armor at a reasonable price for the battleships and cruisers, thereby putting an absolute stop to the building of any new fighting-ships for the navy. If, during the years to come, any disaster should befall our arms, afloat or ashore, and thereby any shame come to the United States, remember that the blame will lie upon the men whose names appear upon the roll-calls of Congress on the wrong side of these great questions. On them will lie the burden of any loss of our soldiers and sailors, of any dishonor to the flag; and upon you and the people of this country will lie the blame if you do not repudiate, in no unmistakable way, what these men have done. The blame will not rest upon the untrained commander of untried troops, upon the civil officers of a department the organization of which has been left utterly inadequate, or upon the admiral with an insufficient number of ships; but upon the public men who have so lamentably failed in forethought as to refuse to remedy these evils long in advance, and upon the nation that stands behind those public men.

So, at the present hour, no small share of the responsibility for the blood shed in the Philippines, the blood of our brothers, and the blood of their wild and ignorant foes, lies at the thresholds of those who so long delayed the adoption of the treaty of peace, and of those who by their worse than foolish words deliberately invited a savage people to plunge into a war fraught with sure disaster for them—a war, too, in which our own brave men who follow the flag most pay with their blood for the silly, mock humanitarianism of the prattlers who sit at home in peace.

The army and the navy are the sword and the shield which this nation must carry if she is to do her duty among the nations of the earth—if she is not to stand merely as the China of the Western Hemisphere. Our proper conduct toward the tropic islands we have wrested from Spain is merely the form which our duty has taken at the moment. Of course we are bound to handle the affairs of our own household well. We must see that there is civic honesty, civic cleanliness, civic good sense in our home administration of city, State, and nation. We must strive for honesty in office, for honesty toward the creditors of the nation and of the individual; for the widest freedom of individual initiative where possible, and for the wisest control of individual initiative where it is hostile to the welfare of the many. But because we set our own household in order we are not thereby excused from playing our part in the great affairs of the world. A man’s first duty is to his own home, but he is not thereby excused from doing his duty to the State; for if he fails in this second duty it is under the penalty of ceasing to be a freeman. In the same way, while a nation’s first duty is within its own borders, it is not thereby absolved from facing its duties in the world as a whole; and if it refuses to do so, it merely forfeits its right to struggle for a place among the peoples that shape the destiny of mankind.

In the West Indies and the Philippines alike we are confronted by most difficult problems. It is cowardly to shrink from solving them in the proper way; for solved they must be, if not by us, then by some stronger and more manful race. If we are too weak, too selfish, or too foolish to solve them, some bolder and abler people must undertake the solution. Personally, I am far too firm a believer in the greatness of my country and the power of my countrymen to admit for one moment that we shall ever be driven to the ignoble alternative.

The problems are different for the different islands. Porto Rico is not large enough to stand alone. We must govern it wisely and well, primarily in the interest of its own people. Cuba is, in my judgment, entitled ultimately to settle for itself whether it shall be an independent State or an integral portion of the mightiest of Republics. But until order and stable liberty are secured, we must remain in the island to ensure them, and infinite tact, judgment, moderation, and courage must be shown by our military and civil representatives in keeping the island pacified, in relentlessly stamping out brigandage, in protecting all alike, and yet in showing proper recognition to the men who have fought for Cuban liberty. The Philippines offer a yet graver problem. Their population includes half-caste and native Christians, warlike Moslems, and wild pagans. Many of their people are utterly unfit for self-government, and show no signs of becoming fit. Others may in time become fit, but at present can only take part in self-government under a wise supervision, at once firm and beneficent. We have driven Spanish tyranny from the islands. If we now let it be replaced by savage anarchy, our work has been for harm and not for good. I have scant patience with those who fear to undertake the task of governing the Philippines, and who openly avow that they do fear to undertake it, or that they shrink from it because of the expense and trouble; but I have even scanter patience with those who make a pretence of humanitarianism to hide and cover their timidity, and who cant about “liberty” and the “consent of the governed,” in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men. Their doctrines, if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation. Their doctrines condemn your forefathers and mine for ever having settled in these United States.

England’s rule in India and Egypt has been of great benefit to England, for it has trained up generations of men accustomed to look at the larger and loftier side of public life. It has been of even greater benefit to India and Egypt. And finally, and most of all, it has advanced the cause of civilization. So, if we do our duty aright in the Philippines, we will add to that national renown which is the highest and finest part of national life, we will greatly benefit the people of the Philippine Islands, and, above all, we will play our part well in the great work of uplifting mankind. But to do this work, keep ever in mind that we must show in a very high degree the qualities of courage, of honesty, and of good judgment. Resistance must be stamped out. The first and all-important work to be done is to establish the supremacy of our flag. We must put down armed resistance before we can accomplish anything else, and there should be no parleying, no faltering, in dealing with our foe. As for those in our own country who encourage the foe, we can afford contemptuously to disregard them; but it must be remembered that their utterances are not saved from being treasonable merely by the fact that they are despicable.

When once we have put down armed resistance, when once our rule is acknowledged, then an even more difficult task will begin, for then we must see to it that the islands are administered with absolute honesty and with good judgment. If we let the public service of the islands be turned into the prey of the spoils politician, we shall have begun to tread the path which Spain trod to her own destruction. We must send out there only good and able men, chosen for their fitness, and not because of their partisan service, and these men must not only administer impartial justice to the natives and serve their own government with honesty and fidelity, but must show the utmost tact and firmness, remembering that, with such people as those with whom we are to deal, weakness is the greatest of crimes, and that next to weakness comes lack of consideration for their principles and prejudices.

I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.

That makes tomorrow Day 1 of a 50-day training program that will culminate in my annual 50-mile march.

I've come to think of the event as a benchmark. Have I maintained, improved, or degraded my health over the past year?

But the answer to that question is not yet set in stone. 50 days allows for a lot of conditioning.

MMA fighters do an 8-12 week "camp" in order to reach their peak fitness before their big fights. Tennis players do the same before Major tournaments, and I assume the same is true of other top competitors.

The “athlete of life” can train all year for the year-round competition that is life. But there is something to be said for a concentrated seasons of higher-intensity training. And absent a marquee athletic competition for everyday citizens, I had to invent one. Or rather, I had to revive the tradition that has given all of my physical efforts so much meaning over the past 6 years.

50 days is long enough to lose more than a few pounds of more than just water weight.

It’s long enough to gain some lean muscle or rather, build the underlying strength and adapt the body to the specific demand of long-distance walking.

Most importantly, it's long enough to develop sustainable, permanent habits so you don’t immediately revert to your old form.

And so, in the tradition of other time-limited challenges like 75 Hard, Whole 30, and Exodus 90, I propose the JFK 50.

The JFK50 Training Protocol

My training regimen this year will consist of daily walking/rucking (weighted walks), weekly runs, a focused and efficient strength program, plus mobility days between the harder workouts to recover. This will follow the four-day "Tetrad" cycle used by Philostratus in his ancient Roman gymnasium.

The other planks will include a flexible yet rigorous eating program that completely eliminates seed oils and junk food, and alternates between periods of high fat low carb, low-fat high-carb, and balanced macronutrients. I've modified Rob Faigin's macronutrient-cycling regime from Natural Hormone Enhancement, combining it with Ray Peat's pro-metabolic perspective and Anabology's "Honey Diet," to create a 5-day cycle that won't drive my wife crazy with absurd requests to change our family dinner routine due to my obsession with optimization.

After a long hiatus, I've returned to fasting (thanks Exodus!) and will be maintaining Wednesday and Fridays as OMAD—one meal a day—days.

My friend Michael Ostrolenk is one of my role models for disciplined peak performance. He recently reminded me of the ultimate importance of sleep.

So, I'm including a simple morning routine that includes hydration, stretching, grounding, and solar gazing, plus a wind-down routine of warm showers, baking soda, blue blockers and a consistent bed time of 9:30pm.

It's in vogue to mock the Huberman fanboys, who titrate their sun exposure to the exact lux level, weigh their supplements in grams, and dial in their morning routines to the millisecond. Much of that mockery is deserved. But taking society as a whole, are we erring on the side over-optimization, or under?

Sleep and the practices that support it are basic hygienes. I'd rather be mocked than be operating at 60% capacity.

Michael also reminded me of the importance of environmental design—are your surroundings contributing to the person you're trying to become?

First you create your environment; then your environment creates you.

For me, this means purging the pantry of things I don't want around, keeping my shopping list on point, and making my exercise platform an inviting place.

You might put a pull-up bar on the door of your office.

Even little things like positioning the shoes I wear for running at the door so they become signposts toward doing the thing I want to do.

It's easy to underestimate the power of inertia—both the static kind that keeps you stuck, and the kind that gets you where you're going.

And so every day of the JFK50, you are called to put one thing on your to-do list that changes your environment for the better.

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The Five Pillars

In previous years, I've boiled down the 4 pillars of the march as:

1. Metabolic conditioning (your cardiovascular fitness)

2. Metabolic flexibility (your ‘fuel efficiency’)

3. Strength (resistance capacity)

4. Grit, or endurance

But there is a fifth column—a mental muscle of sorts, that only gets stronger when you exercise it:

5. Agency

It's become something of a buzzword thanks to George Mack, who wrote an excellent essay on the topic.

JFK was high agency (you don't get to be President without it).

Teddy Roosevelt was high agency.

Charlie Kirk, whatever you thought of the man, was high agency.

It's not unique to Americans, but to embody the American spirit is to act with agency and see possibilities where Old World thinking might see only constraints and the need for a permit.

I anticipate a breakout year and renaissance for the 50-mile march, not this year but soon.

A wave of energy has been unleashed across the country that doesn't have many clear or productive outlets.

2026 is the 250th birthday of the United States, which lends a certain symbolic punch.

RFK Jr. and Pete Hegseth recently provoked the predictable breathless headlines from NPR and the NY Times when they raced to complete 100 push ups and 50 pull ups in under 10 minutes; and Trump just signed an Executive Order to bring back the Presidential Fitness Challenge.

These seem like steps in the right direction, and I applaud them for their individual agency, but there is a grain of truth behind the criticisms that—absent other reforms—the challenge will amount to a humiliation ritual for the mass of obese and out-of-shape kids who have been de-conditioned by a steady diet of ultra-processed foods, seed oils, and high-fructose corn syrup, combined with increasingly screen-dominated sedentary habits.

My friend, the historical kinesiologist Ron Jones criticized RFK and Hegseth’s move as a kind of PR stunt, that is out of touch with the reality of how unfit the average young person is. He has a point.

Setting an impossibly high bar won't get them from "fat to fit" any more than telling a drowning person to swim like Michael Phelps will save them from sinking. You need stepping stones, not pole vaults.

Michael Ostrolenk also makes an excellent point about the need for better rites of passage.

"Right now, the rites of passage are like you get drunk, you get laid, maybe… That's the thing you did to make sure you're a man."

Indigenous cultures had challenges that helped boys become men through genuine hardship and accomplishment. The 50-mile march fills this void.

"I think we need to start much younger having these challenges,” Michael says, “Something a little bit more physically challenging that causes mental toughness, emotional resiliency, self-mastery to some degree... that helps them recognize that they're physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually capable of much more than our present-day culture suggests they are."

Rites of passage require preparation.

With a healthy lifestyle and the right training, attempting a 50 mile march shifts from an irresponsible impossibility to a fitting mega-challenge: a once-a-year-kind of trial that gives purpose to the other 364 days, and makes all the smaller hardships (mental and physical) seem quaint in comparison.

It's not impossible, but I also recognize that I’m getting to an age where if I don't prepare, I'm being foolish.

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No One is Coming to Save You

There is a temptation to hope that solutions will come top-down from Washington D.C.

We can hope in earnest for structural, legislative and/or executive actions to unwind the perverse incentives in our food supply and environment that are making Americans sick.

But when it comes to physical activity, the best we can hope for is better role models.

I applaud Hegseth and RFK Jr. for putting some skin in the game, but we need thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of men taking up the call to embodied excellence.

JFK's line about asking what you can do for your country—though worn down to a cliche by decades of overuse—holds the answer to the question that Americans of good will are asking across the board.

What is to be done?

We don't need another Red Scare—however real the threat of leftism, communism fascism, or fill-in-the-blank may be.

And we don’t need ‘hate speech’ laws or some sort of warmed-over PATRIOT Act.

Wisdom suggests that those of us who feel ill about the direction of the country would be better off turning our attention to the areas under our greatest control.

Granted, self-improvement is a tired genre. I hate to think of myself as a knock-off Jordan Peterson, telling my readers to clean their room, or an Andrew Huberman reminding them to drink their AG-1.

But to the extent I have a platform, however small, I won't apologize for using it to encourage my readers to take responsibility for their health. Take responsibility for your strength. Increase your agency, your stamina, your energy, and your sense of purpose. Become a gritty, metabolically flexible, mentally resilient, well-rested, mission-driven beast.

