sumerian.eth

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

https://t.co/kfa0CkvdgU

[Daniel Ch @chddaniel]

I still read this twice a week.

Title sounds like clickbait, but it's legitimately one of the best things you will ever read.

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

There is a specific kind of intelligence that is almost never celebrated but is consistently effective: the intelligence that recognizes when the game being played is not the game worth playing.

[Chris Williamson @ChrisWillx]

Your partner’s current life is your future life.

“When you select a partner, whether you realise it or not, you are choosing a whole lifestyle, and not just the person.

You’re choosing their sleep schedule.

You’re choosing their money habits.

You’re choosing their stress levels, their family drama, their levels of cleanliness, their work ethic, their coping mechanisms.

All of these things will be a baseline of your daily life.

If their normal is doom scrolling till 2 a.m., avoiding all conflict, impulse spending and never exercising, guess what? You’re signing up to live in that ecosystem.

Love does not cancel out people’s flaws.

In fact, love just makes you tolerate them for longer.

Most people obsess over ‘do we have romantic chemistry?’

And they completely skip ‘can I live with this person’s version of Tuesday every week for the next 10 years?’

The hard truth is, you don’t fix somebody’s lifestyle from the inside.

You either accept the package as they are or you walk.” — @Markmanson

[sumerian.eth @EthSumerian]

@CTW_SMB Cool! What do you mean that the lead came from ChatGPT?

[Zombierichardnixonx @ZombieRichNixon]

@thedrivenman Huh, my parents never bad mouthed each other to me, and they've been happily married for over 40 years. Maybe this guy just has a shitty marriage?

[orph @orphcorp]

gwern spoke about this

[Julian Goldie SEO @JulianGoldieSEO]

Instead of watching a 2 hour movie on Netflix, watch this masterclass on Claude and thank me later.

[Chris Williamson @ChrisWillx]

Can You Be Yourself Around Your Partner?

[Jay Yang @Jayyanginspires]

The most successful people I know are violently allergic to pessimistic people.

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Arthur Brooks reveals the secret to the happiest marriages: Shift from passionate love (the early neurochemical rush) to companionate love—where your spouse becomes your best friend.

Passion fades after the novelty; within 5 years, aim for deep friendship: watching TV every night, having each other's back no matter what, defending you even when the world sees you as a goofball.

Research backs it: Marriages thrive most when partners view each other as best friends—stable affection, mutual understanding, and unwavering support trump fleeting highs.

32-sec clip on why "best friend" marriage is the real bliss 👇

Couples: How has your relationship evolved from passion to friendship?

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

men, 2026 is the time to get our shit together. the modern world has made human slop of us. fertility rates are down 62%. metabolic disease afflicts 35%. obesity has hit 40%.  63% are not having sex weekly. testosterone is dropping 1% every year. 42% over forty have erectile dysfunction. sexlessness has doubled to 24%. enough. fucking enough.

reject fast food, junk food, vaping, gambling, porn, nicotine, sleep deprivation, phone addiction, and excessive scrolling. these are your enemies. this is dopamine extraction. they are mining you for profit and leaving you weak and miserable. they are predators and you are their prey.

no, not just this once. no, not in moderation. no, it’s not living life. it’s suicidal and deranged behavior.

sleep. get jacked. eat well. set limits. be consistent. build the schedule. put on autopilot. don’t let your mind rationalize. replace inner weakness with systems strength.

don’t listen to other people’s criticisms. they’re projecting their own stuff onto you. straighten up. let it roll off of you.  be great. be unabashedily you. maintain friendships with those who make you better. who inspires you to be your best self. do not continue to hang out with people who encourage debauchery.

maintain good posture. stand tall. get up from your desk and walk around, stretch, do light exercises.

do these things to reclaim your self respect. be a sovereign person. do not be owned by evil companies or influence. do not listen to the critics. build your life systems. make them habits. don’t let yourself talk you out of it. as you gain strength, it will require less energy to maintain.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

Sauna is one of the most effective health protocols I've done. Here is everything I've learned; it's the most robust characterization ever produced.

Results:

1) Fifteen sessions of sauna dramatically reduced environmental toxins in my body:

+ 65% drop in 2,4-D
+ 100% drop in MEP
+ 15% drop in MBP
+ 100% drop in MEHP (undetectable post sauna)
+ 56% drop in NAPR
+ 56% drop in HEMA
+ 100% drop in Perchlorate (undetectable post sauna)

2. Sauna eliminated 85% of microplastics from my ejaculate.

Nov 2024:
165 particles/mL
July 2025: 20 particles/mL

Nearly identical drop in my blood same time period:
Oct 2024: 70 particles/mL
May 2025: 10 particles/mL

3. Sauna, without ice on the boys, devastated my fertility markers.

Total Motile Count: –56%
Concentration: –30%
Motility: –50%
Morphology: –48%
Count: –9%

4. Sauna coincided with my fertility markers being at an all-time high. I have more total and motile sperm than 99.6% of men of any age, including men under 25.

