Lately my wife and I have been pairing the current-best-Trek, Lower Decks, with Deep Space Nine, the show we watched when we were dating in the ‘90s. Our most recently watched Lower Decks episode, “Hear All, Trust Nothing,” returns to Deep Space 9, and zooms in on Quark — the Ferengi bartender from the OG DS9.

The Ferengi are Star Trek’s Ur-capitalists and white collar criminals. Quark (we learn) has built a Planet Hollywood-style franchise empire around the “Quark 2000,” a food replicator he claims produces food and drink with a “special zing.” Being Quark, it’s stolen tech. When busted, Quark’s defense is simple:

“I may have borrowed a Karemma replicator some years ago, but it was my codes that made the bar so popular.”

Replicators Are Boring

In Trek, replicators are plumbing. Early “Food synthesizers” required codes, as we learn when Nurse Chapel hands children flavor-specific Ice Cream codes in “And the Children Shall Lead” (TOS S3E4).

Code>Replicator>Food. No Code? No Rocky Road.

But nobody negotiates treaties over replicator food. Replicators (and their malfunctions) are mostly used for comic relief. Real food (whether Klingon, Human or Vulcan) is special in Star Trek.

People travel from all over the galaxy for the Gumbo made by Captain Sisko (captain of Deep Space 9) in his kitchen, or his family’s New Orleans restaurant. Captain Pike of Strange New Worlds turns cooking into diplomatic ritual. Captain Picard retires to make wine in France.

Quark sits in the middle. His codes -- his IP, customer relationships and the non-replicated “extras” from fancy bottles -- those are what make Quark’s unique. His codes bridge the gap between Nurse Chapel’s commodity ice-cream slop, and Sisko’s artisanal Gumbo.

Quark:

• Knows his customers. Quark’s a *bartender*. The mess hall serves food. Quark serves experience, conversation, customization and novelty.

• Knows his tools. Quark doesn’t just push buttons. He “acquired” the best tech and spent years mastering how to use it to please his customers.

• Has taste. Quark’s food has to actually be good. Without discernment and editorial restraint, he loses customers.

Nobody ever suggests he isn’t good at his job. But his job isn’t “chef.” It’s “bartender.”

The Uncomfortable Part

Consider two meals: a gas station tuna sandwich, versus dinner at your house.

I inhale the sandwich. I don’t savor the fish, or admire the crust of the bread. It asks for and receives very little of my time and attention. It’s replicator food.

At your house, I sit at the kitchen counter while you cook. I’m engaged. I ask questions about the paprika. You show off your ridiculous copper pans. I compliment you on your knife skills.

In both cases I end up nourished. Only in one am I truly fed.

But if you come over to my house for dinner (while my wife’s away) things get tricky. I love food but I’m a bad cook. For me Quark’s replicator is a superpower. It takes something that I’m not good at or particularly enjoy and helps me make a meal tailored to your tastes. Because I know you, and I know what you like, and I have my own ideas about what makes food “good.”

But, critically, after loading my codes into my Quark 2000, I would not expect you to compliment me on “my cooking,” and we would not spend the evening talking about “my food.” It would just be better food than I would make on my own, and we would both be happier for it.

Quark’s (Word) Replicator

Sisko and Pike still cook, and having a Word Replicator hasn’t really changed how I think about writing. I enjoy “cooking” too much to hand it over to a machine.

But Quark’s Word Replicator has profoundly changed my relationship with reading.

Pre-AI, reading was a contract. “I’ve put my heart, soul, brain, energy, expertise, pain, tiredness, excitement and love into this artifact, I would like you to read it so we can connect,” says the author. “I will read these words attentively and gently with that in mind,” I say in return.

That contract is broken. Now, I have to assume that any substantive writing wasn’t bled onto the page from a human brain. Instead I have to assume:

• The author had some interesting conversations with an AI, developed some ideas to explore, had the AI read additional primary source documents to support or tweak those ideas, and then had the AI take the first crack at an outline and probably at least a draft.

• The author’s “editorial” process was feeding lightly-rewritten text into an adversarial AI to shore up the arguments.

• The author owns “the ideas” but has no real connection to the specific way language was used to communicate them.

Put another way, I have to assume that any meal has come from a replicator, no matter how special the codes.

AI;DR

Back in peak blog, “TL;DR” was the ultimate dismissal. Longwindedness was a gate. Only the best content earned a thoughtful hour of reader attention.

Now it’s “AI;DR.” That 5,000 word polemic on labor markets? Right into the LLM for a summary. After all, if something is produced with AI, it seems incongruous to expect it not to be consumed by AI.

But if we’re feeding AI-coauthored content into AI-summarizers, are we still connecting as humans? Is it really even language anymore, if it’s this intermediated? Isn’t the point of language, as Stephen King puts it in “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft,” human-to-human telepathy?

“Look—here’s a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot-stub upon which it is contentedly munching. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. Do we see the same thing? We’d have to get together and compare notes to make absolutely sure, but I think we do...

I sent you a table with a red cloth on it, a cage, a rabbit, and the number eight in blue ink. You got them all, especially that blue eight. We’ve engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy. I’m not going to belabor the point, but before we go any further you have to understand that I’m not trying to be cute; there is a point to be made.”

If the Author really only cares about their ideas in the abstract, not the telepathy, then why go through the theatrics of human-sounding prose at all? Why not just publish knowledge graphs (to parrot Stephen Wolfram)?

What’s Your Gumbo?

The challenge as a creator is to distinguish craft from codes.

This right here: me, sweaty and tired, agonizing over word choices and writing paragraphs in my head over and over again; happy, sad, angry and frustrated over how to cut another 100 words. This is the craft I choose. I’ll never compete with the replicators on volume.

Maybe your craft is the economics, the policy, the illustration, or the math. But writing a punchy opening? Just codes.

As a reader, this adjustment is hard. I love words more than I love food. But I am trying, because (even as hermitic as I am) I care about people, not data. Trust is only built when we share things that are uniquely human: the meal, the painting, the performance, the kind word, the loving embrace, the shared silence of a walk in the woods.