Join the Beta Program

Over the next 50 days, I'll be sharing more specifics as I boot up my ‘pilot program’ with a few friends. And I’ll be sharing a few motivational readings, alongside some practical tips for training.

If you're interested in participating and organizing a march in your area, message me privately.

Stay tuned and stay moving.

Past Reflections

The Philosophy of the March

• Stop Poasting, Start Marching - Why digital activism is no substitute for embodied action. The 50-mile march as antidote to online culture wars.

• I Walked 50 Miles in a Day. Here's Why It's Worth Doing - The transformative power of voluntary hardship and what happens when you push past your perceived limits.

• Are You Ready for What's Coming? - Physical preparedness as civic duty in an uncertain world.

Training & Transformation

• The Mile 35 Shift - The epigenetic transformation that occurs during extreme endurance. Why mega-challenges create permanent change.

• Get Light. Get Lit. - The spiritual and metabolic dimensions of shedding excess and building capacity.

• The Ultimate Training Protocol - Combining ancient wisdom (Philostratus's Tetrad) with modern science for optimal training.

• Lighter, Better, Faster, Stronger - Walking technique, footwear philosophy, and the lost art of natural movement.

The Movement

• The JFK50 Challenge - Historical context and why Kennedy's fitness vision matters more than ever.

• 50-Mile Reboot - Lessons from failure and the importance of community in physical challenges.

Siempre Adelante - Always Forward

I've been thinking about this essay lately as I prepare for my annual 50-mile march coming up this Veterans Day.

This year, I'm doing something different. I'm systematizing t…

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A vigorous life is the best training for a 50-mile march, and a 50-mile march is the best training for a vigorous life.

We’re coming out of Northern California’s rainy season, and spring's brief, green, mercy is already surrendering to Bangor’s dry summer heat. With it, my window for lighting burn piles will end. Since November, the bulk of my hard workouts revolved around burn piles – sawing, stacking, and setting logs on fire with the tinder of their dried-up branches.

Without the added purpose of clearing land, it would be hard to find the motivation for this as mere exercise. Some find lifting heavy things to be its own reward, but I find it far more satisfying to throw them into a blazing furnace and watch them crackle.

During Lent, I tried to make up for lukewarm fasting with this laborious chore—a kind of penance by poison oak.

"Ora et labora," urges St. Benedict in his Rule for monastics—prayer and work.

Every man must have his "why".

A good, strong "why" makes meaning out of labora and impels you to exert yourself harder than you otherwise would or could.

It helps to have a "why" when you’re trudging up a hillside with a wheelbarrow and hit a stubborn rock, or singe the tips of your hair getting too close to a blazing fire.

It's essential to have a "why" when my glasses fall off while I'm waist-deep in poison oak.

Especially when I reached the property’s final frontier: the deep dark woods. The tangled thicket of oak and poison oak required me to wear nylon painter's coverall like some backwoods hazmat technician. Only instead of handling toxic waste, I was reclaiming long-abandoned footpaths from several seasons of neglect.

I have a theory that poison oak is possessed by an alien, malevolent intelligence that thrives on neglect. Like rattle snakes, mosquitos, star thistle and other things that bite, it finds its niche because of Man’s fall from grace, and neglect of his original job as gardener. Within my amateur theological scheme, Man is ultimately called to resume this vocation—but with full, conscious, and active participation rather than in Adam’s naive state of wonder. But in exile, Man must work the land "in the sweat of his face.”

My “why” for clearing the deep dark woods is several fold.

First, the effort itself is a well-rounded form of physical training.

Second, I am making a path for the countryside obstacle course I've envisioned since we first arrived here. It’s oddly satisfying to walk unhindered through a landscape that was once impassable, and to imagine what it could be in a couple more burn seasons.

But the third and deepest "why" that keeps me going is a sense of purpose and identity that has become more clear in the past year of living on the land: becoming an Athlete of Life.

Saint Paul first conceived this category, though we've largely forgotten it. In his letters, he frequently uses athletic metaphors: "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." He urges us to "run in such a way as to get the prize" and to discipline our bodies like athletes in training. For Paul, physical training paralleled spiritual discipline—both requiring sustained effort toward a higher purpose. While he acknowledged that "physical training is of some value," he saw it primarily as a tool for something greater.

On the first page of Georges Hébert's training manual for the natural method, he echoes this ancient wisdom: "The primary purpose of physical education is to develop general fitness, the foundation of health, while also building proficiency in all essential practical exercises."

The central concept is développement foncier—foundational development. While Hébert wasn't writing about spiritual life, his philosophy gets closer to the ideal of being strong to be useful rather than in pursuit of some vain discipline or specialized sport.

I consider it a supreme blessing to have fallen under Hébert's influence in my early twenties. Until then, I had specialized in distance running, which had already taken its toll with repetitive stress injuries and a general boredom with "exercise."

In 99% of cases of chronic sedentarism, the inactive person is not lazy. They're bored.

Stacked against the varied demands of our paleolithic ancestors or even the neolithic farmer, modernity asks little diversity of movement. Even the more enlightened corners of the fitness world regard non-sport exercise as something that fits in a separate container. It's a hygiene, like flossing your teeth.

Instead, I've come to think of movement as a practice: a skill to be learned, improved, and mastered. What used to fill the compartment of "exercise" now spreads across what Teddy Roosevelt called the strenuous life, what Ray Peat referred to as a stimulating life, and what Kennedy called a life of vigor.

For all of these men—Hébert, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Peat—health was good in itself but primarily as an enabler of higher things. For Hébert, this was voiced in his slogan, "be strong to be useful." For Roosevelt and Kennedy, it was bound up in the ideals of vigorous citizenship and American progress.

Life is too short for treadmills and siloed exercises you don't enjoy.

There is so much work to be done. Yet most people—even the active ones—expend their most arduous effort on spinning machines or elevating bricks on pulleys without building anything of lasting value.

We need to elevate a new category in the popular consciousness: the Athlete of Life who cultivates his virile energy in pursuit of a mission. He does not compete for trophies or train for specific sports. He reaches an elite level of functional capacity applied to his own real-world vision.

For me, this remains an aspirational identity. I am still making the path, still training for a mission that only reveals itself in increments, proportional to my capacity to receive it.

The Framework for Renewal

In years past, I've taken an ad hoc approach to my training for the 50-mile march, assuming a vigorous baseline lifestyle would carry me across the finish line.

However, with each passing year, I've encountered more difficulties from uncooperative body parts. The spirit is willing, but the ankles are weak. Winter pounds arrive easier; summer shedding grows harder. I could blame "aging" but I've come to see the real culprits as apathy and cumulative, unintentional stress.

To combat these dual nemeses of the vigorous life, I've been developing a training framework for renewal. There are many trendy discipline programs out there – from Exodus 90 to 75 Hard – that encourage ascetic practice for a set period of time. But not all of the practices are necessarily health-promoting (drinking a gallon of water per day or daily cold showers regardless of thyroid health, for example).

In my framework, askesis (discipline) takes a backseat to zoe (vitality). We are approaching the season of Pentecost, after all – not the penitential period of Lent. Furthermore, life is a marathon, not a sprint (though, ironically, the best training for a marathon ruck turns out to look more like a series of sprints than a string of stressful endurance feats).

My philosophy of foundational development has matured into what I'm tentatively calling the New Stress Synthesis – blending the generally anti-stress bioenergetic perspective of figures like Hans Selye and Ray Peat with the pro-stress “hormesis” perspective found in the mainstream of biohackers (think ice baths, fasting, and carnivore).

The synthesis is this: your must push your limits, without surpassing them. And in doing so, you increase the threshold at which stress sets in. So if and when life necessitates surpassing them, you’ve prepared such that the damage is limited.

The 50-mile march is the case in point. There is no getting around the fact that walking 50 miles in one day is a stressful event. It would be unwise to undertake it without preparation. But with the right training, we can mitigate the harms and transform it from a depleting ordeal into a fortifying trigger for growth and adaptation.

My training approach draws from the ancient Greek Tetrad – a four-day training cycle used by warriors and Olympic athletes. Each day had its purpose: preparation, intense training, active recovery, and moderate training. This natural rhythm allowed for sustained progress without burnout.

The goal is increasing the threshold at which you enter harmful stress by staying there only very briefly – just long enough to trigger adaptation. To expand your "production possibility frontier" (to borrow an economic term) of useful, purposeful output. So you can eventually work all day, sleep all night, and return to the same work the next morning with undiminished vigor.

I'm still prototyping this framework, and in the coming weeks I'll be writing more about the main pillars of the Athlete of Life's training:

1. Conditioning - Your ability to recover from a given amount of work.

2. Metabolic Flexibility - Your ability to switch efficiently between different fuel sources.

3. Grit - Your capacity to endure extreme conditions without triggering the stress response.

We’re expecting our fourth child in early July, so the timing of this year’s march remains uncertain. But the training won't be wasted regardless. Some challenges involve clearing poison oak and building burn piles. Others arrive swaddled in blankets. The Athlete of Life prepares for both.

A few weeks ago, I was mindlessly scrolling X on the couch when I happened upon this vintage photograph of French “fusilier” marines from the 1909:

"Hey!" I thought, "I know that look!"

These were clearly Hébert guys. Barefoot, minimally clothed, and standing with unmistakable posture: upright, open-chested, and ready. Their statuesque physiques showed the trademark Hébertiste development—strong core muscles (transverse abdominus) creating an "inner corset" that conveys strength without bulk.

If we trained like them, I noted, we would look like them.

The reply racked up 50,000 views in days. Why? I suspect it’s because people recognize true vitality when they see it. More than that, they desire real role models (not just museum busts) who can help them obtain it.

While today's fitness influencers showcase swollen, hunched physiques built in climate-controlled gyms, Hébert’s men embodied something different—functional strength developed through practical movement in natural settings. It’s a much more virile strength. Sure, some of the guys in the photo are obviously flexing, but the one in the front row second from left, for example. looks like he is standing in his natural pose.

I'm not claiming to match these men's physiques, but during periods when I've consistently practiced Hébert's methods, I’ve found that my body transforms remarkably quickly to meaningful demands. These aren't unattainable physiques requiring endless gym hours. Hébert insisted on efficiency, with his ‘maintenance sessions’ averaging just 20-30 minutes.

What matters is that your workouts incorporate the right elements to trigger an epigenetic shift. Stationary calisthenics and conventional sports won't cut it. You must become an "athlete of life," engaging all your physical capabilities through natural, practical movement—often outdoors, sometimes barefoot, always minimally clothed.

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Previous Installments

Foreword

Chapter 1: Principles of Natural Movement

Principles of Natural Training (Sections 1-3)

The Proper Training Session (Sections 4-6)

The Lost Art of Relaxation (Sections 7-12)

Finding the Sweet Spot (Sections 13-17)

Rigor + Nature = Vigor (Sections 21-26)

Strength in Song (Sections 27-33)

Chapter 2: Conducting the Lesson

The Wave Pattern Principle (Section 1)

If you've been following this series, you know that Chapter 1 introduced the philosophy of the Natural Method, while the first part of Chapter 2 so far has covered the ingenious "wave pattern" for training groups on a field.

But what if you don't have a proper training field? Or what if you're ready to take your training beyond controlled environments?

That's what today's installment addresses. Hébert outlines how to adapt his method to any environment—from narrow garden paths to wild forests.

For those who find traditional fitness boring or can’t motivate themselves at the gym, Hébert's wilderness approach offers a refreshing alternative. Instead of trudging along on a treadmill or counting dumbbell reps, you're scaling rock faces, crossing streams, and navigating varied terrain.

Translation challenges abounded in this section. The French term "parcours en pleine nature" could almost be rendered as "countryside parkour," but I've chosen "wilderness session" to avoid confusion with modern urban parkour—which, while derived from Hébert's methods, now carries associations with acrobatics that are far removed from his approach. The French "bonds et contre-bonds" becomes "bounds and counter-bounds," periods of alternating effort. Sprinting and resting, like a lion hunting.

If you've ever felt that childlike excitement scrambling up a hillside or balancing across a fallen tree, you've experienced what Hébert built his entire system around.

Our bodies are built for this kind of movement.

About 15 years ago, I experienced a chronic illness that left me without much lust for life or desire to do my go-to exercises like going to the gym or city running. What I did find, however, was that I could motivate myself to lift a log (which happened to be placed conveniently on the side of a track where I used to jog). I discovered Erwan LeCorre’s The Workout the World Forgot, and it woke my body from its slumber into a kind of primal frenzy. The inner motivation translated into vigorous outer movement. I built stamina and was able to overcome my chronic fatigue by feeding my body with what it perceived as real-world challenges—the kind completely missing from our modern society.

The wilderness session is the pinnacle of Hébertismé:

• No specialized equipment needed—just your body and the natural environment

• Built-in variety that prevents plateaus and boredom

• Practical skills developed rather than isolated muscles trained

And perhaps most importantly:

• The connection with nature that re-aligns you with your nature.

