Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

An idea for what I might try to make next: How do people transform?

I’m on sort of a break from making YouTube videos or any videos at all really. I kind of accepted I don’t have the time in this season. It’s been about a month since I posted anything to YouTube or TikTok.

Conclusion: man I miss making stuff.

But I’ve been thinking about what to make next. What would actually work? I think it’s some intersection of:

  • Fitness: because I’ve been focusing on hitting my workouts, eating better, and overall just getting healthier this year.
  • Code: because I do still like making things online. I’ve always loved prototyping different tools and vibe coding makes this just about the best time I can remember for actually doing that.
  • Videos: because I’m still interested in creativity and creators as a general topic. I haven’t exactly cracked how to make good videos. I’ve certainly consumed enough information about it.

(Far) more importantly, I just need to get back to making videos.

One idea in that intersection of fitness & videos is to break down different transformations people have gone through. I’m a sucker for basically any fitness transformation video.

The idea I had was to just break down lessons from different people’s transformations. The Psychology of Transformation.

The key thing I’d want to show: there are many ways to win.

Then, of course, have my own insane transformation where I get down to 8% body fat and grow 6 inches taller.

Carve out time away from (crappy) flow

So the warrior element in how you relate to time is how “violent” a swordsman you are going to be before your day begins. How much uninterrupted time will you carve out for yourself?
— “Time Warrior” by Steve Chandler

Alright so lately I’ve been trying to carve out time where I can. It’s definitely harder as a dad and mostly I look back to, say, 5 years ago, and wonder what I was doing with all that free time. Then I look back to 10 years ago and really really wonder what I was doing with all that free time.

But hey can’t look back too much!

I’m always tempted by a good “Why I wake up at 4 AM” video. And when I do the math, I could reasonably do

  • In bed by 10 PM and asleep by 10:30 PM
  • Wake up at 5:30 AM

And that’d be 7 hours. Then I can play with that +/- and get 8 hours or shift things to 6 AM or 6:30 AM. It makes sense on paper but ends up tough to execute in practice. Still worth striving for though.

Sometimes I do wake up that early but don’t start out, as Time Warrior suggests, as a violent swordsman.

Instead I very quickly grab my phone and go into “shitty flow”, a term I learned from Brad Stulberg in “The Way of Excellence”

The psychologists David Pizarro and Paul Bloom coined the term shitty flow to describe the experience of being in flow but in ways that do not encourage or, even worse, work against your values and goals. Shitty flow is particularly common “when your days are filled with bullshit like emails and administrative meetings and then you’re just tired, and this is the time when you should be doing something [meaningful], but all you want to do is sit and browse Reddit or maybe YouTube on your phone,” explains Pizarro.

There are times where I actually do manage to have 1-2 hours completely free. The most alarming thing is how quickly it can disappear into “shitty flow”.

Sometimes I’ll try to catch 25 minutes to nap before the family heads out for the day. I know if I can fall asleep in 5 minutes then 20 minutes will be great for feeling refreshed. That 5 minutes can be gone in a few blinks if I open up social media.

I need to be a violent swordsman when it comes time to sleep. Carve out undistracted time to feel the sleepiness in the first place.

Anyway, I wrote this on the treadmill during a 25-minute session. Maybe not a good post. But I’m glad I wrote it. If anything, it’s 25 minutes of time I’ve carved out away from shitty flow.

Switching it up: CrossFit and the welders of Rogue Fitness

On the welding floor, no one works on one kind of job for more than half a day before switching to a batch of something different. If you don’t vary the task, he says, “you wear people out.” — Learning to Breathe Fire by J.C. Herz

Just finished this book on a flight today. Last night I did a chest workout and did some bench presses in the home gym. I have the same setup my brother and a bunch of friends ended up with during lockdown and the few years after.

A Rogue rack, Rogue barbell, Rogue plates, etc. (I do have some mismatched plates and a bunch of kettlebells from Rep Fitness.)