I used to treat every essay as a fine meal, ready to ask about the paprika. That world is genuinely gone. In the post-replicator now, my attention is a finite gift. And I’m saving my appetite for the shaky hands of the meatsack author and the plaintive request for telepathy.

ETF Nerd? I wrote about the state of innovation in ETFs, the challenges of 2026, and how we’re running the ETF.com 2025 awards this year.

World on fire? I also wrote a piece for Panoptica.ai, called “Tending the Wick.” It’s very short.

AI Stuff? I wrote a about my experiences working with Claude Code at ETF.com a few weeks ago: Code Life.

... this note is more about AI, but I want to get past the “how to” stuff and talk a bit about the “so what?” of it all.

Friction

My modern digital workplace has largely been taken over y “the internet.” And the ol’ “World Wide Web” has become a fundamentally adversarial, high friction place to work.

Two things got me to an “aha” moment about this.

The first is my friend Barry, who writes books. When Barry gets a big idea, he takes over an entire wall with Post-Its. For him, it’s the lowest-possible-friction way of getting things out of his head, and into the world. If he wants to see what deleting a chapter does to flow, he just moves a column of notes. New big idea? Ten new notes. Instant. No “click, click, file save.” No decisions. No “which version number is this.”

If I’m honest, my version of that system is making zines, but that’s not particularly useful for actual work, where the “artifacts” I’m creating aren’t usually paper and glue, but ideas, images, videos, data, analysis, schedules, and plans. But I used to be good at managing my digital life.

In the Beginning

The first computer I worked on was an Apple II, which lived in an attic room at school. No disk drives, just a cassette player and whatever you could type.

Pure simplicity. There’s no extra anything on this screen. There’s not even a “What would you like to do?” question mark. It is the blankest of blank slates.

The programs we ran came on cassette tapes or we typed in by hand, and were largely abstract. Star Trek anyone?

As a neurospicy pre-teen, it was utterly absorbing. There was only the one thing: the ASCII characters and the keyboard. There was an intentionality to interacting with early computers that required a kind of digital zen, a mindfulness of action. There was no banner ad or new feature to explore.

“When walking, just walk. When sitting, just sit. But whatever you do, don’t wobble.” — Yun-men

By the time we reached the mature Macintosh operating systems of the late 80s and early 90s, complexity and distraction were already becoming overwhelming.

But in the proto-internet, even as the “desktop” became an un-asked-for and already-cluttered work-surface. I stayed firmly entrenched in ASCII text terminal screens, living on Bulletin Board Systems that gave me access to Usenet discussions, multi-user dungeons, and chat rooms. And at the San Francisco-based center of the BBS universe--The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (the W.E.L.L.) -- I learned what I thought would be the foundational moderating principle for the internet.

”You Own Your Own Words” — YOYOW. What you contributed remained yours, but by the same token, you were accountable for your own words (and subject to banning, shame and humiliation for being a jerk.) Quaint, I know. But also: words - text on screens - was the whole universe.

Back to the Future

I’ve chosen a hard line with AI on this YOYOW issue: I don’t ever let it “write for me.” So, what does one do with AI if it’s not writing clickbait advertorials or bad rap lyrics or taking the clothes off celebrities? Help it recreate the text-on-screen universe.

Well, here’s my version:

Just a bunch of terminal windows, a few Claude Code instances, and a bunch of very boring command line and terminal tools. And it’s been unbelievably great. It’s easier to show how I’m using Claude+Terminal tools than to try and put it on a page so:

I started by trying to take YOYOW to heart and clean up “my stuff” -- all the digital artifacts all over hard drives and web services and devices. Pictures, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, word documents, vague memories of where I published things a decade ago. And something just clicked. The friction went away. And every time I found a new friction point (like, say, data cleaning), Claude helped develop a process and tools so next time, there’s less friction.

Here’s how Claude Code/AI YouTube Guru Nate Jones put it recently (emphasis mine):

The web fights back. The web is adversarial because it needs to be from a security perspective. File system agents can be robust because your local machine is not adversarial. Your local machine is friendly. And so Anthropic’s bet is that long-term most valuable knowledge work ends up living in your files. It lives in your docs, your spreadsheets, your notes, your receipts, your recordings, stuff that gets on your hard drive or in your Google Docs. And that processing these artifacts is where the real productivity leverage sits long term.

When the bulk of work happens “online”, through web interfaces, we’re in a hostile environment. My “work surface,” isn’t mine. I have to accept all of Google or Microsoft or Adobe or Figma or Canva or Tableu’s idea about where a button should be, or what might be important, or worse, what someone is trying to sell me or get me to do. More often than not, what’s on my screen has been PUSHED at me, not PULLED by me.

Its friction. Endless, distracting, deliberately intrusive, nudging, agenda-containing sources of friction. By switching my “work surface” from “http://” to Claude Code, I’ve removed mountains of that friction, and every little speed bump I find, Claude helps me overcome in a way that is designed by me, for what my brain craves.

Simplicity.

Yes, the complexity of, say, the Adobe Premiere interface has a purpose.

But it also presents quite literally hundreds of interaction points all at once. AI agents will rapidly make much of that complexity invisible, but only if the users are ready to start co-working with AI agents, instead of driving a buss with 1,000 switches.

Low Friction+Structure=#Winning

While removing friction sounds like a universally great idea, to really use an agent like Claude Code, I have to be able to assign it tasks — the things that had been slow, hard, or unsatisfying because of friction. I have to be able to articulate, with some detail, what I need done. Luckily, Claude Code is designed with this in mind, and is fantastic at iterating with me to create robust, long form definitions of tasks, whether the task is analyzing performance data, summarizing prospectus filings, or organizing recipes.