If you have kids, the wilderness approach is especially fitting. I am living on a 20-acre rural property with woods, paths, creeks, and rocks. When I take my kids out, they naturally engage in many of Hébert's movement families—climbing trees and rocks, carrying branches, and balancing across logs. They might not hit all ten movement families in a given romp, but they intuitively gravitate toward the movements ones that develop core capabilities.

Compare this to American PE classes that focus primarily on team sports, leaving the less athletically inclined children marginalized and inactive.

I favor a two-pronged approach to bringing back these methods:

1. In cities, we can reclaim spaces like soccer fields and athletic stadiums for proper Natural Method training—ideally incorporating this approach into physical education during school hours.

2. In rural areas, we can establish “Hébert centers” as training grounds for instructors who can take this vision back to urban communities.

This second prong is part of my medium to long-term vision: creating the first American Hébertiste training center right here in beautiful Bangor, California—complete with a dedicated obstacle course and “plateau,” combined with the existing obstacle course provided by the terrain.

The Concise Guide fills in much of this vision with a concrete picture of what an ideal session looks like. I'm indebted to Georges Hébert's grandson Jacques, who entrusted me with the French manuscript of this work. While our European counterparts are moving towards an official organizational structure for Hébertistme, I believe that America represents the most fertile soil for a revival of these ideas in a grassroots, organic fashion.

For one, we are in a more advanced stage of the health crisis. The sudden rise of the Make American Healthy Again coalition signals that people are ready for radical solutions to the epidemic of diseases that RFK Jr. campaigned on.

Childhood obesity won’t be solved with jumping jacks.

If you’re looking to get started you don't need to overhaul your entire fitness routine overnight. Start with these three steps:

1. Find a natural area near you—a park, trail, or even a schoolyard with varied features

2. Identify natural obstacles for each movement family (something to climb, balance on, lift, carry)

3. Move through the space for 20-30 minutes, alternating between higher intensity "bounds" and recovery "counter-bounds"

Since resuming this translation project, I've been motivated to get back out in my own backyard and revive my obstacle course ambitions. The truth is, the obstacle course is already there—I don't need to install fancy equipment or construct elaborate structures. The trees, logs, slopes, and rocks provide everything needed. The hardest part is simply getting into the habit of going out and doing it. You don't need perfect conditions or a meticulously designed course. Just get out and move.

In the next installment, I’ll conclude the series with Chapter 3, on Hébert's instructions for designing a training session. Until then, I challenge you to step off the treadmill, leave your fitness tracker (even your phone) at home, and rediscover what your body was built to do.

Your primal self is waiting.

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And now, without further adieu… here’s Hébert:

Chapter 2 - Conducting the Lesson

2. Most Common Mistakes to Avoid when Leading Groups on the Field

The principal errors that instructors must avoid when leading groups include:

• Making multiple groups wait motionless at the starting base before launching them across the field (causing congestion at the start due to poor regulation of pacing)

• Launching a wave across the field before the previous one has cleared, or has sufficient time to clear the finishing base (resulting in crowding and disorder at this base)

• Returning along the lateral bases at high speed or in a state of muscular and nervous tension

• Starting a wave before students have established proper lateral spacing from one another

• Starting a wave without clear instructions regarding the starting position (prepared or not), the mode and pace of movement, the exercise to be performed, its execution mechanics, repetition count, or duration

• Allowing students in a wave to cross paths, bunch together, zigzag, or jostle one another instead of requiring each to progress directly forward

• Commanding impractical, conventional, or fanciful exercises that serve no useful purpose

• Having students repeat useful exercises with inappropriate rhythm, especially too hastily, which entirely changes the character of these exercises

• Unnecessarily fatiguing students through excessive consecutive repetitions of the same exercise, or through repetitions not sufficiently interspersed with walking steps during the field crossing

• Failing to regulate the pace of movement, regardless of type; or regulating it poorly—either too hastily or too slowly

• Failing to match the overall workout rhythm and the specific rhythm of exercise movements to the students' capabilities

3. Sessions without a Field or in Continuous Line

The field system allows optimal use of limited space when exercising many subjects simultaneously across multiple groups. However, it is possible to conduct a session without using a formal field, provided one respects the principle of movement through space and all other training guidelines.

For example, instead of moving back and forth across the same area, the group progresses in any direction, always moving forward while regulating movement intensity as one would on the field. This approach resembles the wilderness trail session or continuous journey method described below (section 5).

This approach is especially useful when lacking sufficient open space to establish a proper field. It allows for conducting a session along an avenue, path, or any suitable route. It works particularly well with a single group; with multiple groups, leadership and supervision become more challenging than on a formal field.

4. The Narrow-Strip Field and the Double Field

On a narrow strip of sufficient length—such as a garden path, trail, passageway, school yard, or even a simple corridor—it remains possible to establish a narrow field and conduct a back-and-forth session applying the wave pattern principle. This simply requires increasing the number of groups (or waves) while reducing each group to only one or two students, depending on available width.

One can even establish a double field lengthwise, or more precisely, two narrow fields one after another, with their starting bases adjacent. The instructor positions himself between these two bases to lead the session. On the two fields thus formed, groups are equally distributed and work simultaneously, but moving in opposite directions.

The double field approach can occasionally be used with standard-sized fields when an instructor finds himself alone, for example, working simultaneously with two different groups of students. Instead of being extensions of one another, the two fields can also be perpendicular or parallel to each other if terrain conditions or practical considerations require it.

5. The Wilderness Trail Session or Continuous Journey

The limited-space field session follows an established plan and takes place with back-and-forth movements. This plan comprises a logically ordered sequence of all the fundamental natural and utilitarian exercise types.

The wilderness session unfolds as a continuous journey across varied terrains featuring diverse obstacles. Some or all natural, utilitarian exercises necessarily form part of its composition. However, neither this composition nor the sequence of exercises can be predetermined; both are dictated by circumstances, the nature of the terrain traversed, and the number and variety of obstacles encountered. The instructor decides which exercises to perform based on the training opportunities presented by the route. For example, he has students cross obstacles, descend or climb slopes, climb trees, scale rocks or walls, lift, carry, or throw stones and other objects.

Composing a wilderness session therefore consists not of establishing a sequence of predetermined exercises, but of deciding on a route or itinerary, choosing one that offers the most interest in terms of exercise variety and number.

The wilderness session follows the same working principles as the field session; there is absolute correspondence between the two types of sessions in this regard. However, in the wilderness session, these principles must be adapted to execution conditions different from those of the field session. This adaptation accounts for the following observations:

1. The wilderness session is not a "steeplechase" race to finish first, but rhythmic work. The instructor leads the workout to bring his students to the end in good condition—neither breathless nor exhausted.

2. The rule of alternation that ensures continuous work on the field while providing the organism with necessary relative rest periods is applied during the wilderness journey through "bounds" and "counter-bounds," whose principle corresponds to that of waves (effort) and counter-waves (recovery).

A bound is a short-distance segment executed at various paces depending on circumstances, in the form of running or walking as well as quadrupedal movement, balancing, climbing, obstacle crossing, or carrying.

Practically speaking, a bound corresponds to the movement or effort performed in a wave across the training field. Its length varies from a few meters to 30 or 40 meters, or much more depending on circumstances. Everything depends on the nature of the ground, its slope, the obstacles present, and the capabilities of the students.

Between successive bounds, students perform slow or moderate-paced walks (counter-bounds), which allow for relaxation or moments of relative rest.

3. During a wilderness journey, each subject enjoys even greater freedom of action regarding effort and recovery than on the field. They can easily prevent fatigue and avoid breathlessness by self-modifying their pace, reducing certain efforts, or mitigating or even circumventing certain difficulties. For example, when facing obstacles too difficult or challenging for their strength or training level, a struggling student may simply "pass over" the obstacle instead of jumping it, or even avoid it with a detour. If they fall behind during a bound, they can always easily make up the distance without needing to push too hard during the slow progression of the counter-bound. They cover the same distance as their more vigorous comrades but with less intense effort, remaining at a lower average speed. The group leader should only signal a new bound when the entire group has reassembled (without stopping the march), just as on the field, he waits for all subjects to reach the starting base.

4. Depending on the type of route, the wilderness session can take the following forms:

• Adventurous or on unknown/unplanned routes

• On planned or pre-marked routes

• On specially organized routes

Finally, mixed sessions can be conducted—performing a short route, then stopping in a clearing, meadow, or suitable terrain to execute, as on a proper training field, certain exercises that movement along the route doesn't allow to be practiced properly.

5. In each group, the instructor or leader has students adopt the formation best suited to the nature of the terrain being crossed. Depending on circumstances, he orders single file, massed formation, or line formation (in wave).

Massed formation is most common and should be adopted without special instruction. The other two formations are used only to facilitate certain passages (single file in defiles), to cross certain obstacles, or to climb slopes as a line, that is, in wave formation.

6. During a wilderness journey, the instructor's role is much more difficult, delicate, and tiring than on the field. First, the instructor must personally complete the route alongside his students. Additionally, general supervision becomes more challenging. Absorbed by leading the whole group, he cannot attend to details as readily as on the field. He benefits from reducing the number of groups to two or even one (if the number of students is small), whereas on the field, increasing group numbers is preferable. Above all, he must be concerned with training good group leaders beforehand to assist during the journey. His position depends partly on the help he can count on. He may be with the first group of the strongest students, with the last group of the weakest, or between two groups. Groups should follow each other at a distance of only a few meters.

7. On a complete stadium, it is possible to mark out a route and conduct a continuous journey session using all the facilities and installations: regular tracks, obstacle courses, climbing structures, etc. Such a session offers certain advantages of outdoor lessons but lacks the unexpected elements and varied difficulties of journeys across diverse terrain. However, such a session serves as useful preparation for outdoor journeys, both for students and instructors.

8. Due to the various difficulties inevitably presented by wilderness journeys, various precautions must be taken by both instructor and students.

Above all, one must remain within the strictly practical domain. This is the primary means of preventing accidents. In the first attempts at wilderness sessions, students—especially young people—are often tempted to "play the fool" and engage in all sorts of potentially dangerous antics or extravagances that risk ending badly. The instructor's role is to anticipate these thoughtless impulses of youth and maintain exercise execution within normal or realistic bounds.

For example, everyone must ensure secure footing. On prepared terrain, this detail matters little. But in the wilderness, one must quickly assess ground conditions and clearly see small obstacles like holes, protruding objects, loose stones, etc., where one risks painful foot twisting or sprains, especially if ankles are naturally weak or poorly trained.

Similarly, one should never blindly launch oneself over an obstacle without quickly assessing its nature and potential dangers. When jumping on a specially prepared jumping pit, one focuses attention solely on the height to clear, without worrying about the takeoff or landing surface, known to be well-prepared in advance. But in the wilderness, conditions differ. The takeoff ground may be very poor and the landing hazardous. Depending on circumstances, the appropriate decision varies: one might directly clear the obstacle, jump or simply climb onto it (if solid and firm), or avoid it by some means.

Finally, tree climbing must be executed cautiously, especially in groups. There is always risk of slipping or losing grip with hands or footing; moreover, branches are not always solid.

9. The wilderness session should be considered a small expedition and, beyond the route to travel and destination to reach, should have a figurative or real purpose which may be, depending on circumstances of time, place, and student age: an exploration; a summit ascent; a hunt or figurative bounty to bring back (flowers, wood, fruit); a mock battle; a rescue or aid mission. A session understood this way fulfills the triple aim of physical education: physical, energetic, and moral development.

2. Common Mistakes to Avoid When Leading Groups on the Field

The main mistakes an instructor must avoid when leading groups are:

• Having multiple groups wait motionless at the starting base before launching them across the field (congestion at start due to poor overall pace regulation)

• Launching a wave across the field before the previous one has cleared, or will certainly clear, the finishing base (causing congestion and disorder at this base)

• Returning along lateral bases at high speed or in a state of muscular and nervous tension

• Starting a wave without proper lateral spacing between students

• Launching a wave without precise instructions regarding starting position (prepared or not), mode and pace of movement, exercise to be performed, mechanics of execution, repetition or duration

• Allowing students in a wave to cross paths, bunch up, zigzag, or jostle each other instead of requiring each to progress exactly straight ahead

• Ordering impractical, conventional, or fanciful exercises that serve no useful practical purpose

• Having useful exercises repeated with inappropriate rhythm, especially too hurriedly, which completely changes the character of these exercises

• Unnecessarily tiring or straining students through too many consecutive repetitions of the same exercise or through repetitions not sufficiently broken up by walking steps while crossing the field

• Not regulating movement speeds regardless of type; or regulating them poorly, meaning either too hurriedly or too slowly

• Not matching the general work rhythm and specific movement rhythms of exercises to students' capabilities

3. Lessons Without a Field or in Continuous Line

The field system makes optimal use of restricted space when exercising many subjects simultaneously in multiple groups. However, it's possible to conduct a lesson without using a marked field, provided one respects the principle of movement-based work and all other training rules.