Oh yah but the book. It has a good history of a few different characters involved in the early days of CrossFit.

I knew Rogue sponsored CrossFit in some way but didn’t know the founder of Rogue had a CrossFit box. The first product was a set of Olympic rings for CrossFit workouts. Eventually they’d build rigs and then home racks and then just about everything you’d need for a home gym.

It’s not necessarily an intentional connection, but it sounds like the welding jobs vary day to day much like a CrossFit workout varies from day to day. Workouts are intense but interesting.

Part of the appeal of CrossFit is the slot machine aspect. Yes, they’re thought through from the coach’s end. And I’m sure more experienced CrossFit people see the patterns from week to week.

But early on while on the receiving end of those workouts, I get that anticipation walking in and seeing what’s on the whiteboard.

One certainty: I’ll touch something made by Rogue. Beyond that, there’s one main question.

In what way will I be punished today?

Can’t wait.

Musashi: the age we live in (or something)

“We live in an age when a clever publicity seeker can rule the roost, at least as far as ordinary people are concerned.” (Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi)

One reason Musashi is known as the greatest swordsman ever is that he wrote about being a great swordsman. I’ve done the cursory reddit search and the overall vibe seems to be that, no, he wasn’t the greatest swordsman ever.

But, hey, a portion of the world thinks he is so that’s still an accomplishment.

Persuasion was and will always be powerful. Even in the age of AI, some of the problems stem from an LLM response being pretty good at checking boxes for persuasion even in cases when facts are wrong.

Today everyone can be a clever publicity seeker. And more ordinary people than ever are seeking publicity. Clever ordinary people even realized they could rule the roost by highlighting just how ordinary they are.

There seemed to be a vacuum when Hubs life fulfilled the very ordinary dream of leaving the ordinary 9-to-5 for full-time content creation. And you likely know at least one person who’s a full-time content creator. So even that is becoming somewhat ordinary.

So how do you rule the roost today?

Define your own roost with a purple cow swimming in a blue ocean.

Or something.

The Four-Pack Revolution: What sets off your snacking?

When it comes to unhealthy eating, what sets you off? Do you start focusing on everything that needs to get done and end up feeling stressed as a result? When you are bored, do you use food as a distraction? Or has eating become a hobby you share with friends? Almost every cue or trigger fits into one of the following five categories.

— “The Four-Pack Revolution” by Chael Sonnen

Alright so abs are made in the kitchen and all that.

I was tracking my food closely for a couple months… a couple months ago. So I basically haven’t been tracking.

I was losing 1-2 pounds a week for a couple months. You’ve probably guessed (correctly) that it was during those first couple months when I was tracking.

Still, even without tracking I know one thing for sure: I’m snacking too much. Even when I was tracking my food, one of the main benefits of doing it was that it gave me a nice hard signal at night that it was time to stop snacking.

Right now if I could magically remove all the snacking I’d guess I’d be under my goal of 1800 calories on some days, if not most days.

Here are the 5 categories of snacking cues/triggers Chael Sonnen lists and how they end up showing up in my life.

  1. Location: There’s free food at the office. The meals, totally fine. The snacks I pass by every time I walk to a meeting or go to the bathroom… it gets tough being tempted 20 times a day.
  2. Time: Even if I can make it through the work day, the breakdown can happen before or after dinner. If I ate clean during the day, I think my mind starts getting into “Well, I can reward myself now” mode. (One trick for stopping this: eat dinner immediately so there’s no snack before, then floss my teeth immediately because I don’t want to floss twice.)
  3. Emotional state: I’ve realized that the problem isn’t necessarily that I snack when I’m stressed—which I do. It’s that I also eat unhealthy when I’m feeling good and celebrating something. So basically I turn to food no matter what emotional state I’m in.
  4. Other people: One thing I noticed moving from New York to San Francisco—and this also is just me and the different friend groups getting older as well—is that people drink less. Now I’m rarely at a gathering where a majority of people are drinking. So that’s good. Though I don’t exactly have a food version of that because I really enjoy food and reading about food and watching videos aIbout food. And a bunch of friends here also share that interest. That said, it’s not like all of them struggle with overeating. They show restraint at the same gatherings. I don’t need to be the person finishing all the remaining food.
  5. Actions: I’ve heard a rule along the lines of, “Don’t eat standing up”. As mentioned, I snack between meetings. I grab a snack before getting to the desk. I snack when I get home. I snack to fit something in before I brush and get ready for bed.

