USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.
Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.
I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."
"They just come with the table, man."
They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.
This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.
I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.
"Did we…?"
"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."
Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.
My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."
Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.
I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.
Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.
I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.
Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.
Barbell strategy for killing it in an age of superhuman AI:
Simultaneously get as close to AND stay as far away from AI as humanly possible.
1. Get close — play with AI models, use them to help you think, ask them to teach you about the world, get them to help you create, work with them to write code, understand what makes them tick, embed them into your everyday life, have fun.
2. Stay far away — learn to tell stories, make eye contact, build a team, lead with courage, connect far-flung ideas, build lifelong friendships, debate persuasively, think forbidden thoughts, handwrite ideas, confess your fears, fall in love.
Spend less time trying to master mental transformations that are purely mechanical — building spreadsheets, analyzing trades, balancing accounts, writing code by hand, following playbooks, searching for needles in haystacks. These are the emerging no-man's land, squarely the domain of AI.
Venture to the extremes. That’s where all the fun is anyway.
To get good animations from an AI you need to get good at telling it what you want:
- "stagger this list of items"
- "make this animation direction-aware"
- "spacial consistency", "crossfade", "layout animation",
I made a motion vocabulary for this:
https://t.co/ExAxpr31no
Non-UFC related, but every single one of you should be forcing your hip into extension daily. Hip Flexors are quite possibly the most important muscle that no one talks about. Tight Hip Flexors = poor hip mobility = low back and knee pain. This stretch = 🐐
The ability to *voluntarily* sit down and do actual work is the closest thing we have to alchemy and it is insane that people just assume it is a thing anyone can do.
A soft person's idea of toughening up includes all the things that will weaken them even further, like lifting daily, grinding long hours, intermittent fasting, overoptimized routine, sucking it up. There's this weird montage in their heads where they're able to clench their way to some new physical and mental state that requires far more fuel than they currently have in the tank.
Your entire life can really change in a year. You just gotta love yourself enough to know you deserve more, be brave enough to demand more, and be disciplined enough to actually work for more. You can do it. You got this.