For example, instead of moving back and forth over the same area, one progresses in any given direction, always moving forward while regulating movement intensity as one would on a marked field. This approaches the case of the open-country course or continuous route lesson described below (no. 5).

This approach is especially useful when no open space of sufficient size is available for creating a field. It allows conducting a lesson along an alley, avenue, or any path. It works particularly well with a single group to lead; with multiple groups, direction and supervision are more difficult than on a marked field.

4. The Narrow Strip Field and Double Field

On a narrow strip of sufficient length - such as a garden path, walkway, passage, school courtyard, or even a simple corridor - it's still possible to establish a narrow field and conduct a back-and-forth lesson applying the wave principle (principe du travail en vague). One simply needs to increase the number of groups (or waves) while reducing each group to two students or even one, depending on the available width.

One can even establish a double field lengthwise, or more precisely, two narrow fields in succession with adjacent starting bases. The instructor positions themselves between these two bases to conduct the lesson. Groups are equally distributed across the two fields thus formed and move simultaneously but in opposite directions to each other

5. The Open Country Course or Continuous Route Lesson

The restricted-space field lesson has an established plan and is executed with back-and-forth movements. This plan includes a logically ordered sequence of all fundamental types of natural and practical exercises.

The open country lesson unfolds as a continuous journey (en trajet continu) across various terrains more or less furnished with diverse obstacles. All or part of the natural and practical exercises necessarily enter into its composition. However, neither this composition nor the order of exercise execution can be planned in advance; both are dictated by circumstances, the nature of terrain crossed, and the number and variety of obstacles encountered. The instructor decides which exercises to perform based on the training opportunities presented by the route. For example, they might have students cross obstacles, descend or climb slopes, climb trees, scale rocks or walls, lift, carry, or throw stones or other objects...

The composition of an open country lesson therefore consists not of establishing a sequence of predetermined exercises, but of deciding on a route or itinerary and choosing one that's as interesting as possible in terms of the number and variety of exercises possible.

Example of Route for an Countryside Parkour Session

The departure begins toward the left. The route includes first an open space for initial warm-up running; then underbrush for quadrupedal progression; a slope to climb; a wall to scale; a second slope to climb; rocks to traverse; various obstacles (ditch, embankment...) to cross by jumping; a river crossing using balance on a tree trunk; a wooded area where one can perform climbing, lifting, carrying and throwing; a meadow allowing execution of defense exercises; finally an obstacle-free space for return to the starting base, either directly by crossing the river bridge, or after swimming across the river.

The open country lesson follows the same work rules as the field lesson; there is absolute concordance between these two types of lessons from this viewpoint. However, in the open country lesson, these rules must be adapted to execution conditions different from those of the field lesson. This adaptation takes place according to the following observations:

1º The open country lesson is not a "steeplechase" race to see who arrives first, but rather a rhythmic work session. The instructor conducts the work in such a way as to bring their students to the end of the course in good condition - neither out of breath nor exhausted.

2º The rule of alternation that ensures work continuity on the field by providing the organism with necessary relative rest is applied, during the course, through "bounds and counter-bounds" whose principle corresponds to that of waves (effort) and counter-waves (recovery).

A "bound" is a short distance traveled at various paces according to circumstances and can take the form of running or walking as well as quadrupedal movement, balance work, climbing, obstacle crossing, or carrying.

Practically speaking, a bound corresponds to the movement performed or effort given in a wave on the training field. Its length varies from a few meters to 30 or 40 meters, or much more depending on circumstances. Everything depends on the nature of the ground, its slope, the obstacles present, and also the capabilities of the students.

Between successive bounds, slow or moderate-paced walks (counter-bounds) are performed, which allow for relaxation or ensure a moment of relative rest.

3º On a course, each subject possesses even greater freedom of action for effort or recovery than on the field. They can easily prevent fatigue and avoid breathlessness by modifying their own pace, reducing certain efforts, lessening or even avoiding certain difficulties. For example, when faced with obstacles too difficult or demanding for their strength or training level, the struggling student can "pass" the obstacle instead of jumping it, or even avoid it by taking a detour. If, on the other hand, they fall behind during the execution of a bound, they can always easily catch up without having to force themselves during the slow progression of the counter-bound. They cover the same distance as their stronger comrades but by providing less violent efforts, that is, by staying within a lower average speed. The group conductor should only signal for a new bound when the entire group is gathered (without stopping the march), just as they wait on the field for all subjects to arrive at the starting base.

4º Depending on the type of course, the open country lesson can take the following forms:

• Adventure-style on unknown or unplanned routes

• On planned or pre-marked routes

• On specially organized courses

One can also execute mixed lessons - that is, complete a short course, then stop in a clearing, meadow, or suitable terrain to execute, as on a proper training field, certain exercises that movement along a route doesn't allow to be practiced properly.

5º In each group, the instructor or conductor has students take the formation best suited to the nature of the terrain being crossed. Depending on circumstances, they order single file, massed formation, or front formation (en vague).

Massed formation is most common and should be taken without special indication. The other two formations are only employed to facilitate certain passages (single file in narrow passages) or to cross certain obstacles or climb certain slopes as a front, that is, in wave formation.

6º On a course, the instructor's role is much more difficult, delicate, and tiring to execute than on a field. First, the instructor must personally complete the course alongside their students. Additionally, they can less easily maintain general supervision. Absorbed by directing the whole, they cannot attend to details as much as on a field. It's beneficial to reduce the number of groups to two or even one (if the number of students is small), whereas on a field it's preferable to increase them. They must especially concern themselves with forming, beforehand, good group conductors to help during the course. Their position depends partly on the help they can count on. They can be with the first group composed of the strongest, or with the last composed of the weakest, or between two groups. Groups should follow each other at only a few meters' distance.

7º On a complete stadium it's possible to mark out a route and execute a continuous journey lesson using all the amenities and installations: regular tracks, obstacle course, climbing frames... The lesson executed this way offers certain advantages of outdoor lessons, but lacks the unpredictability and full range of difficulties found in varied terrain. However, such a lesson is useful as preparation for outdoor courses, both for students and instructor.

8º Due to the various difficulties inevitably presented by a course in open country, various precautions must be taken by both instructor and students.

Above all, one must stay within strictly practical limits. This is the main way to prevent accidents. In their first attempts at open country lessons, students, especially young people, are often tempted to "act foolishly" and engage in all sorts of dangerous fantasies or extravagances that risk ending badly. The instructor's role is to anticipate these thoughtless enthusiasms of youth and keep exercise execution within normal or reasonable bounds.

For example, everyone must watch their foot placement carefully. On prepared terrain, this detail doesn't matter. But in open country, one must quickly assess ground conditions and clearly see small obstacles such as: holes, protruding objects, loose stones, etc. where one risks a painful foot twist or even a sprain, especially if ankles are naturally weak or poorly trained.

Similarly, one should never blindly launch oneself over an obstacle to be crossed by jumping without quickly recognizing its nature or dangers it might present. To execute a jump on a specially prepared jumping area, one concentrates attention solely on the height to be cleared, without worrying about takeoff or landing ground known to be well-prepared in advance. But in open country it's not the same. The takeoff ground may be very poor, and the landing ground dangerous. Depending on circumstances, the decision differs; one either crosses the obstacle directly, jumps or simply climbs onto it (if it's solid and firm), or avoids it by some means.

Finally, tree climbing must be executed with caution, especially in groups. There's always risk of slipping or losing hand or foot holds; moreover, branches aren't always solid.

9º The open country lesson should be considered as a small expedition and, beyond the route to be covered and destination to reach, have a figurative or real purpose which, depending on circumstances of time, place, and age of students, might be:

• An exploration

• A climb

• A hunt or figurative bounty to bring back (flowers, wood, fruits)

• A mock battle

• A rescue or aid mission

The lesson conceived this way serves the triple aim to be pursued in physical education: physical, virile, and moral.

La Méthode Naturelle Series - Previous Installments

Foreword

Chapter 1: Principles of Natural Movement

Principles of Natural Training (Sections 1-3)

The Proper Training Session (Sections 4-6)

The Lost Art of Relaxation (Sections 7-12)

Finding the Sweet Spot (Sections 13-17)

Rigor + Nature = Vigor (Sections 21-26)

Strength in Song (Sections 27-33)

Chapter 2: Conducting the Lesson

The Wave Pattern Principle (Section 1)

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His aides all dropped out by mile 35, but he pressed on until his feet bled. Not because it was easy, because it was hard.

I’ve told the story so many times here that the words feel stale and cliché. But on Thursday, RFK Jr. breathed new life into this little-known tidbit of American history in a White House speech, after being sworn in as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

As he prepares to command our national health apparatus, it feels like a good time to take stock of the challenge that gives this Substack its name: the 50-mile march that once invigorated the nation, and can do so again!

When President-Elect John F. Kennedy wrote ‘The Soft American’ for Sports Illustrated in late 1960, he warned that modern comforts were dulling our national edge. At the time he voiced these concerns, Americans were far healthier and more robust. Under President Kennedy, a seventeen-year-old boy was expected to run a mile in about 6:06, perform thirteen pull-ups, and complete over fifty pushups.

Today, seventy-seven percent of young people don’t meet the basic requirements for military service (which are not particularly demanding). That statistic loomed large as RFK Jr. stood in the Oval Office, the very place where his father and uncle once plotted to renew our national vigor.

In accepting the HHS post, RFK Jr. didn’t dwell on vaccines, pharmaceuticals, or the truth about seed oils. Instead, he invoked the memory of his father staggering home after eighteen snow-choked hours—a man spent, yet transformed.

This story about the original 50-mile march, along the C&O canal towpath, was the preface to his remarks about his own decades-long mission to end the epidemic of childhood chronic disease in this country.

For the past 7 years, my writing has focused on the necessity of a certain extremism when it comes to restoring American vitality. Moderation can work for maintaining health, but not for recovering it. A sick nation needs strong medicine.

Take just two data points:

• Average testosterone levels in men have fallen on average by one percent each year since the 1980s.

• Grip strength has declined from 117 pounds of force in 1985 to 98 pounds in 2016.

These might not sound so dramatic – until you extrapolate them another 50 years into the future.

We’re getting weaker.

But it’s not only about diminishing physical strength, excess weight or chronic illness. It’s about how our material lives have overtaken our sense of purpose. We’ve grown spiritually obese. Even the trim among us lug around so many burdensome possessions and so many illusions of wealth.

It was Teddy Roosevelt who first warned of how peace and plenty might erode our martial spirit. JFK admonished the American people for becoming “a nation of spectators.” We’ve gone far beyond that threshold—we’re a nation of scrollers and strollers, meandering through life without much sense of individual or collective purpose. The kick in our step is all but gone, and it’s making our souls sick.

As RFK Jr. notes in his brief speech, a healthy man has a thousand dreams; a sick man has but one (to be well). Nearly two-thirds of Americans now suffer some form of chronic illness, their horizons narrowed to mere management of their condition.

I experienced a similar diminishment in my early twenties—suffering from what I self-diagnosed as chronic fatigue from an extended bout with mononucleosis (in hindsight, I think it was Swine Flu). After months of illness, my old-school family physician properly diagnosed me with having "lost the Will to Live." Modern medicine might have dosed me with prescription pills, but he wisely recognized that I needed a mission.

By embracing what Teddy Roosevelt called “the strenuous life,” I gradually recovered my health and began the longer-term work of rooting out remaining sources of weakness and illness, both internal and external.

The resulting strength and purposeful energy has been a great enabler in my life. I can lift logs and build burn piles that some would think would require heavy machinery. I can carry my big kids up the stairs and play “Bear Game” with them on all fours. I can lift an alfalfa bale on to a truck bed so I can feed our family dairy cow who, in turn, provides us with a fridge full of milk and all the derivatives my wife is learning how to make.

These might seem quaint and trivial, but for me they are the core of what Making America Healthy Again should mean. It’s about returning to basics, stepping away from technological dependence, and embracing the tools of conviviality that give us vital purpose and honest labor.

For years, I believed freedom meant only the absence of state meddling, of constraint; the lifting of regulation. This was the libertarian's view: that government should simply get out of the way. But like Roosevelt, I’ve come to see that real liberty demands action—a robust engagement with the world, including politics. And that requires the positive freedom of a sound mind in a sound body (mens sana corpore sana). In that sense, RFK Jr. stands in a worthy tradition. He sees health freedom as more than avoiding disease. It’s a pre-requisite for healthy citizenship and self-governance.

Yet no single man, no matter his name, can rescue us if we do not wish to rescue ourselves.