So now that I’ve written all that above, what would uncle Chael recommend?

Break the cycle, replace with a new behavior, and condition the new behavior.

Gotta drill it. For like… 2 days I was replacing snacking with making tea. I can probably drill it a bit more. But also tea just might not be quite satisfying enough to replace snacking. I also tried baby carrots. Yes, I should probably replace it with something that isn’t going in my mouth.

But, hey, one step at a time. Hopefully a few weeks from now I’ll update you with the great replacements I chose and drilled.

Program hopping… into CrossFit (and realizing I’ve been qualified age-wise for “Masters” divisions for a few years now)

In the first round of a WOD like “Kelly” (a 400-meter sprint, 30 jumps onto a 24-inch box, then 30 wall balls, five rounds), you think, “Why am I doing this? I could be watching TV on a treadmill.” Your rationalizing brain still works well enough to have thoughts like this. By round four, your ability to formulate alternative scenarios is completely gone.

— “Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness” by J.C. Herz

A few weeks ago a buddy told me he’s been working out every day for a couple months. For part of that he’s been using ClassPass to try out different classes. I did a ClassPass trial so I could join him for a few classes. A Barry’s class ripped through most of the trial credits, but I still had some left so I thought I’d try out CrossFit.

(Also the coaches were super welcoming even though sometimes I do overthink if they’d rather not have ClassPass people coming in or if it’s really not meant to be used more than a couple times and the expectation is that I join for real etc. continual overthinking etc.)

First workout was:

  • 2-mile run
  • 100 cleans

Or it might’ve been 50 cleans (100 total because it was a partner workout)

The weight doesn’t matter other than that it was very light for internet standards. But definitely enough for me to be toast by the end. I mean the run left me toast already because I’m not in shape.

(I’ve read enough self-development books that I know I should be saying “I’m not in shape… yet!” but anyway yeah I’m not in shape.)

I looked deep in my email to see how my CrossFit experience went in the past. Looks like I did it for 3 months in 2013 in New York and then for 2 months in 2016, also in New York. And I did a few classes in 2011 in San Diego.

I usually ended up tweaking something and stopping. So check back in a few weeks to see if I’ve suffered the same fate. Hope not! The main way I’m trying to avoid that is keeping the frequency pretty low initially.

This time I’m aiming to go 1-2 times a week (instead of 3-4 times a week I had in mind in the past) for these first 6 weeks. There’s a trip to Hawaii and a small chance at some point I’ll be shirtless in front of family. So it’d be nice to be a few pounds down.

And I know yadda yadda yadda, it happens in the kitchen and all that and workout wise 2 hard workouts will not do the trick. But it’s fun, there’s a little bit of chit chat, and I sometimes get the mere-mortal non-olympic version of the feeling described in the quote that opens the book above (which is a history of CrossFit that I’m enjoying quite a bit.)

At the peak of tremendous and victorious effort, while the blood is pounding in your head, all suddenly becomes quiet within you. Everything seems clearer and whiter than ever before, as if great spotlights had been turned on. At that moment, you have the conviction that you contain all the power in the world, that you are capable of everything, that you have wings. There is no more precious moment in life than this, the white moment, and you will work very hard for years just to taste it again. —YURI VLASOV, RUSSIAN OLYMPIC WEIGHTLIFTER, THE FIRST MAN TO CLEAN AND JERK 200 KG

The white moment is why doing 100 cleans is more interesting than a few sets on the functional trainer.