+ total count: 600 M
+ concentration: 162 M
+ motility: 55%
+ total motile count: 330M
+ morphology (normal): 10%

We do not know what to make of these improvements. Was it the sauna? Sauna + ice? Ice only? We don't know but we did not identify any other protocols or lifestyle changes during this interval that would plausibly account for the change.

5. My vascular function improved by a ten year reduction in age. Now I have the vascular age of an elite 18-early 20s.

+ Central Systolic Blood Pressure: 96 mmHg
+ Central Pulse Pressure: 20 mmHg
+ Pulse Pressure Amplification: 160%
+ SEVR: 227%
+ Augmentation Pressure: 1 mmHg
+ Augmentation Index Wave: 3%
+ Traditional blood pressure: 107/75 mmHg

6. What type of sauna?
Use a dry sauna with high temperatures between 80-100°C (176 to 212°F) and 5-20% relative air humidity. Aim for the lower end of this spectrum, especially as a beginner. Higher temperatures closer to the boiling point can cause side effects like headaches and severely dried nose and eyes.

Note: Steam baths, hot tubs, and infrared saunas fail to replicate the same effects because they do not allow you to safely reach the required high temperatures and do not induce the same level of sweating, the necessary inverted (skin-to-core) temperature gradient, and the massive re-direction of blood to the skin with resulting vasodilation.

Dry sauna is unique, and very likely superior to wet (steam bath) and infrared saunas. By heating up your skin way faster than your core, dry hot sauna flips your core skin temperature gradient, eliciting the following hormetic benefits:

+ enhanced blood flow: the heart pumps up to 70% more blood, similar to intense aerobic exercise (zone 2-+ increased sweating for detoxification: to maintain a stable core temperature, the skin produces 0.6-1 liter of sweat per hour, facilitating significant detoxification.
+ improved heat tolerance: the body becomes better at handling heat, leading to a lower core body temperature (offering metabolic advantages)
+ safe activation of heat shock proteins: the skin experiences substantial heat shock protein activation, while a modest 1°C increase in core temperature is sufficient to activate these proteins without the risk of hyperthermia.
+ extended Exposure at higher temperatures: dry saunas are more tolerable for longer durations and at higher temperatures, maximizing the benefits.

7. Sauna protocol and frequency
Type: hot dry sauna
Temperature: 176–212°F ( I do 200°F)
Relative air humidity: very low, 5-20%
Duration: 20 min
Frequency: 4–7x a week

8. Heat Protection

If you'd like, you can protect your head from the heat by wearing a sauna hat or wrapping it with a towel (use only cotton or other 100% natural material). You can breathe through a towel or cloth if needed to protect your nose. I am personally fine not doing this.

Most importantly, ice the balls.

Icing the testicles is absolutely required to prevent heat from damaging fertility markers.

+ Ice the testes during the sauna session.
+ Use a non-toxic, reusable ice pack material.
+ Wear cotton boxers and shorts.
+ Place ice packs in between the boxers and shorts.
+ Keep them in place for the entire session.

Men should care about preserving fertility markers even when they are not trying to conceive. Sperm quality is tightly coupled to testicular function, which governs testosterone production, metabolic health, and long term endocrine stability. When fertility parameters decline, the same upstream dysfunction often drives lower testosterone, higher inflammation, and increased cardiometabolic risk.

9. Hydration

Dry sauna induces sweating as part of its beneficial mechanism. Be sure to hydrate properly. In general, you might need to rehydrate with up to 16–32 oz (0.5–1 L) of fluid after a sauna session. Be sure to add electrolytes.

If you want to be precise, measure your sweat amount and electrolytes (saltiness) using a patch (e.g., from Gatorade) to quantify your liquid and electrolyte loss, and rehydrate accordingly. Some people have saltier sweat than others and must ensure they replenish electrolytes as well as water.

My results: my body sweats 18 oz during a 20 min sauna at 200 °F, with a sodium concentration of 25-39 mg/oz. A single sauna session flushes 450–700 mg of sodium out of my body.

#

I wish you all the best in life my friend. A new era or being human is here. One where existence is the highest virtue. Prioritize sleep, daily exercise and eat well and you'll be in a strong position. Try to avoid the bad stuff. Anything that takes away your agency.