Every few generations, a figure comes along to remind us of our own responsibility for preserving essential freedoms. From Teddy Roosevelt’s original fifty-mile order for Marine officers to JFK’s revival of that challenge in 1963, we have been called to combat the corrosive effect of prosperity on our bodies and souls. The JFK 50-mile march is both metaphor and method — a template for national renewal and a tool for personal transformation.

I encourage all able-bodied Americans who identify with the MAHA movement to go a step further than tweeting about diet, debating seed oils, or stacking supplements—and instead step into the arena. Follow in the footsteps of both RFK Jr. and Sr.

Walk the miles. Test your limits. Prove, through action, that health isn’t just something you optimize—it’s something you earn.

The collective psyche can be manipulated by fear—lockdowns and masks taught us that. But it can also be elevated by a vision and mission to undertake seemingly impossible feats.

Consider sixteen-year-old Jim Troppman, student body president at Redwood High in Larkspur, California (my alma mater). In February 1963, just six days after the news of Kennedy's marching challenge broke, Troppman organized what became known as "The Great Marin County Hike." Four hundred students showed up in cut-off jeans, Bermuda shorts, and football jerseys, ready to march 50 miles to Point Reyes Station and back. The school physician protested, warning it could be a "killing effort." The principal wrung his hands but couldn't stop it - it was a school holiday.

By midnight, 97 students had completed the full fifty miles. Their success sparked a wave of imitation. A week later, 3,500 young people marched to the Oregon state capitol. The nation was gripped by a contagious can-do spirit.

That spirit must be revived, and it must start with you. As recently as last October, I wrote that I thought a nationwide revival of physical culture was improbable.

Since then, I’ve seen a budding appetite for vigorous participation and challenge.

Take, for example, Andrew Huberman’s recent endurance challenge of walking a mile with a heavy kettlebell:

This, I should note, should be undertaken with caution (listen to your body, folks) but for men accustomed to thinking of strength solely in terms of bench press PRs in the gym, is a step in the right direction.

RFK’s speech signals that the time is ripe. His appointment is significant, but the real potential lies in your boots, your roads, and your tribe.

We need a responsible radicalism—what I call the 'far center.' This isn't about finding compromise between extremes. It's about pushing beyond the false choice between passive libertarianism and bureaucratic control. The far center is where we take responsibility for rebuilding our strength from the ground up. Before we can reform institutions, we must reform ourselves. Before leading others, we must prove our capacity for difficulty. The long march builds the judgment and will required for wise governance.

I’ve been organizing fifty-mile marches for five years, and 2025 beckons with fresh possibility.

For my part, on the advice of a battle-tested Army Special Forces and Recon Marine, I’m beginning a regimen of three weekly training sessions: two weighted rucks (with gradually increasing weight and distance) plus one run. These are my non-negotiables.

But discipline alone can’t spark a nationwide revival—culture does.

In many ways, the MAHA (Making America Healthy Again) movement has gained momentum in the culture through memes—the irreverent disdain for seed oils, the cult of raw milk, the iconic mystique of RFK Jr. himself. Memes are more than jokes; they’re forerunners of cultural change, transmitting deep truths through viral trends. Think about it: the 50-mile march was, in its own era, a kind of proto-meme—a simple, tangible challenge that spread like wildfire across the country. Its power lay in its clear, audacious form—fifty miles. All or nothing. On order from the President.

I’m all for the memes that keep us curious and provoke us to question authority. But if there’s one meme we need to propagate right now, it’s this: get stronger, move your body, and rediscover the will to do the hard things that used to define a healthy, free people. You can call that “MAHA” or you can call it common sense. Either way, the JFK50 might just be the meme that brings us off the couch and back to life.

After an initial rush of enthusiasm, motivation fades.

It’s why the gyms empty out by February, and it’s why I stopped making resolutions like “publish 3 books this year.”

But there is something to be said for the fresh start effect, and indeed Research™ has confirmed that “Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior.” In layman’s terms, the end-beginning of the calendar year is a natural time to pause and take stock. Plus, all of the delicious treats consumed during the holidays (and deposited around the waist) give us an energy boost.

But annual resolutions, conceived as goals to achieve within a one-year horizon, may be the very worst possible framework for personal transformation. A year is an awkward timeline: too distant to demand immediate action, yet not long enough to allow for the organic development of meaningful change.

The better argument against December 31 resolutions is that the date is arbitrary. If you need to make a change, why wait? We should be constantly updating our resolutions, as well as our strategy for making them happen. Two weeks into the New Year is just as good a time to take stock as January 1 if you can invest it with the same symbolic meaning.

I don’t remember much of what James Clear wrote in Atomic Habits (did I actually read it?), but one phrase stuck with me from the cliff notes version:

Systems > goals.

If you google this, Clear’s name shows up at the top of the search results, but I’m pretty sure he stole it from Scott Adams, who likely borrowed it from someone else. Ideas this useful tend to have many parents. I have no shame in stealing it again to present my meta-system for setting goals, as well as goals for systems that get you closer to your goals – assuming you knew what goals would make you most satisfied.

A Two-Fold System for Transformation

The basic system is a two-fold writing exercise.

The first exercise, performed quarterly with a longer annual reflection, involves writing down your vision of a flourishing life. You give yourself permission to write down a future beyond your wildest dreams. The point isn’t to be realistic or set “SMART” goals specific, measurable, achievable... you know the corporate acronym), but to suspend logic and reason in favor of the most beautiful picture you can imagine.

The second exercise, performed daily, is more practical: write down the 2 or 3 most important things you will do that day. These will be a mix of necessity (what you must do to keep your job and daily bread) and possibility – an incremental step in the direction of that life you envisioned above. Nothing more.

To-do lists aren't goals – they're instructions to yourself about where to focus your attention. These tasks should be realistic and attainable. But there's a danger in over-engineering the path from your to-do list to your dream life. Every day brings new information. Not only will your sense of the best path change, the vision itself will change.

It's been said that you overestimate what you can do in one year, but underestimate what you can do in 5.

That has been true in my experience.

About 10 years ago, I got the idea to get my captain's license and start some kind of sailing business on San Francisco Bay. My old notebooks circa 2015 show a primitive vision of a sailing water taxi that would transport people across the Bay “with flair” (whatever that meant). At the time, I was basically homeless – what the Berkeley Marina euphemistically called a 'sneak-aboard' – living on a 24’ sloop and feeling increasingly hopeless about my dependence on marijuana, which I used to fuel pipedreams like the sailing taxi.

In early 2016, I took my first concrete step: signing up for SMART Captains – a 2-week crash course in chart-plotting and outsmarting the Coast Guard's written test. I had little knowledge of what becoming a captain actually required. All I knew was that captains had to pass a drug test, so it seemed like a good way to tie my hands and motivate sobriety. During the course, I learned I'd need to rack up 360 days of sea time before they'd even ask for the drug test.

Over the next 5 years, I self-logged most of the required time on my own small sailboats before passing the Coast Guard’s written test (and the pee test). In those intervening years, something unexpected happened: startups like Boatsetter and GetMyBoat had taken Airbnb's sharing concept to the water, creating peer-to-peer platforms for booking cruises. They hit their stride right as I got my license in May 2020, when Bay Area residents were desperate for masked-optional outdoor activities.

From 2020 to 2024, I ran a sailing business that exceeded my wildest aspirations. I got paid well to do something vigorous and enjoyable that otherwise would have been an expensive hobby. The highlight was a 6-hour 'experience' through Airbnb – taking small groups to Angel Island for guided hikes to the summit of Mt. Livermore.

Somewhere around the 22nd circuit of the island in three years, I started experiencing a certain restlessness. My mind wandered to an even older vision from those same notebooks: getting back to the land. Though I'd never lived rurally, homesteading offered an even greater call to adventure than sailing – one I could pursue with my growing family.

The timing, again, was serendipitous. SpaceX's Starlink satellites and the post-pandemic Zoom economy had made remote work not just possible but normal. Within weeks of the words 'back to the land' re-entering my journals, an opportunity appeared to rent our current homestead abode in Butte County. I haven't sailed in over a year, but I have zero regrets about trading a rudder for rural life.

This isn't a story about achieving goals – it's about how systems and visions evolve. The sailing business wasn't in my original water taxi vision, and Butte County wasn't in my original homesteading dreams. But maintaining a daily practice of both practical action and wild dreaming positioned me to recognize opportunities when they appeared.

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My latest journal is filled with vision-casting notes that animate me through daily chores and demands of work and family life. Many of these aspirations are as audacious as my old marijuana-fueled pipe dreams. But they're beautiful, and I've seen enough times that when I take steps toward my dreams, God and circumstance have met me more than halfway.

I'll spare you my litany of grandiose hopes for the future, but I will share the systems I'm implementing in 2025 to increase the odds and accelerate the timeline toward them.

1. Caffeine On Ramp

First is the caffeine on-ramp: sipping white tea during morning prayer while I journal the two tiers:

1. Has my vision changed?

2. What 2-3 things will I focus on today?

Lots of people are waking up to the fact that the body adapts to caffeine intake - especially if you have it first thing. The result is that you become reliant on it, and don’t get the full benefit as if you wait 90 minutes. I’ve found a middle ground with low-caffeine white tea. The coffee still hits at 9 AM, when I’m hitting my stride and getting into the Deep Work portion of my day.

2. Time Blocking

Next is broad-based time blocking – not planning every minute, but setting certain appointments with myself before opening my calendar to others. Mondays stay meeting-free for deep work and moving big rocks, giving me momentum for the rest of the week. Other mornings are reserved for the 1 or 2 things I've identified as top priorities.

Evenings are blocked for family time, nights for reading books (not scrolling).

Exercise follows a different kind of flexible time blocking, modeled after the ancient Greek Tetrad cycle. Monday late morning gets me outside for a quick, energizing plyometric workout, preparing for the next day's strenuous afternoon ruck (weighted hike), strength routine, or outdoor 'maintenance' work cutting trees and building burn piles. Wednesday through Saturday have time blocked for mobility work, technique, and other outdoor work, but these stay flexible enough for hikes or play with the kids.

My dietary routine aims to balance nutrition, energy, and enjoyment – in that order – focusing on 'crowding out' guilty pleasures with meals so nourishing and delicious that I'm not tempted to snack or binge. Most nights, I will allow myself a half cup of ice cream (note: raw milk, cream, eggs & honey – a veritable superfood in moderation) and save my willpower for resisting the energy-killing sludge (i.e., seed oils, high-fructose corn syrup, etc.) that characterizes much of the American food supply.

3. PM Alarm Clock

Rather than setting a wake-up alarm, I have a nighttime be-in-bed time. It's tempting to squeeze in more work or scrolling after the kids are asleep, but this always comes at the expense of the next day's productivity. Nothing is so pressing that it can't become one of tomorrow morning's top priorities.

Perhaps I'm straining to distinguish these 'systems' from run-of-the-mill resolutions, but the distinction feels crucial – like the difference between plotting a cross-country road trip by specific highways versus simply heading west with a good map and a full tank of gas.

There’s a book that's been haunting my social meda feed lately, with the intriguing title 'Why Greatness Can't Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective.' I haven’t read it, but the title alone feels like a permission slip to release ourselves from the tyranny of annual goal-setting. After all, we don't always know what to want – or perhaps more accurately, we don't always want what we should want.

What we can do, however, is orient ourselves toward the good. Rather than marking progress in year-long chunks, I've found wisdom in working in two-week sprints – short enough to demand immediate action, long enough to see if something's working. For the really important things, a small daily step is enough to keep the flame alive.

When we arrange our lives this way, we create space for serendipity. Someone famous once said, “I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”

But that's not quite right. It’s less about hard work than obsessive drive over a long period of time. Showing up day after day with openness to possibility. Robert Frost might have been closer with 'fortune favors the bold,' though I'd adjust it to 'fortune favors the faithful' – faithful not just to the goal, but to the practice.

This feels especially relevant in 2025, as artificial intelligence creates new possibilities and perils. Yet even as our technological capabilities expand, the fundamental rhythms of human flourishing remain unchanged: we still need daily bread, daily purpose, and daily grace. The most meaningful transformations in our lives tend to operate on God's timeline, not our own. Our job isn't to force the timeline but to show up every day, ready to receive what comes.

I spent the next few days in prose that cut like glass. She wrote about California not as paradise but as contradiction. Her sentences were spare and unsparing. I had never read anything like it.

That encounter planted a seed.

Fifteen years later. I'm producing content for a client with a distinctive voice—short sentences, irreverent humor, occasional profanity. His audience knows what to expect. The team had tried every AI tool that promised voice matching. None delivered.

They called me as a longshot. An experiment.

What I learned: the best prompts are not elaborate. Five words carry a whole philosophy.

"In the style of [writer]."

When you invoke Didion, you give AI permission to be opinionated. To eschew the safe middle ground. To adopt her stance of unflinching clarity. The result crackles with specificity. It feels born of a particular consciousness.

But "in the style of" only works if the AI knows the writer.