Our job, as the human in the loop, is to direct the agents and tools towards producing... something. A budget, a piece of code, a stats analysis, a document, a presentation, an image, a loaf of bread. Whatever the task is, the human value is in taking the unstructured mess that is human thinking and creativity and turning it into task definitions and artifacts that capture not only the creative spark, but the definition of “done”, the rubrics of quality and infusing subtlety and magic into the artifacts made.

I’ve chosen to die on the hill of owning my own words (and my own environment), so my “and thus” are these very words, not written by AI, but stored, managed, filed away, and published by AI. I’m doing the part I want to do. The part that (hopefully) I’m good at. And I’m not doing 90% of the cruft that used to get in the way, while having all that done better.

Feels like a win.

Most folks seem to fall into three categories:

1: I can’t meditate, I don’t have time.

2: I’m having a hard time with a regular practice.

3: WTF is going on!? Am I crazy?

Quick Practices

(answers to “I can’t meditate, I don’t have time”)

As much as I’m a zealot for regular practice, a lot of folks I talk to are just trying to get through the day. Maybe they’ll feel drawn towards a regular habit-engrained practice someday, but right here, right now, what they need is just a little chill. A little narrative distance. A quick slap in the face and cold water bath from reality.

The challenge is that I don’t think one size fits all: I’m highly visual, you might be highly auditory. I’m a neurospicy epileptic, you might be a normie. But here are some things that feel like pretty universal “good tech.”

• Phillip Shephard’s “Elevator Shaft” meditation is very, very short, and takes you through a simple, powerful body-sensing and attention practice. Pop in a pair of earbuds, and wherever you are, sit up straight and you’ll feel better in 346 seconds.

• Cheaterpants 5 minute Kasina: Turn on your phone’s flashlight. Turn it all the way down. Hold it at arm’s length in your lap and stare at it. Count to 30 in your head while you try and see every detail of the light you can tease out. Now close your eyes. Explore the after image. Just note it. See what comes up. Can you keep your attention on it?

• Sleep. I know sometimes that’s actually the problem, but meditation instructor Michael Taft has your back. His 20-minute guided sleep meditations will, if nothing else, chill you out as he talks in your ear with his deep, beautiful voice.

• Almost Sleep with Yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra is an old body-scanning practice with a few twists that use moving attention to trick your brain/body into letting go. There are a lot of terrible Yoga Nidra guided meditations on YouTube, but friends over at The Leading Edge turned me onto Ally Boothroyd, and hers all seem to be great. Lie down and pop this 20-minute starter on, and I suspect you’ll be pretty relaxed at the end.

• Walking Meditation (aka “Kinhin”). While here’s an excellent 45 minute discussion from Thich Nhat Hahn’s students on why he specifically used walking meditation to survive his Exile from Vietnam, the practice doesn’t need that much: simply stand up, and take one slow breath per step, and focus on the sensations in the soles of your feet. Inhale, foot lifts and movs. Exhale, foot presses to the ground. That’s it. You can do it in your kitchen for 10 breaths, or in the woods for 10,000.

• Noting for Dummies. “Noting” is a big-deal for meditation nerds, and old Burmese monk Mahasi Sayadow wrote a super influential treatise on the practice. But literally all it is is … noticing reality. Close your eyes and name everything in your experience. If you’re a breath follower, you can note: “breathing in. breathing out. Tickle in nose. Thinking. Pain in knee. Breathing in.” and so on. It sounds silly, but this “labelling” style of practice really works for many people. Eventually, your “noting” will be come too fast and granular for actual language labels, and you’ll start noticing, more than noting. This will feel silly. This will feel stupid. Maybe note “I am judging my noting” as a note!

• Christian? Try the Way of the Pilgrim! In J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Franny gets hooked on saying a version of the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me, A sinner.” If the prayer also contains real semantic and metaphysical meaning for you, all the better (just like Om Mani Padme Hum can be simply sounds, or each syllable can have specific meaning.)
  
  But the real power is that like any Mantra, it takes on a life of its own in deep concentration. As Franny puts it:

“–you only have to just do it with your lips at first–then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active. Something happens after a while. I don’t know what, but something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats, and then you’re actually praying without ceasing.”

The Nuggets

(answers to “I’m having a hard time with a regular practice”)

Read Less

It’s very easy to over-intellectualize meditation and spirituality. For myself and I suspect a lot of people, the reading-talking-thinking-languagy part of my brain isn’t what needs any more exercise.

Put another way, I find it all too easy to replace actually being here and now with being in a book. I’ve spent hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of hours reading science, religion, meditation and spirituality text. While the frameworks are helpful and it’s fun knowing things and being well read makes for more interesting conversations, I don’t think most of those hours helped my actual practice as much as hours, you know, actually doing it.

I think this especially true in normal, high-stress day to day life. If I have 20 minutes to go into a room and shut the door, I know that those 20 minutes will be much, much better spent in silence with my eyes closed than they will be reading another section of the Gita, or some modern Tome-of-Woo. But reading is easier.

Make a “Bad” Habit

For a long time when I would pray or meditate, I was “content focused.” I was going to do a specific meditation. I was reciting a certain prayer. I was working through the Psalms. I was practicing a specific “thing.”

In retrospect, none of the content for the last 30 years or so has been as important as the showing up. Many times — many years — I had no real enthusiasm or even interest in “practice.” It simply become how I end my day. Sometime between “day” and “dinner” I would sit alone.

Sometimes, it’s an hour of me kneeling with a pad and pencil, thinking and making notes about something mundane. Sometimes it’s 20 minutes lost in self-recriminating ego-games and ancient schoolboy slights. Sometimes its 2 hours of pure light. It doesn’t matter. Showing up and doing it mattered. The trick is not to judge what happens past showing up. Showing up is the victory, whether the sit is “bad” or not.

Fix Your Hips

The folks at Zen Mountain Monastery have regular online sessions called “Nuts and Bolts” where a senior teacher gives very practical advice on sitting. Best advice ever? “fix your damned hips!”

