In 1983 five trained cyclists cut their carbohydrate to almost nothing, and four weeks later they rode just as long as they had on a high-carb diet.
The secret was the four weeks.
Carb-loading had come out of Swedish labs in the 1960s. Muscle glycogen runs out, the athlete hits the wall, so fill the muscles with carbohydrate before you start.
Researchers had tested the alternative by switching athletes onto fat for a few days. They faded badly, and the verdict stuck. Fat was a poor fuel for exercise.
Stephen Phinney thought a few days proved nothing. A body fed on sugar is built to burn sugar, and the machinery for burning fat at pace takes weeks to build.
So at MIT he took five well-trained cyclists.
For one week they ate a standard athlete's diet, more than half their calories from carbohydrate. Then they rode at a steady pace, about 63% of their maximum, until they could no longer turn the pedals.
Average time to exhaustion, 147 minutes.
Then the carbohydrate went. Under 20 grams a day, about a slice and a half of bread. Same calories, same protein, the rest from fat. Not for a few days. For four weeks.
Then they rode again at the same intensity.
Average time to exhaustion, 151 minutes.
Their maximum aerobic capacity had not changed.
The engine had. Before, just over half their fuel on the bike came from fat. After four weeks it was almost all of it. They were burning sugar at a third of the old rate, and muscle glycogen at less than a quarter.
Not one of them showed a blood sugar crash, on a diet with almost no carbohydrate in it.
That is fat adaptation. The first days without carbs feel flat because the body is still set up for sugar. Quit there, and you walk away certain you need the carbs. Stay, and the body rebuilds itself to run on fat.
Forty years on, the sports nutrition aisle is wall-to-wall gels, chews, bars and drinks, all sold on the idea that the body stalls without a top-up.
Even a lean cyclist carries tens of thousands of calories of stored fat and only around two thousand of stored carbohydrate. The industry sells refills for the small tank. Phinney showed the body can learn to run on the big one.
Having spent a long time watching Elon Musk, and having talked with him, I believe I understand what he understood before almost anyone else. And it's something every one of us needs to understand now.
Western civilization is not one civilization among many. It is the one that gave the world freedom of thought, modern science and the dignity of the individual. And it is under attack. Not by peoples, but by ideologies that want it dead.
If it dies, the world will not become more just. It will become poorer, more brutal and darker. For everyone, including those who hate it.
Why? Because civilizations are not interchangeable. We were told that any culture could be blended with any other, like mixing colors, and that the result would always be harmonious. It isn't true. A society where women are equal to men cannot coexist without friction with a worldview in which a woman's testimony is worth half a man's. A society where you can criticize God, change your religion or have none cannot absorb, without fracturing, a worldview in which apostasy is paid for with your life.
Every people has its own genius and moves at its own pace. But not all values are equal, and you cannot build a nation on laws that contradict each other. Saying so is not racist. Racism is about blood. I am talking about laws, customs and values. And those values belong to no race: a Japanese, a Senegalese or an Iranian can make them his own, and millions have. That is exactly why they are worth defending.
Let's remember where they come from.
It all begins in Greece. In Athens, for the first time, men decide that truth does not descend from a throne but is sought through reason, and that a city governs itself through debate. Socrates chooses death rather than give up thinking freely. At Salamis, a handful of free cities stops the greatest empire in the world.
Then comes Rome. Rome invents law that binds everyone, the citizen who holds rights, the Republic. And one immense idea: you can become Roman without being born Roman. You become Roman by adopting its laws.
Christianity adds the most revolutionary idea in history: every human being, slave and emperor alike, has infinite worth.
Then France. The cathedrals, those ships of stone our ancestors built over centuries for descendants they would never see. Descartes, Pascal, Voltaire. The Declaration of the Rights of Man. And Napoleon, who gives France the Civil Code, the lycées, and one simple principle: careers open to talent. Murat, the son of an innkeeper, ends up a Marshal of the Empire and King of Naples. The Civil Code spreads across much of Europe and still shapes the law of dozens of countries today.