For famous authors, five words is enough. For your client who runs a fitness empire? For your own voice? The AI has nothing to draw from. You need a different approach.

Most voice matching tools focus on describing voice. Categories. Adjectives. Spectrum sliders. You tell AI a voice is "conversational, witty, medium-length sentences"—and get generic slop.

Examples beat descriptions. Every time.

When you show AI actual sentences from the voice you're matching, it absorbs the rhythm. The cadence. The specific way this writer constructs meaning.

Consider Didion's signature sentences:

"The center was not holding."

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

"I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be."

No description captures what these examples do. They show the AI exactly what to aim for.

The Voice Matching Wizard is built around this insight. You collect signature examples across every dimension of writing—openings, transitions, closings, sentence architecture, sticky phrases, what they avoid. Then you synthesize them into a reusable skill file.

When I submitted my first draft for that fitness client, I had no idea what to expect.

The feedback: "This is Fantastic!!! I honestly wouldn't change a thing except the title."

The skill file I built has dozens of signature sentences. Each one teaches the AI something no description could convey.

The skill package includes:

1. SKILL.md — The complete analysis framework

1. WIZARD.md — Conversational setup with checkpoints

1. templates/ — Blank template for your voice

• references/ — Example voice skill with signature sentences

Setup takes 15-20 minutes. You need 2-5 writing samples, 500+ words each.

Three ways to use it. Codify your own voice for consistency across newsletters, social, long-form. Build a voice skill before any ghostwriting project. Or analyze writers you admire—extract their signature sentences, absorb their patterns, make them your own.

This post is from the Skill Stack newsletter. Subscribe for weekly skill breakdowns.

Download the Voice Matching Wizard →

In this installment, I present section 1 of Chapter 2: Conducting the Lesson.

Chapter 2 of the Guide Abrégé (the concise guide for instructors of the natural method) begins with a description of the "wave pattern principle" (principe du travail en vague) – a masterful solution to the challenge of training large groups while maintaining the essence of natural movement. At first, the system of waves and counter-waves might seem overly structured for a practice called the "Natural Method," but this apparent paradox reveals Hébert's genius.

The system is elegant and simple: trainees are divided into small groups that move across a field in succession, like waves breaking on a shore. As one group crosses the field performing their exercise (whether running, carrying, crawling, etc.), the next group prepares to follow, while previous groups walk or jog briskly back along the sides to return to the starting position. This continuous flow of movement – forward in waves, back in "counter-waves" – creates a natural rhythm of exertion and active recovery. A kind of early interval training.

The wave principle solves several key challenges inherent to training large groups:

• Efficiency of Space and Time: By organizing groups in waves, dozens of trainees can work intensively in a relatively small space. The system prevents bottlenecks and keeps everyone moving continuously, maximizing the training effect within limited time.

• Freedom Within Structure: While the overall pattern is organized, each trainee maintains complete freedom of movement during their wave crossing. Unlike military-style drills that force synchronization, the wave system allows each person to move at their natural rhythm and intensity.

• Built-in Recovery: The counter-wave return journey (contre-vague) provides a natural interval for recovery. Rather than static rest periods that can lead to cooling down or loss of focus, trainees actively recover while walking back to the starting position. This maintains the training session's flow while preventing exhaustion.

• Natural Progression: Groups are organized by ability level, allowing everyone to work at an appropriate pace. Stronger trainees can move more intensively while beginners can progress at their own speed - all within the same system and space.

• Versatility: The wave principle adapts to virtually any natural movement - running, crawling, carrying, jumping, or throwing. This allows for tremendous variety while maintaining organizational coherence.

When leading the East Bay Natural Movement group, our default approach was spontaneous – warm up and then freely explore the environment. While this works beautifully with a handful of people, it becomes chaotic and ineffective with larger groups. The typical solution, seen in PE classes and military training, is to resort to stationary, synchronized calisthenics or "follow the leader" exercises. But these rigid formats strip away the freedom to find your own rhythm and intensity. It’s these mechanical, repetitive exercises that make people dread physical education. Hébert's wave principle offers a third way: enough structure to efficiently manage large groups and enough spontaneity and adaptability that make natural movement both effective and enjoyable.

While this might seem like a niche historical curiosity, the wave principle represents something far more significant. We face an unprecedented crisis of physical inactivity and movement illiteracy that shows no signs of abating. As Milton Friedman observed, when crisis strikes, the actions taken depend on the ideas lying around. The wave principle – and the Guide Abrege more broadly – remains the single best blueprint for physical education that could be implemented at scale across schools, military training, and community fitness programs.

While it may seem hard to imagine this method being adopted widely today, perhaps we're approaching a point where our dissatisfaction with the current state of physical education will exceed our resistance to trying proven solutions from the past.

And now, without further adieu… here’s Hébert:

Chapter 2 - Conducting the Lesson

1. Training on the Field

The Wave Pattern Principle

The instructor positions themselves either inside the field or preferably on a platform outside it. For large groups, they may be assisted by another instructor who handles detailed guidance and observations, or by several instructors or instructor-trainees who each direct a group. In the latter case, the head instructor directs the overall session - announcing exercises for different groups, ordering paces, changing exercise types, setting rhythms, and making general observations. The instructors or instructor-trainees actively lead their groups while maintaining cohesion with the whole.

Groups typically number four at maximum. Each group has a leader or simple conductor chosen from among its most capable members. When a single instructor leads the lesson, these group leaders assist by repeating commands, instructions, or observations about the work as needed.

The two most distant sides of the field constitute the "starting base" (base de départ) and "finishing base" (base d'arrivée). The other two sides are designated as "lateral bases" (bases latérales). The outer perimeter forms the field track (piste du plateau). The instructor's platform is always placed at the middle of one of the lateral bases but outside the field track.

Movement work on the field occurs in back-and-forth patterns. Groups advance one after another from the starting base to the finishing base (intense active work), then return successively to the starting base using one of the lateral bases (passive return work or relative rest at a slow walk).

Students in each group line up shoulder-to-shoulder on the starting base and form a "wave" (vague) when advancing toward the finishing base. On the lateral bases, each group returns in "counter-wave" (contre-vague) with members either in single file (one behind another) or in "massed formation" - members grouped loosely but at comfortable distance behind their leader or conductor.

In a wave, each member must advance straight ahead to avoid hindering or jostling their immediate neighbors.

Field work is conducted as follows:

1º The session begins with one or two laps around the field track, walking or running, with groups arranged one after another and spaced as far apart as possible to maintain independence and allow paces matching their abilities. Within each group, subjects move in single file with sufficient spacing to avoid impeding one another.

The instructor immediately regulates intervals and paces to bring groups to the starting base and begin wave pattern work smoothly without stops or jerks, as detailed below.

There is no proper training work done on the track in single file, as students cannot have complete freedom of action when so constrained. The track is only used at the session's start, with students in single file, to allow the instructor to distribute and position groups. During the session it serves only for rest walks or as a return path to the starting base. Timed runs and walks at the session's end are conducted on the field track when no special track is available outside; however, in this case, work is never done in single file but in loose "massed formation."

To close gaps or pass each other, groups on the track cut corners, cross the field, or progress parallel to neighboring groups, outside or inside. Similarly within each group, students who need to close gaps or pass can cut across or traverse the field to retake their position.

If children are mixed with adults or weaker students with stronger ones, they can progress on an inner concentric track to stay level with the group while covering less distance.

2º The real training work takes place on the field itself, from starting base to finishing base, with each student having complete freedom of action. (See diagram on following page.)

Groups come successively to line up shoulder-to-shoulder on the starting base, students always sufficiently spaced (arm's length lateral spacing). They are launched in waves across the field as soon as they arrive in line. Each student progresses freely straight ahead to the finishing base, either at maximum pace or any other pace indicated at the start or even during the wave by the instructor.

As groups finish crossing the field, they reform in single file on the track, turning right or left immediately after passing the finishing base, or any other intermediate base (closer) or supplementary base (further). They return to the starting base via one of the lateral bases at a recovery walk, slow pace. They relax as much as possible muscularly and especially neurologically, performing amplified breathing movements if needed. Exceptionally, they may return at a moderate or brisk walk, or even slow run, if their training level allows this accelerated rhythm.

The instructor must regulate wave departures, finishing base distance, or group pace such that no group has to make stationary stops or only insignificant ones while awaiting their turn to launch across the field. Group progression should be continuous, as it would be during a cross-country course.

Any group arriving at the starting line before previous groups have cleared it positions itself behind them in depth, or continues track walking, to avoid remaining stationary.

3º Walking and running exercises (except end-of-session timed courses), quadrupedal movements, bounds, collective jumps, juggling and certain distance throws, individual, mutual and collective carrying are all executed "in wave" without any difficulty.

4º For individual jumps, groups each go to a corner of the field where a basic jumping area can be set up, or to prepared jumping pits, or to a special obstacle course.

5º For climbing exercises, groups proceed, walking or running at regulated or free pace, to climbing and scaling apparatus. If equipment is insufficient for all students to exercise simultaneously, groups are positioned at different locations to avoid any interruption in work. For example, the first group is sent to ropes, the second to suspension bars, the third to wall climbing, ladders etc., the fourth to tree climbing or high places where vertigo must be overcome. They then rotate locations.

THE WAVE PATTERN PRINCIPLE

In this example, there are four groups, each comprising six subjects. The group conductor is designated as #1.

The starting base (base de départ) is on the left of the sketch, and the finishing base (base d'arrivée) on the right.

The first group, launched in wave formation (en vague) across the field, is near reaching the finishing base; the second group is positioned on the starting base and will launch across the field as soon as the first group has passed or nearly passed the finish line; the third group is on the left lateral base and will move to the starting base behind the second group; finally, the fourth group, having just completed their wave crossing of the field, returns via the left lateral base at a slow or moderate walking pace toward the starting base.

If distances and paces are well-regulated by the instructor, there is no interruption in the work, no stopping in the counter-wave (contre-vague) return walk, and no congestion at the starting or finishing bases; the overall progression remains continuous.

Each student gives their full effort freely across the field, from starting base to finishing base; they catch their breath and recover their strength along the lateral bases.

At the end of each wave, groups return toward either the right or left flank, arranged so the group conductor remains at the head. The first group in the figure above will turn right for this reason.

6º For balance exercises, groups proceed, as for climbing, to areas containing special apparatus or equipment needed for these exercises. Alternatively, beams and mobile equipment are arranged on the field itself and work is done "in wave."

7º For certain lifting and throwing exercises requiring special equipment or targets, groups proceed to prepared areas.

8º Some defense exercises are done in waves (advancing kick boxing for example). For elementary two-person wrestling, groups advance in waves then stop to wrestle at a determined base. For collective wrestling, the entire field is used. Finally for real wrestling, groups are led to special arenas.

9º Timed walks and runs are executed off the field on measured tracks, or on the track surrounding the field if no other is available.

10º The session ends with a more or less prolonged slow walk, depending on effort expended, with amplified breathing movements. Finally, skin care takes place before dressing.

11º During the session all movement, whatever its form (walking, running, quadrupedal, balance progression, carrying...) and wherever executed (on field, track or path to special equipment and back) must always be regulated in terms of pace or speed. In other words, the instructor or group leader must specify the pace (very slow, slow, moderate, brisk, very brisk) along with the mode of movement.

12º Whenever groups go to a specially prepared area, the principle of wave and counter-wave work, or alternation of effort and relative rest, is respected as much as possible. Thus each special jumping area becomes a reduced field, but the wave in this case consists of a single subject. At bars, ropes, as well as certain areas for lifting, balance work, throwing, groups work in waves composed of a number of performers matched to available equipment or apparatus.

13º During the session the instructor orders certain groups or students to stop active work and execute one or more laps of the field track at a slow walking pace if signs of fatigue appear.

VARIOUS FIELD LAYOUTS

Example of a short-length field

In this case, it's advantageous to round off the lateral bases for two reasons: first, to clear space for wave pattern work, and second, to lengthen the return path of the counter-waves, which would otherwise risk congesting these bases.

Example of a narrow field backed against a wall or fence

In this particular case, the lateral base is unique and rounded for the reasons given above. It can also be placed beyond an unusable strip of terrain.

Field laid out diagonally, suitable for certain terrain shapes

Basic field simply marked by four corner posts or angle markers

Passing outside the corners during returns or circular runs requires a slight detour (see point D).

Field with bases marked on ground and set-back corner posts to allow for rounded track

The set-back posts facilitate turns but don't exactly indicate the starting and finishing lines. They aren't essential and can be omitted if the bases are clearly visible.

Field with well-marked circular track and alignment posts on the actual starting and finishing bases

A small space adjoining the lateral bases remains free and can serve for installing climbing apparatus and balance equipment.

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Eight full nights after finishing this year's route, I'm still not sure my left big toe nail won't fall off.