Sitting in actual attentive stillness for 30 minutes or more at a time is not something a Western body is used to doing. We are a nation of slouching fidgeters. While some pain sitting can be instructive and focus the mind. That’s cool, and indeed, it can help get through a painful sit and even provide a great container for insights. But you know what’s also cool? NOT sitting for hours in pain.

If you’re new to practice, I beg of you: take your body’s signals seriously. Do the stretches, or the yoga or the Pilates, or whatever feels right to you so you can hold some erect sitting position for half an hour without pain. That might mean sitting in a chair for a year before moving to a cushion. But do the body work. It makes an enormous, enormous difference.

Make Space

While discomfort can be powerful (Anyone for a little Death Meditation?) most of the time I find it helpful to practice in a friendly and familiar container. Every meditation text has some version of this advice: set up your altar/shrine/space.

I used to take this very seriously, acquiring lots of … objects. I know lots of people for whom a well-curated and adorned devotional space is really important. Personally, as I start knocking on the door of my 7th decade on this rock, I’ve let more and more of the “things” go:

After years of slowly removing all the books and idols and incense and art and flowers and bowls and carpets and pillows and all that jazz, this is all that remains in my 10 x 10 temple-of-whatever, and every object has a reason.

• Cushion, Bench: While i’ve tried everything, this is all I really need to sit on.

• Window, Candle, Water, Timer: Fire Kasina or Trataka is my primary concentration practice, especially in winter. In summer, I often open the window and simply absorb the woods outside. The pomodoro timer lets me know whether I’m late or early for dinner and I like it better than having a clock.

• Sound: In the corners are speakers, which I use to play ambient music or binaural beats if there’s other noise in the house or outside for some reason (or to play guides or music.)

• Lighting: I’m very light sensitive, so adjustable, dim lights matter to me.

• Mirror: Depending on the modality, mirrors can be really interesting to work with, especially in certain non-dual and no-self practices.

• Body stuff: For me Yoga and Pilates right off the cushion are really valuable. Being set up to move right into body work helps me manage the excess {energy/kundalini/neurological discord/trapped trauma/anxiety/animal spirits/magical lightning/firetongues of holy spirit} stuff that arises in my sits more and more as I get older.

That’s it. This 10 by 10 foot room contains all of the luxury I really need in the world (the Pilates reformer being a particularly luxurious find, a hand-me-down from an instructor).

I’m not saying you, or anyone else, needs even this. My most {meaningful? important? lasting?} meditative experiences have all come in nature, not this room. But the familiarity and simplicity of a dedicated, sparse hermitage makes forming and keeping the habit easy.

Integrating Weirdness

(answers to “Am I Crazy?”)

Whether it’s Jhana Meditation or Psilocybin or the Holy Spirit, a “big experience” in practice can feel like finishing your favorite book for the first time. It can take a while to figure out how your relationship with the world is going to change. You can be left with a sense of “how do I go back to the real world knowing this exists?”

Perceptions shift. Personalities realign. Maybe you saw god. Maybe you felt kundalini energy run through your body. Maybe you saw machine elves or spoke to your inner snake spirit. You’ve been in the river. You’re wet now. You’re learning to swim.

I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits all answer to “integration” of non-ordinary states of consciousness any more than there is for meditating. But I have seen folks get themselves reoriented pretty well, and here’s a few thoughts.

Therapy

Look, I’m not a trained anything. And if you’ve genuinely broken some part of your way-of-being enough that your having a hard time functioning, take your mental health seriously. Talk to a professional.

Meditation isn’t a replacement for getting your own personal stuff figured out. Two weeks on retreat isn’t going to solve your relationship issues or heal your traumas. What it for sure will do is force you to pay attention to them, because if you’ve got that stuff riding inside, when you quiet all the noise, it’s gonna wanna get in the driver’s seat.

Spiritual Autolysis

This is a fancy phrase (courtesy of Jed McKenna) for a fairly simple practice. Sit down. Shut up. Ask yourself what’s true until you know by writing it down. Grab a piece of paper and write “I Believe…” at the top of it and keep going. For everything you write, steel-man all the counter arguments. You think the sky is blue?

Why? How do you know? Because you saw something with your eyes? Why do you believe what you see with your eyes? Keep going. Unmask all the untruths.

Put another way: journal. Write down the stuff you experience in meditation. Challenge it. Argue with yourself about it. It’s way better to spend 10 pages wrestling with “I believe I saw God and he actually spoke to me,” and all the ways that makes you react, feel, think and challenge than to simply carry it around in your head. Then… delete anything you cannot absolutely prove to your own satisfaction, and start over.

This “self-digestion” of belief is great for thinkboi wordnerds like me. I spent a year on this project in 2020, and it was surprisingly hard and utterly transformative.

Embracing Simple Gifts

Sit long enough, and you will be changed. Maybe you’re less reactive to emotional situations? Maybe you take longer to think about what you are going to say than you used to? Perhaps you can now pick out fine details in a painting you’ve walked past for years, or hear an entirely new part in a favorite piece of music.

While I have not personally developed obvious supernatural abilities, I have had all sorts of weird normal-adjacent things surface. Since I was in 3rd grade I’ve been color blind. After a particularly strong practice season, I discovered I could, if I dropped into a single-pointed concentration, ace the tests. I learned how to feel all SORTS of body signals I’ve never felt before. I’ve become an vastly better tracker in the woods.

You’re not crazy. It just happens. How well you perceive reality is a function of concentration and filtering. Both are massively and demonstrably trainable. And yet, almost nobody bothers.

The “Integration Economy”

If, however, the things your experiencing seem to cross into the wildly bizarre, well, that’s both amazing for you and also the window into a problematic realm of spiritual capitalism.

On the one hand, I’ve now had enough interactions with folks who I believe are genuinely gifted, wholehearted, smart, rational people who do all sorts of “woo” things to not just dismiss them all out of hand. On the other, there are a lot of charlatans out there looking to prey on spiritual seekers with promises of healing and secret knowledge.