Be a warrior and caretaker of existence. Don't Die.

[Haseeb Qureshi ＞|＜ @hosseeb]

In Defense of Exponentials

I used to tell founders, the reaction you are going to get to your launch is not hate, it’s indifference. By default, nobody cares about your new chain.

I have to stop telling them that now. Monad just launched this week, and I’ve never seen so much hate about a blockchain that just launched. I’ve been investing into crypto professionally for 7+ years now. Before 2023, almost every chain I’ve ever seen that launched was mostly met with enthusiasm or indifference.

But now, new chains are born into a chorus of hate. The amount of haters I’ve seen for projects like Monad, Tempo, MegaETH—before they even hit mainnet—is a genuinely new phenomenon.

I’ve been trying to diagnose: why is this happening now, and what does it mean about the psychology of this market?

The Cure is Worse than the Disease

Forewarning: this is going to be the vaguest blockchain valuation post you ever read. I don’t have any fancy metrics or charts to sell you on. Instead, I’ll be arguing against the zeitgeist of Crypto Twitter, which for the last couple of years, I’ve been constantly on the opposite side of.

In 2024, I felt like what I was arguing against was financial nihilism. Financial nihilism is the belief that none of these assets matter, it’s all memes at the end of the day, and everything we’ve built is inherently worthless.

Thankfully, that’s no longer the vibe. We have broken out of that spell.

But the zeitgeist now is what I’d call financial cynicism: OK, maybe some of this stuff has value, maybe it’s not all memes, but it’s grossly overvalued and it’s only a matter of time before Wall Street finds that out. Not that all chains are worthless. But these things are all maybe worth 1/5th-1/10th of what they’re currently trading at (have you seen these PE ratios?), and so you’d better pray like hell Wall Street doesn’t call us on our bluff, because once they do it’s all getting wiped out.

You’ve got many bullish analysts now trying to conjure up optimistic L1 valuation models, inflating PE ratios, gross margins, DCFs, trying to fight against this mood.

Late last year, Solana very proudly embraced REV as a metric that could finally justify their valuation. They proudly announced: we—and only we—are no longer bluffing to Wall Street!

And, of course, almost immediately after REV was embraced, it fell off a cliff (though $SOL, tellingly, did better than REV did).
Not that there’s anything wrong with REV. REV is a very clever metric. But the point of this post is not metric selection.

Then came the launch of Hyperliquid. A DEX that had real revenue and buybacks and PE multiples. And the chorus said—look, look I told you! Finally, for the first time ever, a token that has some real profits and a proper PE multiple. (Nevermind BNB, we don’t talk about that.) Hyperliquid will eat everything because obviously Ethereum and Solana don’t make any real money, we can stop pretending to value them now.

Hyperliquid, Pump, Sky, these buyback-heavy tokens are all great. But the market always had the ability to invest into exchanges. You could always buy Coinbase, or BNB, or whatever. We own $HYPE, and I agree that it’s a fantastic product.

But that’s not why people were investing in ETH and SOL. The fact that L1s don't have exchange-like profit margins is not why people were buying them—if they wanted that, they could’ve bought Coinbase stock.

So if I’m not critiquing blockchain financial metrics, maybe you think this post is going to be chiding the sinfulness of the token-industrial complex.

Obviously, everyone has lost money on tokens in the last year, VCs included. Alts are down bad this year. And so the other half of the zeitgeist on CT is arguing about who's to blame. Who’s become greedy? Are the VCs greedy? Is Wintermute greedy? Is Binance greedy? Are the farmers greedy? Are the founders greedy?

The answer, of course, is the same as it’s ever been.

Everyone is greedy. Everyone. The VCs, Wintermute, the farmers, Binance, the KOLs, they're all greedy, and you are greedy too. But it doesn't matter. Because no functioning market has ever required anyone to act against their self-interest. If we're right about crypto, we can all be greedy and the investments will still work out. Trying to analyze a market that has gone down by figuring out “who’s greedy” is going to be about as fruitful as commissioning witch trials. I guarantee you, nobody just started being greedy in 2025.

So this, too, is not what I’m going to be writing about.

Many people want me to write a post about why $MON should be valued at X or $MEGA at Y. I’m not interested in writing this post, or advocating that you buy anything in particular. In fact, you probably shouldn’t buy any of them if you don’t already believe in them.

Will any new challenger chain win? Who knows. But if it has a material chance of winning, it's going to be priced on that basis. If Ethereum is worth $300B or Solana is worth $80B, a project that has a 1-5% chance of becoming the next Ethereum or Solana will be priced according to those probabilities.