I've asked myself more than once whether this toll is worth it. It always happens around Mile 35, and this year I started questioning much earlier. Close to the 8-mile mark, as we transitioned from the scenic dirt road of Dunstone Quarry Rd. onto a more heavily trafficked highway shoulder, my toe box started to feel constricted. My hands were freezing since the sun had just come up, and I hadn't had my coffee yet.

Mile 8 is a dangerous time to start making mental bargains with yourself.

So I put all thoughts of truncating the route or breaking the march into two days, and just kept walking. A few miles later, the “pit crew” arrived with a change of shoes and a thermos of hot tea (among other provisions), which propelled me almost effortlessly through the halfway point and beyond. If anything, it felt too easy.

After a large coffee at mile 27, I even carried my 4-year-old daughter Clare on my shoulders up a long incline (she had wanted to join for a short stretch, and then tired after about 2.5 miles). Anything to keep the pace and make it back in record time. I've found that "time on feet" is a better indicator of fatigue than distance.

Then, like clockwork, Mile 35 brought its trademark obstacle. Like last year, it was an inflammation of the internal stabilizing tendons of the ankle (the peroneals, or something). Unlike last year, it was my right ankle this time – not the left. The actual pain was not so bad – something on the order of a bad cramp – but the signal was clear:

Stop walking, or do something different.

I tried different, changing my shoes for the second time, and resorting to the same pair of walking sticks that got me through the last 20 miles of last year’s march (thanks, Steven!). I certainly wasn’t going to stop walking.

The sticks helped, but there was no gait adjustment that would get rid of the pain. The only modification that provided a modicum of relief was a kind of hop-scotch / crutches maneuver, where I’d push off my good foot – bearing the weight on the right with the sticks. This method allowed me to make up time on the downhill, but it was a far cry from the glide that had carried me from miles 10 through 35.

But mile 35 is always where things get interesting. When you push past normal limits into real depletion – hour 12, 13, 14 – the body shifts into survival mode. Cortisol rises, then falls. Growth hormone pulses. Your cells change how they process energy. The same mechanisms that kept our ancestors going during persistence hunts and overland journeys are alive and well in our modern bodies, waiting to be awakened. As the primary walking muscles fatigue, a network of smaller, less-used tissues takes over. These supporting muscles and tendons, usually hidden within larger bundles, emerge like backup generators kicking in when the main power fails. The body, it turns out, has multiple redundancy built into its architecture.

I knew from last year’s experience that my tendonitis was not a serious permanent injury. At worst, I’d hobble around for a few days afterwards (that I did).

And so I limped across the finish line, high on cortisol and probably a bit of my afternoon coffee still.

To my dismay, the more disabling after effects of the march came less from the ankle and more from the toe nail (which must have gone numb as I continued to aggravate it), and a general fatigue for 4 or 5 days afterward.

Again, the question remains: why am I doing this?

I've written a great deal about the benefits of stress in the right doses. "Hormesis" is what happens when you push right up to the point where a stress might harm you, and then back off. Find the sweet spot. Adapt. Rinse and repeat. The principle has undergirded my whole approach to fitness for the past 8 years, and it's served me well. I don't have time for long hours in the gym or distance runs, but life offers ample opportunities for quick mini-challenges: sprints uphill, a few pistol squats while holding the baby, cold plunges in the creek.

What all of these micro-workouts have in common is that the adaptation takes place after the action. You're not trying to "burn calories" but send a signal to the cells in the muscles and vascular system that they need to level up before the next time the stress arrives.

But a JFK 50-miler is different. You can't hack it or shortcut it. The magic is in the sheer stupid length of time spent putting one foot in front of the other. That works for maintenance. But there's a reason every major religious tradition has pilgrimages. The body needs duration to reach certain states.

I file the 50-mile march under what Mark Baker (aka GuruAnaerobic) calls "mega-challenges" in his book Anaerobics: Deconstruction and Reconstruction. These rare but intense physical feats go beyond workouts. Their aim is not mere adaptation, but rather a TOTAL EPIGENETIC SHIFT. Not just one or two genes, but hundreds of them. It's like your whole genome wakes up and remembers, "Oh right, this is what we're built for."

Your muscles start producing different proteins. Your mitochondria multiply. Your blood vessels remodel themselves. And a whole host of genetic “switches” associated with vigor and persistence turn on to prepare for the next big challenge.

While my toenail was turning purple, my entire cellular machinery was getting a software update.

I first experienced this phenomenon when I was still learning to sail, and got myself into trouble – running aground in Suisun Bay shortly before a high tide on a windy summer day. The encroaching ebb meant that if I didn't get out of the mud within half an hour or so, my boat would be beached and possible smashed to pieces in the rough surf as the water receded from underneath me. In response, I found a gear I never knew existed and with some choice intercession by the Blessed Virgin Mary, heaved with all my might for a full 20 minutes until the boat almost miraculously slid free.

After that trial, I was a different person – physically, mentally, and spiritually.

One of my favorite historical figures is Zeno of Citium, founder of Stoicism, who discovered his life's purpose after losing everything in a shipwreck. "Now that I've suffered shipwreck, I'm on a good journey," he said after landing in Athens, where he founded a school of philosophy. Some say he would periodically recreate the shipwreck to maintain his appreciation for life. Given how frequently I continued to run aground in my early sailing days, life provided similar opportunities for the TOTAL EPIGENETIC SHIFT without my having to seek them out.

But once I finally figured out how to read a depth chart, I needed another external source of motivation to put me in a state of near-total depletion to bring about the same shift that made me a different person.

When I look back on pictures of myself in my early 20s, I'm surprised by my all-around softness. Some of this may have just been youth, but I'm confident that the periodic mega-challenges I've built into my life are responsible for the mind and body I've developed.

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The 50-mile march reliably carries me beyond the "safe hormetic zone" that I use to titrate my typical maintenance workouts and micro-challenges. The march is a wholly unreasonable and immoderate thing to do. Every year, it costs me dearly, consuming precious energy and turning me into a borderline invalid functional mid-wit for the week that follows.

But like any good mega-challenge, the temporary downswing gives way to an even larger upswing. Long-distance walking causes a temporary dip in testosterone that's followed by a compensatory surge – like pulling back a bow before releasing the arrow. Fat metabolism, inflammation response, hormone production – they all get recalibrated.

The early rains are bringing green shoots to the land, while the old growth dies away. Soon I'll be out there with my chainsaw, clearing the fallen trees, and stacking branches for the burn piles. Some logs I'll burn, while the sturdy ones I’ll keep for the outdoor obstacle course I’ve been talking about building since last year.

My toes will heal. My ankle already has. Eight days later, I’m ready for winter’s demands. Time to break down. Time to build.

There has been a flurry of threads and historical tidbits about the legendary founder of the Bull Moose Party, including this well-crafted thread by @VanDiemen_ on Roosevelt’s original 50-mile marching order:

When I saw the spotlight on the march getting over a million views, I felt a mix of excitement and mild envy.

Excitement that this forgotten tradition – one that's given me so much meaning and so many callouses – is being rediscovered.

Envy, because I remain on the sidelines as my own writing on the subjects – including an incomplete manuscript – gathers dust (keeping company with my other would-be masterworks like How to Cook a 1/4 Cow – coming soon, I swear!).

And yet it’s hard to blackpill when the vibe is shifting so dramatically in the right direction.

RFK Jr. is tweeting about seed oil truth and talking up tallow fries on national television.

"Make America Healthy Again" is trending.

The signs are everywhere that We Are So Back.

It's tempting to extrapolate from this that a Trump/Vance victory could spark a sudden national revival – a collective remembering of who we used to be, and how to get back to that era of American optimism that ended... when?

With Carter's “national malaise”?

Nixon's resignation?

The final season of America’s Got Talent?

No. I would argue it ended on that dark, terrible afternoon in Dallas in November of 1963 with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. That's central to the thesis of my forthcoming manuscript on the 50-miler. But I intentionally subordinated the political message to the practical format of a training manual – how I stay in shape for my annual 50-mile march.

Why?

Because politics alone can't get us out of the rut we've dug in the past 70 years since the darkness spread out from Dealey Plaza across the land.

Politics is downstream from Vigor.

Kennedy knew this. Roosevelt knew this.

Although politics may have contributed the modern health crisis, it’s not going to save us (though it might help).

With the election less than a week away, I'm keeping my sights set on the weekend after the election – Sunday, November 10 – when my tribe will gather to celebrate Veteran’s Day with the 5th (!) annual 50-mile march.

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Long-distance marching has taught me to keep my eyes on the horizon – not on my shuffling feet or even the ground a few steps ahead. A forward tilt, head straight, eyes looking over the cheekbones is more important for maintaining morale than proper gait. But I'm still struggling with the temptation to look down at my phone every waking hour for the latest Polymarket election odds (which currently predict a Trump victory) or some late-breaking October surprise.

In past marches, I've chosen loose themes. After the COVID lockdowns and endless masking, the theme was about moving “beyond resentment.” Last year, it was Saint Junipero Serra's motto – "Siempre Adelante!" – always forward.

The meta-theme stays the same: Stay moving.

Don't stagnate or let current events or things out of your control bog you down. You’re stronger and more powerful than you think.

But this year the stakes feel higher.

While I’ve been reluctant to express overt candidate preferences, I feel like I have to say something.

It’s Okay to Vote for Donald Trump

That’s all. I’m not saying you should or you must, but this statement shouldn’t provoke rage or retaliation, the way a TRUMP yard sign in the Bay Area would.

Since I recently moved out to a remote, rural area with no place for a high-visibility banner, consider this post my digital yard sign.

My friend Jacob has a solid post breaking down the key policy differences between candidates. His reasoning is rock-solid and might sway a certain type of voter. I can't argue with any part of his analysis. The basic argument is that Trump is far better on three important issues: 1) economy 2) peace 3) safe borders. He is winning right now because, crass jokes and ego aside, people care more about the price of food than ideology.

My reasoning is even simpler.

Kamala is talking about how much she loves Doritos on the podcast circuit while JD Vance and RFK Jr. are spreading awareness about the poisons in our food supply. It’s the sludge, stupid.

You could call me a single-issue voter, but my vote for Trump goes deeper than seed oils and its derivative artificial foodstuffs.

Kamala Harris is the ultimate plastic candidate – a mere stand-in for the gerontocratic administrative state, not to mention the many-headed hydra that is the (woke) military-industrial complex.

How did we end up in a world where a Democratic presidential candidate welcomes the endorsement of the Bush/Cheney families? Where Raytheon sponsors Pride floats and Wall Street titans lecture us about equity?

The party that once stood for the working class now sneers at truckers and dismisses normal, concerned parents as domestic terrorists.

The electoral map tells the story: union households are crossing the aisle, Hispanic and African American voters are shifting right, and young men are abandoning the Democratic Party in droves. Not because they've suddenly embraced country club Republicanism, but because they’re waking up to who's actually fighting against the military-industrial complex, big pharma's captured agencies, and the junk food empire.

Perhaps it’s naive to think that RFK can single-handedly overcome the inertia of 50 years of the Deep State. Maybe I overestimate Tucker Carlson’s and Tulsi Gabbard’s peace-making influence on foreign policy.

But I’ll take my chances with the clear lesser of two evils. And I'm guardedly optimistic about the prospects of a re-energized American middle class, propelled by tax and spending cuts, sensible deregulation, and a systematic gutting of the administrative state.

We need a leaner federal government that does a few things well: protecting clean air, food, and water – not scapegoating cows for climate change, or causing widespread environmental destruction in the name of preservation.

The solution isn't more federal intervention – no national bans on seed oils or federal mandates for "patriotic education." It's about removing the regulatory structures that created these problems in the first place and devolving power back to the states where it belongs. Let states experiment with different approaches, let communities decide their own priorities, let markets actually function as markets.

I also have personal reasons for my vote.

In the next 4 years, I hope to start a business.

I want to buy a house.

I want to homeschool my kids and have a choice in where their education funding goes.

I want my brothers-in-law in the military to remain in a defensive stance, not sent to conflicts that have little to do with national security.

And I want to see ‘Make America Healthy Again’ turned from a political slogan into a legislative agenda – with a marching order to back it up (optional for civilians, but mandatory for officers and heads of the alphabet soup agencies).

The gerontocracy is dying, but it can’t fade out fast enough.

For all these reasons (plus the Doritos) I’ll say it again: it’s okay to vote for Donald Trump.

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Beyond Blind Support

Like my friend Jacob, I feel the urge to hedge my support for the Trump-Vance ticket with the obligatory "now, I'm no Trump sycophant..."

Here, I’ll get off my soap box to say that it is worth asking about the potential for a kind of American Fascism scenario, where even moderate critics of a populist movement are marginalized, and the regressive right is empowered to seek vengeance against its political enemies.

Is it a real risk?

That’s not what I see happening. Instead, Trump is surrounding himself with a number of genuine progressives – in the Teddy Roosevelt/JFK sense of that word.