And this civilization goes on to abolish slavery, which had been practiced on every continent since the dawn of time, to push back the plague, smallpox and the night itself, and to set foot on the Moon.
Peoples of the West, be proud of this history. Proud does not mean blind. Every civilization has committed crimes: conquest, slavery, war. Ours is the one that went furthest in examining its own faults, to the point of abolishing what it had once practiced. This capacity to question itself is its greatest strength. And that is exactly the strength now being turned against it.
Because for decades, this magnificent system has been getting hacked. Not by an army. By an alliance of two forces that have nothing in common except one enemy: us.
The first is communism. It lost the economic war, lost the Cold War, lost history's verdict with its tens of millions of dead. But it never lost the universities. It survived by changing costumes: class struggle became the struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors, and the West was declared guilty of everything. It taught our children to be ashamed of their ancestors, their borders and their culture. It is the root cause, because before you can bring down a civilization, you have to take away its will to defend itself.
The second is political Islam. I am not talking about Muslims, many of whom came here precisely to escape this ideology and are its first victims. I am talking about a political project that wants to place religious law above civil law. It has no doubts. It feels no shame. It rushes into the void the first one dug.
One disarms. The other advances.
And let no one on the left believe they will stay in control. History has already staged this play. In 1978, Michel Foucault was enthusing over the Iranian revolution. Iran's communist party, the Tudeh, backed Khomeini and called on Iranians to vote for his Islamic constitution. By 1983, its leaders had been arrested, the party banned, and its chiefs paraded on television to confess their “crimes.” In 1988, thousands of political prisoners were executed, communist activists among them. The second always ends up devouring the first. Useful idiots are only useful for a while.
So here is my call to every Western people. To the French, the Italians, the Poles, the Germans, the Spanish, the Americans, to all of you.
We are at a turning point. What we do in the next ten years will decide what our grandchildren are allowed to say, believe, write and love.
I am not asking you to die for the West. I am asking you for something harder: to live for it.
Learn its history and pass it on. Have children. Speak without fear, even when they call you every name in the book. Vote, get involved, run for office. Build companies, schools, factories, families. Refuse the shame they are trying to inject into you. And stop surrendering anything that makes us who we are: freedom of thought, equality before the law, the dignity of every person.
The historian Arnold Toynbee understood it: civilizations are not murdered, they commit suicide. And those who think they can let the West fall without paying the price should remember the Iranian communists. They helped tear down what they despised, and then they were next.
The Greeks at Salamis were outnumbered. They won because they knew what they were defending. We are the heirs of Athens, Rome, Notre-Dame and the Civil Code. It is no accident that the rockets that will carry humanity to Mars are being built in a free civilization.
It is time to prove ourselves worthy of what we were given.
The West is worth defending. And no one will defend it for us.
In June 1752, when Benjamin Franklin flew a kite into a thunderstorm outside Philadelphia, the only person with him was his son William, who helped him run the experiment.
Father and son were inseparable for years. William traveled with Ben to London, helped with his work, and through his father's connections was appointed royal governor of New Jersey in 1763. Ben was proud of him.
Then came the Revolution. Ben became one of its leading voices. William stayed loyal to the King.
In June 1776, the New Jersey Provincial Congress arrested William and shipped him to Connecticut as a prisoner. When he was caught helping loyalists while on parole, he was thrown into solitary confinement in a Litchfield jail. While he was locked up, his wife Elizabeth fell ill and died in British-held New York. He begged to see her and was refused. Ben never lifted a finger to help.
After a prisoner exchange in 1778, William became president of the Associated Loyalists, a group that waged a vicious guerrilla war against Patriots in New Jersey and New York. When the war was lost, he left for England for good.
They met only once more, in 1785, at a port in Southampton. It wasn't a reunion. Ben had William sign over his American property to settle debts, then sailed home.