Somehow CT is scandalized by this, but it’s no different than Biotech. A drug that has less than a 10% chance of curing Alzheimer's is priced by the market as worth billions of dollars, even if 90% chance it won’t pass stage 3 trials and will go to 0. That's how the math works—and turns out, markets are pretty good at doing math. Binary outcomes are priced on probabilities, not on run rates or moral turpitude. It’s the “shut up and calculate” school of valuation.

I really don’t think that’s an interesting question to write about. “5% chance to win? No way, that’s clearly a 10% chance!” Markets, not articles, are the best way to assess that for any individual token.

So here’s what I am going to write about: CT doesn't seem to believe anymore that chains are valuable.

I don’t think this is because they don’t believe new chains can win market share. We just saw Solana dominate market share after emerging from the ashes less than 2 years ago. It’s not easy, but of course it’s possible.

It’s more that people have come to believe that even if a new chain wins, there’s no prize worth winning. If $ETH is just a meme, if it’ll never generate real revenue, then even if you win, you won’t be worth $300B. The contest is not worth winning, because these valuations are all bunk and it’ll all come crashing down before you go to claim your prize.

Being optimistic about chain valuations has become passé. Not that nobody is optimistic—obviously there must be optimists out there. For every seller there’s a buyer, and as much as CT cool kids love to drag L1s, people are comfortable buying SOL at $140, ETH at $3000.

But there’s a perception now that all the smartest people are over buying smart contract chains. Smart people know the jig is up. If not now, then soon. The only people buying here are suckers—Uber drivers, Tom Lee, and KOLs who say stuff like “trillions.” And maybe the US Treasury. But not the smart money.

This is bullshit. I don’t believe it, and you shouldn’t either.

So I felt like I had to write a smart person’s manifesto on why general purpose chains are valuable. This post is not about Monad or MegaETH. It’s really in defense of ETH and SOL. Because if you believe ETH and SOL are valuable, the rest is straight downstream.

Defending ETH and SOL valuations is generally not my job as a VC, but fuck it, if nobody else is willing to do it, then I’ll write it.

Feeling the Exponential

My partner Bo experienced the Chinese Internet boom first-hand as a VC. I’ve heard how “crypto is like the Internet” so many times now that it doesn’t even register for me anymore. But when I hear his stories, it always reminds me how costly it is to be wrong about these things.

A story he often tells is about when all the early e-commerce VCs (it was a small group back then) got together for coffee in the early 2000s. They debated: how big is the market for e-commerce going to be?

Is it going to be mostly electronics (maybe only techies will use PCs)? Could it ever work for women (perhaps they’re too tactile)? What about food (maybe impossible to manage perishables)? These were deeply important questions for early VCs to decide what to invest in and what prices to pay.

The answer, of course, was that literally every single one of them was devastatingly wrong. E-commerce would sell everything, and the target audience was the whole fucking world. But nobody at the time actually believed it. And even if they did, it would be too absurd to say out loud.

You just had to wait long enough for the exponential to show you. Even among the believers, very few thought e-commerce would become as big as it became. And those few who did, almost all of them became billionaires from just not selling. Every other VC—as Bo tells me, since he was one of them—sold too early.

It has become passé in crypto to believe in the exponential.

I believe in the crypto exponential. Because I’ve lived it.

When I started in crypto, nobody used this stuff. It was tiny and broken and awful. TVL on-chain was in the millions. We invested into the first generation of DeFi, MakerDAO, Compound, 1inch, back when they were science projects. I remember playing around on EtherDelta back when DEXes traded single digit millions a day, and that was considered to be a huge success. It was complete dogshit. Now we routinely trade in the tens of billions on-chain every day. I remember believing it was crazy that Tether hit a billion dollars in issuance and was being written up in the NYT as a ponzi scheme on the brink of shutdown. Now stablecoins are over $300B and regulated by the Federal Reserve.

I believe in the exponential because I’ve lived it. I’ve seen it over and over again.

But you might respond—well, stablecoin growth might be exponential, maybe DeFi volumes are exponential, but they don’t accrue to ETH or SOL. The value doesn’t get captured by the chains.

To which I answer: you still don’t believe in the exponential.

Because the exponential’s answer is always the same: it doesn’t matter. This stuff is going to be so much bigger than it is today. And when it’s absolutely enormous, you’ll make it up on scale.

Study this chart.
This is Amazon’s P&L from 1995 to 2019. That’s 24 years. Red is revenue, gray is profit. You see that little blip on the end where the gray line goes up? That’s when, 22 years in, Amazon started actually making a profit.