I call it "the far center." When Trump surrounds himself with anti-war Democrats like Tulsi Gabbard and health freedom advocates like RFK Jr., it’s not a moderate position. Instead, it's radical in its return to basics: peace, health, markets, and human flourishing.

As Jacob mentions, the backing of figures like Elon Musk suggests this coalition could solve the personnel problems that plagued Trump's first term. Could a Department of Governmental Efficiency, staffed by people who've actually built things in the real world, succeed where 40 years of Republican budget-cutting rhetoric has failed?

Here, I’m not holding my breath. We have to be clear-eyed. It's tempting to invest our hopes in this vision of a federal government finally empowered to do a few important things well – to slice through red tape, reorganize the administrative state, and put the country back on track. But this same temptation is a strong reason to heed the wisdom of the Psalms:

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.

This brings us to the most difficult test of maintaining clear eyes: January 6th.

The narrative has been spun endlessly by both sides, and I consider it a national tragedy. But a few facts need to be part of any honest discussion.

First, there was the experience of watching the 2020 election results. It felt to me and to many like a banana republic steal. Mail-in ballots have known problems – which is why Jimmy Carter famously opposed them. With the sudden unapproved changes to election law (justified by COVID-19), I don’t think it’s beyond the pale to question election rules that paved the way for the infamous spike in mail-in ballots for Biden at 2 AM. Hillary Clinton cast doubt on a much more secure election in 2016.

I won’t defend the actions of any of the rioters. But the chances that there were agent provocateurs in the crowd to create chaos are high. We’ve seen the FBI infiltrate a number of dubious ‘patriot movements’ and have no reason to think they wouldn’t have been active on January 6 and operating with some degree of immunity.

Some are pre-emptively suggesting that another apparent steal would require a kinetic response. Instead, I say that such an outcome would call for a different kind of politics – a continuation of the peaceful resistance we saw during the lockdown era, when millions of Americans simply voted with their feet and their U-Hauls. The states would have to become the centers of change, and DC written off as a lost cause.

The Man in the Arena

John Marini writes of a certain "unmanly contempt for politics" that causes many to renounce their civic duty in the name of false principles. But perhaps we've misunderstood what civic duty really means. When Kennedy said "ask not what your country can do for you," he was calling for a shift in how we think about citizenship. True civic engagement isn't just about casting a ballot every four years or following the latest political drama. It's about finding your arena – whether that's organizing fifty-mile marches, fighting for better food in school cafeterias, or building businesses that serve real human needs – and pursuing change with the kind of vigor that makes government reform seem secondary by comparison.

The day Trump stood up at the Butler rally following the assassination attempt was the turning point when many people, including Elon Musk, came forward to support him. Here again we must guard against excessive mythologizing of a man who is as flawed as any. But there’s never been a political figure in my life who embodied what Teddy Roosevelt once called the "Man in the Arena":

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

This might sound overly lofty for a man who regularly eats McDonald’s aboard Air Force One and recently joked about how he tried weightlifting for a week before realizing it wasn’t for him.

Trump is not the paragon of vigor that Roosevelt was. But that's not really the point. By entering the arena at all, Trump has made himself into something else entirely – what philosopher René Girard would call a scapegoat, a figure who bears the burden of society's collective sins.

The degree to which he is reviled and branded a fascist confirms this role—he's become a figure upon whom society projects its anxieties, allowing the collective to feel righteous in its condemnation and experience catharsis upon his expulsion.

This follows an ancient pattern: leaders are held in sacred limbo until the moment their sacrifice becomes politically expedient. The king must be divine enough to rule but corrupted enough to deserve his eventual expulsion.

If someone is universally loathed by establishment powers—cast simultaneously as a joke, a threat, and an existential evil—it often signals that he might be more dangerous to the powerful than to the powerless.

To the extent that Americans accept him uncritically or venerate him, I am distrustful. Hero worship is dangerous, no matter who the hero is. Girard was careful to note that not all scapegoats are innocent. But for the most part, I see something different with Trump—less uncritical acceptance and more of a knowing, transactional support. Trump supporters might meme, chant, and rally, but they don't kneel. We recognize his flaws (as well as Elon's and RFK Jr.'s). Even JFK had a few skeletons in his closet.

And if Trump's movement ever shifts toward uncritical acceptance and scapegoating of the powerless, I'll be the first to jump ship.

In 2020, I cast my vote for Trump in silence, and watched with resignation when the "midnight pause" hit the swing states before eroding what seemed like a certain victory. This time, I feel compelled to step into the arena, make my vote public, and contribute to what I hope will be a decisive victory on November 5 (because if it’s not decisive, it won't be a victory).

Either way, my work on November 10 will remain the same. In the end, it will get done – including the JFK 50-Miler book.

The path to a healthier America won't be paved by princes, but by a legion of active citizens demanding more of themselves than their government.

¡Siempre Adelante!

NOTE: If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I am still interested in beta readers for my 50-mile march manuscript. Email me at chdeist@gmail.com if you’re interested.

My wife teases me about it. Like "fetch" in Mean Girls, she tells me I should stop trying to make "4S" happen.

But I insist that it's going to happen.

4S is an overarching framework that subsumes other frameworks like P-A-S (problem-agitate-solution) and A-I-D-A (attention, interest, desire, action) into an easy-to-use process for writing anything with AI (plus your own ideas).

The Problem with AI Writing

If you've ever tried writing something with AI, chances are you were disappointed with the results. Or at least, didn't think they were good enough to share with the world, your boss, or whoever.

Maybe the voice was off. Maybe it hallucinated (made up) important details. You figured it would take more time to edit than to just write yourself. It didn't feel right.

This is because it wasn't you. It did what you asked but not what you wanted. It didn't follow your thought process. It didn't understand what was important or unique. And it used words like "delve" and "unleash" in the most cringeworthy ways.

One of the missing pieces was a framework.

What is a Framework?

A framework is a structure that is solid enough to support your creativity, but open-ended enough to give expression to the ideas that are uniquely yours.

As a content creator, I have a bad habit of collecting frameworks that I rarely use. I've amassed a library of best practices, templates, and essential elements for everything from landing pages, to welcome sequences, book chapters, opening hooks, headlines, and every imaginable kind of social media post.

My first "a-ha" moment about Large Language Models was how adept they are at polishing rough, low fidelity "source material."

My second epiphany was how much better they are at the above task when you also provide them just a bit more structure and information about your objectives.

Enter the 4S framework.

The Four S's

The basic framework is deceptively simple. There are 4 elements of effective AI-assisted writing, and they all start with S:

1. Source: Your raw material, the treasure trove of your ideas

1. Substance: The core message, your "big idea worth sharing"

1. Structure: The framework that fits your content and guides your reader

• Style: Your unique voice that makes the content unmistakably yours

Source

AI excels as a repurposing and transformation engine, not just a text generator.

A podcast transcript or hastily composed voice memo often contains the seeds of genius — diamonds in the rough. I used to polish these manually, but now AI does it in 1/10 the time, producing higher quality results. When I first used Notion's "improve writing" tool on an AI-generated transcript, the result seemed like sorcery.

Now, I call it sourcery: transforming base inputs into gold.

Substance

The real alchemical transformation comes when you enlist AI to first help you distill a body of content into its diverse elements. This is where substance comes into play. AI helps reorganize those elements around the core ideas, the "big idea worth sharing."

Structure

Structure — your chosen framework — is the skeleton that holds it all together. Whether it's a Standard Operating Procedure or a compelling narrative arc, the right structure guides both the AI and your reader through your ideas.

This is where the 4S framework becomes the "One Ring to Rule Them All," but instead of rings of power, we're talking hard-hitting frameworks. Different frameworks get different jobs done, and some are more appropriate for certain kinds of source material and substance.

But if you don't specify any structure, ChatGPT (and even Claude) will default to the lowest common denominator framework — the kind of essay structure your middle school teacher tried to get you to follow, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Yawn.

Style

Style might seem to be the cherry on top. Sometimes, style is secondary (as in the case of a Standard Operating Procedure), but don't underestimate its importance.

As Strunk and White taught us, good style is about conveying meaning clearly without too many words. But it also serves other purposes, like capturing attention, holding it, earning your readers trust, and ultimately, changing their mind.

The Framework of Frameworks

You really can't overlook any of the 4 S's if you plan to write with AI, at least not if you want to stand out in the endless sea of content that is produced every day.

The framework is simple, and the applications are almost endless. It is enhanced and supplemented by every other framework you encounter.

I'm not saying 4S is the end-all-be-all. Perhaps there's a 5th 'S' out there waiting to be discovered. But for now, I'm sticking with 4S.

Let's make 4S happen together.

My excuses for the radio silence are many: farm projects… a new full-time job… plus the everyday demands of raising three young kids. But I’ve come to realize that much like with prayer, when my writing habit is strong, everything else tends to fall into place. Writing is thinking. And a daily writing routine is like sharpening the axe so you can cut the tree down faster.

How much time should we spend sharpening compared with actually swinging the axe? I don’t have the magic ratio, but I’m sure that the optimal sharpening time is greater than zero.

My personal writing rut has also led me to reflect on the nature of momentum, and how having too many simultaneous projects can feel productive while in fact distancing you from the goals you set out to achieve in the first place. I justify my scattered focus with elaborate mental maps, convincing myself that the side quests are essential to the main quest. But most of the really big rocks are still there – the same writing projects I’d meant to move months or even years ago remain unbudged. I've tinkered with outlines and drafted chapters I'm slightly ashamed of, but I'm no closer to finishing them.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is a deeper discomfort with the subject, or my stance on it. My concept and rough draft manuscript for a 50-mile march training manual (working title: The JFK50), for example, stalled out around the same time that I fell off the bandwagon of my own training protocol. Not only did I stop running, I cancelled the march due to extreme heat. On one level, this was prudent and practical. I was unlikely to make it 25 miles in 95 degree heat, let alone 50. But since then I’ve remained hampered by the non-stop summer heat of Bangor, California, along with a series of minor injuries (more excuses, I know).

Suffice it to say, my mood hasn't matched the often lofty tone I employ when writing about subjects like the JFK 50 Miler – the Presidential Fitness Challenge par excellence, on which our nation's vitality supposedly depends! (See? there I go again with the loftiness.)

This tone is at odds with my actual experience of half-starts, hobbled attempts, and limping across the finish line (last year, literally).

My working draft of the introduction mixed the historical backdrop of the Cold War and Kennedy administration with the stories of early marchers who kickstarted the nation-wide craze.

Upon rereading it, two things stood out to me.

First, it felt odd to be writing about historical events as if I had witnessed or understood them. I’m not a historian, and information about the 50-mile march is surprisingly scant. Much of what I wrote was conjecture, using too broad of strokes to argue for a return to American Optimism.

But second, the remedy for both the narrative flaws and my discomfort with my tone was staring me in the face. The real lesson from this understudied chapter of American history has less to do with Cold War politics or Presidential directives and more to do with the positive potential of social contagion. For a brief period, marching 50 miles in one go wasn’t considered abnormal or extreme. It was noble, respectable, and even hip.

In this drama, several supporting roles beneath JFK deserve highlighting in the revised final draft. There’s RJK, of course, who very publicly completed the challenge (in Oxford shoes, in the middle of Boston winter).

But there’s also Lt. Col. James W. Tuma, the 48-year-old marine, who read the initial Associated Press article about the marching order and “decided within minutes to start a 50-mile hike through the Sonoran Desert.” The most detailed source on the events, authored by an apparently pseudonymous “Davy Crockett” on Ultrarunninghistory.com, reports that “Tuma used a 5-m.p.h. run/walk approach he called the “Apache Shuffle” for the first half and later settled into pace of about 4 m.p.h.” Now there’s an idea!

And then there’s the 16-year-old Jim Troppman – student body president at Redwood High (my alma mater) in Larkspur, who organized the Great Marin County Hike. This was the first large group hike of its kind, which spawned countless knock-offs around the country and then around the world.

Some might look back and label this an instance of “mass formation psychosis” – a term popularized by Dr. Robert Malone during the COVID-19 pandemic to describe the contagious hysteria around masks, etc… but I see it as the positive, inverse version: A collective enthusiasm and espirit de corps that builds up rather than tearing down, and that promotes healthy muscular bonding rather than divisive suspicion and social distancing.

Is it possible for such a revival to take place in America in 2024?

Probably not. But my overly lofty alter ego still thinks it’s worth a shot. I remain determined to finish the manuscript, while also training for this year’s belated march (details to come) on October 23-24.

I find myself hesitating to overcommit, but this time around I’m setting more realistic goals for myself – starting with a weekly post, and a maximally efficient training regime that fits in with rather than subtracts from my existing obligations.

A vigorous life is always the best training for a 50-mile march! And a 50-mile march, the best training for a vigorous life.

Today was Day 1. My phone tells me I hit 10k steps (but who’s counting?).

Time to sharpen the axe and start swinging.