When Ben wrote his will, he left William almost nothing, explaining that the part he acted against me in the late war "will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavoured to deprive me of."
The man who helped catch lightning with his father ended up on the other side of the war that made his father a legend.
Elon Musk answers the most ambitious question: “What do we do after a Terafab?”
How do we achieve a PETAWATT-scale future built on the Moon?
The vision is to use Tesla Optimus robots, humans and local lunar manufacturing to build massive compute infrastructure, then launch it into deep space using electromagnetic mass drivers
Because the Moon has no atmosphere and only one-sixth of Earth’s gravity, electromagnetic mass drivers could accelerate payloads to escape velocity using electricity instead of conventional chemical rocket propulsion
So no combustion burning rocket fuel is required for launch from the lunar surface
That opens the door to scaling compute by another THREE orders of magnitude:
Terawatt → Petawatt
A staggering 1,000× increase in scale
So, basically, 500 million Europeans expect 300 million Americans to protect them from 120 million Russians who can’t even defeat 40 million Ukrainians while those 500 million Europeans don’t even realize they are being conquered by 2 billion Muslims who claim they are being persecuted by 8 million Israelis. Is that about right?
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America wasn't always a nation of immigrants or a "melting pot". The bulk of its original settlers were Protestants from the British Isles, particularly England. The original heritage Americans were and are WASPs 🇺🇸🇬🇧
eye contact during sex increases oxytocin release by up to 300% compared to sex without eye contact. oxytocin is the hormone that produces the feeling of bonding, trust, and emotional connection. the orgasm experienced during eye contact is not just physically stronger. it is emotionally different. the woman who orgasms while looking into her partner's eyes describes an experience that the woman who orgasms with her eyes closed does not recognize as the same event.
the mechanism is the oxytocin feedback loop. eye contact activates the social engagement system (mediated by the vagus nerve and the oxytocinergic pathways in the hypothalamus). the activation produces oxytocin. the oxytocin increases emotional openness and trust. the increased trust reduces the sympathetic activation (anxiety, self consciousness) that suppresses arousal. the reduced anxiety increases arousal. the increased arousal intensifies the physical sensation. the intensified sensation produces a stronger orgasm. the stronger orgasm produces more oxytocin. the loop feeds itself. it starts with eye contact.
the difficulty: sustained eye contact during sex requires vulnerability that most people instinctively avoid. the eyes are the highest bandwidth emotional communication channel in the human body. during orgasm, the face is uncontrolled. the expressions are involuntary. the sounds are involuntary. looking someone in the eyes during this moment of maximum involuntary expression is the most vulnerable thing a human being can do with another human being. the instinct to close the eyes or look away is the nervous system protecting itself from the exposure.
the vulnerability is the mechanism. the orgasm that occurs during eye contact is more intense precisely because the vulnerability amplifies the emotional component. the physical orgasm (muscular contractions, nerve discharge) is the same. the emotional orgasm (the feeling of being seen, known, accepted during the most exposed moment) is what changes. the combination of physical and emotional is what produces the experience that women describe as "the best orgasm of my life." the physical was not different. the emotional was.
the practical approach: do not force sustained eye contact for the entire encounter (this creates performance anxiety which is counterproductive). instead, make eye contact at 3 specific moments. moment 1: during the early arousal phase, hold eye contact for 3 to 5 seconds while touching her. the eye contact communicates presence. moment 2: during the build phase, catch her eyes periodically. 2 to 3 seconds at a time. the intermittent contact maintains the oxytocin flow without creating pressure. moment 3: during the approach to orgasm (if she is comfortable), hold her gaze. the sustained contact during the final build amplifies the oxytocin surge that accompanies the orgasm itself.
the man who makes eye contact during sex is communicating one thing that no technique, no rhythm, and no position can communicate: I see you. the communication reaches a part of the brain that genital stimulation does not. the combination of being physically stimulated and emotionally seen produces the orgasm that neither component can produce alone. the eyes do what the hands cannot.