Amazon was 22 years old when this little gray line of net income first peeled off of 0. Every single year before then, there were op eds and critics and short sellers claiming that Amazon was a ponzi scheme that would never make any money.

Ethereum just turned 10 years old. This is what the first 10 years of Amazon stock looked like:
10 years of chop. All along the way, Amazon was beset with doubters and non-believers. Is e-commerce a VC-subsidized charity? They’re selling underpriced cheap low-quality knick-knacks to bargain hunters, who cares? How are they ever going to make actual money, like Walmart or GE?

If you were arguing about Amazon’s P/E ratio, you were in the wrong regime. That’s the regime of linear growth. But e-commerce was not a linear trend, and so every single person for 22 years arguing about P/E ratios was devastatingly wrong. No matter what you paid, no matter when you bought, you were not bullish enough.

Because that’s what exponentials do. When it comes to truly exponential technologies, no matter how big you think it’s going to get, it just keeps getting even bigger.

This is the thing that Silicon Valley has always understood better than Wall Street. Silicon Valley was raised on exponentials, while Wall Street was raised on linearity. And over the last few years, crypto’s center of gravity has migrated from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. You can feel it.

Granted, crypto growth doesn’t look as smooth as e-commerce’s growth. It’s burstier, it goes in fits and starts. This is because crypto, being about money, is deeply tied to macro forces, and it also has more violent regulatory push and pull than e-commerce. Crypto strikes at the heart of the state—money—and so it’s more unnerving to governments than e-commerce ever was.

But the exponential is no less inevitable. It's a crude argument. But if crypto is exponential, then the crude argument is correct.
Zoom out.

Financial assets want to be free. They want to be open. They want to be interconnected. Crypto turns financial assets into file formats, makes it as easy to send a dollar or a stock as to send a PDF. Crypto makes it possible for everything to talk to everything. It makes it all 24/7, global, interconnected, and open.

That will win. Open always wins.

If there’s no other lesson I've learned from the Internet, it’s that. Incumbents will fight against it, governments will huff and puff, but eventually they will give up against the adoption, the generativeness, the sheer efficiency that this technology enables. It’s what the Internet did to every other industry. Blockchains are how that same trend will gobble up all of finance and money.

Yes—with enough time—all of it.

An old saying goes: people overestimate what can happen in two years, but they underestimate what can happen in ten.

If you believe in the exponential, if you zoom out enough, then it’s all still cheap. And it should humble you that every day, the holders outlast the sellers and naysayers. Big capital has a longer time horizon than CT swing traders might lead you to believe. Big capital has been trained through history not to fade big technologies. You know, the big gushy story that originally got you to buy $ETH or $SOL? Big capital believes that story and hasn't stopped.

So what exactly am I arguing?

I am arguing that applying P/E ratios to smart contract chains (the “revenue meta,” as it’s now called), is giving up on the exponential. It means you have consigned this industry to the regime of linear growth. It means you believe 30 million DAUs on-chain and <1% of M2 is it. Crypto is just one of the things in the world. A sideshow. It did not win. It was not inevitable.

More than anything, I’m arguing to be a believer. Not just a believer, but a long-term believer.

I’m arguing that this exponential will be bigger than anything else you’ve been a part of in your life. That this is your e-commerce. That you will look back when you’re old and tell your kids—I was there when it all happened. Not everyone believed it was possible, that whole societies could change, that all of money and finance would be transformed by programs running on decentralized computers that we collectively owned.

But it actually happened. It changed the world.

And you were a part of it.

Disclosure: These are my own views. Dragonfly is an investor in $MON, $MEGA, $ETH, $SOL, $HYPE, $SKY among many other tokens. Dragonfly believes in the exponential. This is not investment advice, but is advice of another kind.

[Naval @naval]

Visit all the places, eat all the food, read all the books, make all the friends, gather all the fame, support all the causes, build all the products, earn all the money...

...to see that the quality of your life is what it is when you are doing nothing.

[Suhail @Suhail]

My favorite way to learn is now uploading a bunch of source material to AI and then doing this:

“Help me understand this paper step by step. Go from high level (simple explanations) to incredibly low-level, detailed technical explanations until I understand it. Do not advance without confirming that I understand each step with a quiz question first.”

It has not failed me once. It’s very enjoyable and easy to pause and restart.

[Mark Manson @Markmanson]

How to win at life
1. Commit to doing a hard thing
2. Do the hard thing
3. Feel good about doing the hard thing
4. Become someone who enjoys doing hard things