This is, as Tom Morgan dubbed it, where the “Integration Economy,” and I have no better advice than that given in the above link from Tom, perhaps with a side-order of “A Path with Heart” by Jack Kornfield, and a general recommendation for Tara Springett if your finding yourself with a disturbingly energetic lighting-spine problem.

Letting it Go

In the Zen tradition, when you sit down to talk to the Abbot or a teacher and ask them about some weird stuff that happened, the most likely word you’ll hear is “Makyo,” a Japanese word that loosely translates to “Devil Realms.” The Zen take is that all of these weird things — from visions to levitation — are just mental-formation distractions from being in reality, here and now. Or if you want to science it up: its all just a transient hallucinatory state caused by our predictive processing brain-engine suffering from lower-than-normal stimulus.

Either way: letting it go … letting everything go … seems like it’s always the right answer.

Peace.

Mostly as a coping mechanism, here’s a playlist to go with the key insights - 11 songs of mostly new music, all within the last few years. Enjoy the heat. If you just want the tunes, here’s the playlist:

Here’s the whole video (and for gluttons, the full transcript is below the paywall):

"These V-shaped recoveries mean nobody learns any hard lessons. Everybody's okay. Everybody feels safe. And that's been a big part of it." - Matt
🎶 Song: Fontaines D.C. - "A Hero's Death" (2020)

The reality of most bubbly markets is that they “feel” like we’re in a new age, and when we have headfakes like “liberation day” or the largest bombardment since the Gulf War, it really “feels” like the past doesn’t matter.

Fontaines DC is one of the best bands working these days, and this song's repetitive, almost maddening chorus of life advice ("Life ain't always empty," "Don't get stuck in the past") is an echo of that feeling. Should we really just pretend everything’s fine? I dunno. Seems like a good time for a punk-rock revival.

"Our minds want to make this all rational and logical, but that's not how markets work. They've basically legislated their way into this wall of money coming in to buy the dip." - Jason
🎶 Song: Yard Act - "The Overload" (2021)

The wall of money, in this case, is the combo platter of passive investing and the reality of markets as a political utility, not a weighing machine. Month after month, another $100 Billion shows up in ETFs buying risk. Can it ever end? I mean, 2023 did happen.

This Yard Act track is a brilliant and reminds me intensely of “Pepper” by the Butthole Surfers, and not just from of the droning chorus. The rambling monologue about navigating a nonsensical modern world ends with the kind of advice that would seem pretty commonplace right now: "give the man what he wants." Anyone else feel like a tiny fish in a big, chaotic, irrational pond? Hopefully if the tide really is rising, we’ll all catch a lift.

"How can you have a bear market if nobody sells? If nobody wants to be the one puking, how do you ever get a sustained bear market?" - Dave
🎶 Song: Winona Fighter - "Swear to God That I’m Fine" (2025)

I keep ending up in Nashville for a day at a time, and thus I have still never seen a band there, unless you count the folks who play corporate events or airport lounges. Winona Fighter — a new band with a killer debut album — would be right at the top of my list of bands to chase down next time I’m there.

Reminding me of a harder, more polished Cayetana, this track seems to get that “everything’s fine” meme down. We’re all collectively "swearing to god that we’re fine," holding our positions and propping up a system that feels increasingly detached from fundamentals.

"Does any of it ever actually matter? Does it matter that we labeled these heuristics and biases and other things? It almost feels like you should just take all those textbooks and throw most of them in the trash can." - Matt
🎶 Song: The Last Dinner Party - "Nothing Matters" (2022)

This may be the theme song to ClickBeta honestly, and I keep meaning to include it in playlists but it seems so obvious. We do feel in a post-truth world, where whatever the AI says is taken as gospel no matter how much it hallucinates.

This song pretty much established The Last Dinner Party as a FORCE in indie music, coming TWO YEARS before they finally released the album it anchors (Prelude to Ecstasy, which is brilliant from the needle-drop). This was the first song that I, and I suspect most folks ever heard from their debut album last year. It got a LOT of airplay, but for good reason. It’s huge, sweeping, baroque and profane.

"I've been saying privately for about the last year, what concerns me more is an oil spike... that sort of recessionary input that we get from energy prices scares me more than anything else." - Jason
🎶 Song: Corridor - "Mourir Demain" (2025)

The only French-language band on Sub Pop that I know of, they’re like the most Canadian thing ever. "Mourir Demain" (To Die Tomorrow) is a good intro to their shtick: capable of big-bad guitar music, lost-highway harmonies or experimental rhythm shenanigans, they’re chameleons and that’s cool.

This track came to mind because of the “chung chung chung chung” beat of the second half, with the marching band snares and chasing octaves through mountains of distortion. That’s the feeling I get from this “but the inputs drive it all” vibe from Jason.

"What does it take to shake Americans out of that US-centric perspective? The reality is... the US market is not ripping higher. Germany is ripping higher." - Dave
🎶 Song: Benjamin Booker - "Black Ops" (2025)

You have to listen into the lyrics, but Benjamin Booker’s (what is it, garage-punk? post-grunge?) whole recent album, Lower, is a giant critique of jingoistic consumer self-obsession.

“Give a little love, they bug the house again
Give a little love, they're on the lawn
Give a little love, they’ll kill you while you sleep
Give a little love, the place is gone
And before I get away
I'll be buried in this place
Hallelujah, dying fighting
For a life I ain't had yet”

"What I'm excited for... is what does it look like in that world to show authenticity in the real world? What are going to be the exciting things? In-real-life meetups, zines. What is the thing that's really going to show that?" - Matt
🎶 Song: The Beths - "Expert In A Dying Field" (2022)

Maybe the best Beth’s song (although “Future Me Hates Me” is a close second), the title is a perfect description of being Human in the age of AI. While mostly a lament-lovesong, it’s a banger, and the search for authenticity in a disposable world at least harmonizes the quote and the song. The "dying field" in this case may be our analog, real-world connections to each other.

"I think about the analogy of just-in-time inventory in manufacturing. We have all had unbelievable wealth because of that. And then we saw when that gets disrupted by COVID what that actually does to our daily lives." - Jason
🎶 Song: Venturing - “Something Has To Change” (2025)

Venturing is a “vibey” project that fits into the same airy, perfect-but-simple guitar genre as last year’s MkGee album. Mostly I love this album, and the line “When you wake up, nothing’s ever wrong. I’m your baby till I’m not” hooked me to Jason’s observation of just how fragile things really are.

"I had a niece who's heading off to college ask what to study: behavioral economics. It's become very much a hot topic... because humans do seem like the last great frontier."
🎶 Song: Straw Man Army - "Age of Exile" (2024)

Brooklyn duo Straw Man Army tackles big-picture themes like “capitalism”, but with a post-punk snark. The long lead up breaks into a good hearty punk anthem about the human condition, and the hunt for a “sleep without disturbance or annihilating dreams.” And there seems to be a lot of “tracing distant times to the shadows in my head” going on out there in the Woo-ification and hunt for meaning.

"We need stuff that is more mid. Because between luxury and crap, that's the real part that gets hollowed out here." - Matt
🎶 Song: Djo - "Basic Being Basic" (2025)

I’m an unashamed fan of Keery - the dude from Stranger Things. The stuff Djo is putting out is honestly just great. Check out this cover of HAIM’s “Gasoline.” I’m desperate to see them live. They’re so tight in their filmed recordings and really seem to know who they are as a band (putting them in similar territory to Wednesday, or, even, HAIM).

And Keery clearly understands Matt’s exhortation to just “be more Mid.”

”I don't want your money, I don't care for fame
I don't wanna live a life where that's my big exchange
I want simple pleasures, friends who have my back.
Everyone has secrets, but not everyone can fool a man like that.”

"It's going to take some stuff breaking that feels very local... hospitals, particularly in the south of the United States, are going to close... those things I think, really will be polarizing." - Dave
🎶 Song: ROLE MODEL - "Sally, When the Wine Runs Out" (2025)

I have since learned that this song went viral on the TikToks. I have no idea about that, but I do love the vibe here, and it has that quality of “well, we’ll see what happens!” to it. It may be a little bubblegum-pop-with-country-flavoring for my usual taste, but a great song is a great song.

See you next month. Please don’t go falling in love then disappear when the wine runs out.

(Full transcript below the paywall, for your LLM posting pleasure)

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The Kilt/Sporran (pouch)/Sgian-dubh (dagger) belonged to Al, the cool uncle-of-a-friend and half-handed Veteran who played bass, danced like a lunatic, and loved with a Falstaffian-huge heart. In the ‘80s, he was the kind of adult who helped you get into “good trouble” and bailed you out of “bad trouble.” He introduced us to the testosterone-burning Highland games, and down two-and-a-half fingers on his dominant hand, he could still toss a caber like it was a twig.

Thus: the kilt. “An elegant garment for a more civilized age,” he said. Jokes aside: A rugged piece of kit for doing manual labor, complete with a man-purse and knife in your sock. Ridiculous and practical all at once.

He died too soon in 1994, and I’ve felt his absence continuously. For 30 years, when I’ve really wanted to gut check on life — when I’ve needed an actual Elder — he wasn’t there. So it took a few minutes before I could pull myself together enough to take the Kilt out to my car.

From Child to Parent

I’ve been thinking a lot about GenX aging, for the obvious reasons that I am both GenX, and Aging. It was, if I’m being honest, the main reason I reached to Neil Howe from Demography Unplugged (author of The Fourth Turning is Here) a few weeks ago (full episode here) was to get a vibe check: just how unique are these feelings of inadequacy? Apparently: not.

“When they were young, they could do anything they wanted and their problem coming into midlife was agoraphobia: the fear of endless open, unlimited distance with no time horizons, no barriers, no structure.” ([00:36:56])

This is the conventional narrative of GenX: ignored latchkey kids who ran feral until middle age, at which point we became overwhelmed and overprotective. When faced with the seeming impossibility of raising kids in the aftermath of 9/11, my wife and I made the choice to run back to the woods where I’d grown up. While my kids ate dirt, broke bones and played with knives and matches, we were “overprotective” of them just like most GenX parents; Bears are much less dangerous than people.

And raising my kids, at least once a week when the river of madness roared the loudest — I would close my eyes and just ask myself: what would Al do?

He was more than a surrogate father: I lived with him and his family for two summers as a teen. We’d had countless late night talks on the porch while he pretended not to notice I had snuck a beer. His answers were good-and-goodness manifest: Respect. Honesty. Kindness. Love. Attention. Boundless joy. Smart is good. Cruel is bad. Don’t have a lot of rules, but stick to them. Lift with your legs. Don’t let your ego hurt your back.

It wasn’t how I was raised. I was raised by wolves. But it’s what I witnessed in Al, in his actions, in his family. And it seemed to work.

From Parenting to Wisdom? Seriously?

This memorial day, I went to eat ribs at the house of my Parish Priest & Dungeon Master. He’s good at all three of those things (Priesting, DMing, and Ribs).

On the wall, near the phone, are the emergency numbers: once for babysitters, now for home-alone teens. Local police, a family member. And my wife’s cell phone. I’d never noticed it, but it must have been there for a decade. I smiled, and in my head I knew why:

My wife’s phone number is on whiteboards around town because when things get really squirrelly, she’s the “second opinion” everyone wants. Because she is wise.

Wisdom, to me, is Aristotelian Phronesis, which is to say, it’s practical. It’s knowing the right thing to do, at the right time, based not just on acumen, and not just on intuition, and not just on knowledge, but through all of those.

But this innate wisdom seems to have escaped me — and if I look around, it seems to have escaped most of my generational peers too. And I think it’s because we’ve spent our whole lives being the opposite of community-oriented-sages. We’ve spent our lives on the imagined brink of disaster, mostly disdained by generations above and below us. Black Flag & The Cure & Nine Inch Nails didn’t have a lot of lyrics about the wisdom of the saints, but boy were they good at anger and despair.

As Neil put it:

“How do you get a mature role as a leader of institutions, as a cornerstone of the community, when you've grown up thinking that you were past the end of history and not only did no one care about you, but the world would be better off if you just didn't take part?” ([00:05:54])

So we end up with Henry Rollins & Robert Smith & Trent Reznor as role models for “Eldership?” It seems ludicrous on the face of it. Neil’s thesis is that — as the coming-of-age-elders in the fourth-turning crisis of the now — we’re going to be the community builders whether we want to be or not:

“… Xers will be, believe it or not, the solid anchors of their community—whatever community you're talking about... at a time of tremendous crisis. They will be the no-nonsense, pragmatic bottom line at a time when everyone around them is losing their minds.” ([00:34:37])

Which is all well and good, until I look around and realize I have no idea how to do this. And while there has been a seeming resurgence of interest in wisdomhunting (notably through rediscovering ancient sources, from the Bible to the Buddha to Psychedelics), I haven’t found a palatable What To Expect When You’re Expecting or even a Thomas Guide for Elders.

What Are We Even Eldering?

As far as I can tell, Elders traditionally serve two big roles: Transmission and Friction.

In a more normal age, elders acted as living libraries of stories and culture and wisdom and process knowledge. My own limited exposure to traditional “elders” was largely in the church, or in Scouts, where this function of transmission-through-time was obvious in stained glass windows and WW2 era handbooks and secret handshakes. But of course, as a GenXer, I tried to sweep those old farts out of my way at every turn, ‘cause there was stuff to do. And GenX loves getting things done. Move Fast and Break Things. F-Around and Find Out. Just Do It.

For that reason, I suspect our role as GenX elders will be much less about transmission, and much more about the second feature of Elders: useful friction. While I’m an abundance-optimist long term, short term it seems pretty obvious we’re going to burn some stuff down. Our role, then, will be to preserve what we can (through inertia), and help rebuild whatever comes next (because we just do things).

This seems most obvious to me in three domains: AI, Culture, and Tribalism.

• As the online-world slides deeper and deeper into AI-Slopocalypse (where all content is dominated by high-polish mediocrity and low-creativity creation), we will be building, celebrating and teaching those very skills “everyone else” will decide are deprecated. Why do I believe this? Because Chess is more popular than ever, and it’s more pointless to be good at than ever before. We don’t do this by writing screeds against AI or trying to pass dumb laws. We learn the new tools, and we celebrate the Human in everything, from art to commerce. I genuinely believe the next decade is deeply human, and GenX can help by living as if that is already true (because it is.)

• Alongside the Slopocalypse is the ever-deepening algo-driven monoculture. I think the GenX frictional eldership here is very easy. Unsubscribe. I do not care or even know if every top 40 song sounds the same, because Kevin Alexander is a much better curator than the algo. I have no idea what’s even on network TV (much less TV News), because I can access weird game shows from Japan. GenX is very good at not caring what other people think, so they will be our best curators, editors, critics and discovery engines.

• Lastly, Neil predicts that conformist tribalism will be the defining feature of Millennials and Zoomers. Whether you believe in the 4th Turning stuff or not, I feel pretty confident we are not on the brink of a new age where differences will be celebrated. GenX has seen this before. The oldest among us remember Stonewall, the youngest lost our friends in the Castro in 1990. We practically invented Mohawks and Mosh Pits and Grills and body modification. I suspect our non-conformity will serve us well in the times to come, but here we can lead primarily by being unabashedly ourselves. If 50 and 60 year olds can’t be weird and loud in public, who will be?

How this plays out will be as individualistic as everything else about GenX. While there is plenty of room for being the old-fuddy-duddy teaching ancient artforms like making zines, or furniture, I suspect most of our “eldership” will be simply living-by-example in a different way than those coming up behind us, who have never known a world without a smartphone.

Perhaps it’s simply the act of being that will define our later years. Perhaps it’s enough to just live by Al’s simple rules, and show that this can be enough?

Respect. Honesty. Kindness. Love. Attention. Boundless joy. Smart is good. Cruel is bad. Have few rules, but make them count. Lift with your legs. Don’t let your ego hurt your back.

And when all else fails, there’s the Kilt: A more elegant garment for a more civilized age. 8 yards of wool, a pouch for some coins, and a good sharp knife in your sock. Just in case.

But what I’ve found — over and over again — is no matter how nuts the world gets, the indie music scene makes it all better — at least for a few minutes at a time. This month’s playlist is a whopper at 18 songs, leaning strongly into mellow, electronica, triphop, and bedroom pop, but with a few bangers to close it out. As usual, you can just play the Spotify playlist, or click along the videos with me below.

And the songs:

"khatil - خاتل" by nabeel - نبيل

I have no idea who this guy/band Nabeel (نبيل) is other than what I can find on the internet: He’s Iraqi-American, lives in Virginia, and this song freakin’ rocks. It’s exactly my favorite kind of indie-DIY garage music. I don’t understand a word of it, and that’s honestly part of why I love it. I’m just going to assume someone making music this good isn’t saying horrific things?

"It's Amazing To Be Young" by Fontaines D.C.

"It's Amazing To Be Young" is the latest drop from Irish lunatics and top-of-my-must-see-list Fontaines D.C. Last years "Romance" was a hit-filled masterpiece, and this is a pretty darn good start to whatever their dropping next. It’s also surprisingly hopeful, and I’m all about that right now. Also the few bars of 2-2 Punk drumming in the chorus is hooky as heck.

"Dancing in the Club - MJ Lenderman Version" by This Is Lorelei & MJ Lenderman

I like this version of This Is Lorelei's hit form their wildly successful 2024 album more than the original. It’s got MJ on it, which is already a pretty big sign, but it’s also a really great mashup of styles. Compare MJ’s super organic version to the overly-autotuned but well-produced original.

As far as I’m concerned, Nate and MJ should just get married and have little musical babies like this one going forward.

"catch these fists" by Wet Leg

New Wet Leg! is all you really need to know. Their eponymous debut album a few years ago was overplayed and Grammy-winning to the point of pastiche, but they’re back, and they’re crushing. This track shows a better mix, and tighter writing. Big fan.

"CCF (I'm Gonna Stay With You)" by Car Seat Headrest

Strap in for 8 minutes!

Like a lot of great bands, Car Seat Headrest has a VERY specific sound. Sometimes I dig it, sometimes I don’t. This first track from an upcoming concept album called “The Scholars” which, based on this, (and the B-Side, the weirder and in-rotation “Gethsemane”) - has me intrigued.

The internet tells me that this “epic 8-minute track is part of a rock opera set at the fictional Parnassus University and follows the character Beolco, a student who believes himself spiritually connected to the college's founder.”

Sure. Or, it’s a great tune.

"Hideaway" by Mallrat

Welcome to the Tone shift in this playlist towards a bunch of mellower/electronic stuff that’s been getting be by. Mallrat is the overslick, overproduced work of Grace Shaw, which I featured last month, and I find myself still listening to it more than I expect to. Clearly this is aa continuation of the SOPHIE era.

"Potion" by Djo

"Potion" comes from Djo, which is the music name of that dude from Stranger Things who plays the Mall Guy, Steve. I have no opinions about his acting career, but I’ve really dug his music. The only word I can use to describe his nostatalgic synthband/psychedelia is “Groovy.”

"Disorder" by Freak Slug

I’ve had Freak Slug on repeat since they dropped their Album “I Blow Out Big Candles” (featured last time), and the Algo surfaced this cover they did of Disorder by Joy Division. I mean COME ON. The Universe isn’t even being subtle about delivering me just what I need.

"Lichen" by After

Call it “atmospheric post-rock” if you have to, this new-to-me dreampop-electro layered-air creation slid into a random bandcamp exploration and now I’m hooked. Great cruisn’ around on a spring evening music.

"Sweet Danger" by Obongjayar

Nigerian-born, London-based artist Obongjayar brings the heat on "Sweet Danger." The combo of his weird and amazing voice with an absolutely irresistible hook makes this hard not to dance to. It might be my favorite song on this playlist.

"80 Days" by Σtella

Σtella (Stella Chronopoulou) is a new-to-me Greek artist that honestly had me reminiscing about being a small child in the 1970’s hearing Joan Baez (made more poignant but just having watched the amazingly good and deeply child-nostalgic “A Complete Unknown.")

"Garden" by Maria Somerville

And *another* amazing new find, Irish experimental artist Maria Somerville. Haunting. Very San Francisco 1995. That girl you knew in high school who was wicked into the Cocteau Twins, wore black, sang in choir and never looked at you? That’s how I picture Maria Somerville. In a good way.

"Goodbye (Don't Tell Me)" by Black Country, New Road

NOT new to me, British experimental weirdos Black Country, New Road had a very strange album a few years ago, “Ants From Up There,” which had wild brass and jazz bits, and included the phenomenally strange “Chaos Space Marine.” This time with "Goodbye (Don't Tell Me)" — the closing track from their mixed new Album, Forever Howlong, they’re more down the middle really highlighting their musicianship and Georgia Ellery’s sweet vocals.

"I'm Not Real" by TV Girl, George Clanton, PYNKIE

Hardly an “Indie Find”, TV Girl has 21 million monthly Spotify listeners. Still, mashing up her pop inclinations with George Clanton’s TripHop and PYNKIE’s awesome dreampop is just magical. A mellow and acquired taste, I’m feeling mellow and acquired.

"Aerial Troubles" by Stereolab

Let’s round out this list with a handful of great new tracks from old bands. And “Old Bands” definitely covers Stereolab. They’re the O.G. experimental rock band, and I’ve been nodding along to their vibe since the 1990s. And they’re as good as ever honestly.

"NEVER ENOUGH" by Turnstile

Wait, I thought Turnstile was a Baltimore hardcore band. And this is a weird mashup of a slow-mellow-dreamy intro/outro and a solid arena-rock gooey center. If ever a song seemed to capture the schizophrenia of the moment, where Nostalgia and insane novelty are side by side, its this one. The guitar solo (2:11) is straight out of a 1989 MTV video.

"Rodeo" by Momma

Nobody should make as consistently great guitar-rock as Brooklyn-based Momma. It’s like the 90’s never ended. Still sounds fresh though.

"Enough Is Enough" by The Hives

I haven’t thought about these rockin’ Swedes in a while — honestly not much since 2000 when they dropped Veni Vidi Vicious with killer single “Here To Say I Told You So.” I found their 2023 album The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, largely forgettable. This feels like a return to form with just some straight ahead punky rage-rock.

“Everyone’s a little fuckin’ bitch
And I’m getting tired of it.
Went to the doctor ‘cause I was sick
Sick of everybody’s bullshit.”

Indeed.

“This too shall pass,” is annoying. The Taoist Farmer who meets each change of life with “maybe!” The great Sufi Mystic who tells the king that “this too shall pass” is the cure for both mania and depression. The foundational Buddhist sensate experience of Impermanence. The Stoics. The education of Arjuna by Krishna.

Jesus on the Mount: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:34)

All these wise folk tell us that nothing lasts. On big market days, this can be challenging. In crashes past my emotional reactivity has been pretty high.

But over the last week, I’ve had far more chill than I expected. Beyond chill, I’ve felt grateful, compassionate, and full of, dare I say it, Love. Don’t get me wrong, I got shellacked like everyone else. But honestly? So it goes.

This feels like a superpower, a very recent one.

I give credit to a half decade of really focussing on impermanence and change in my daily practice. But mostly, to horrific pictures of decaying bodies.

Seasonality and the “Ango”

In Soto Zen, an “Ango” is (as I understand it), is a season of practice. Traditionally, each seasonal Ango (a word which means “Peaceful Dwelling”) has a flavor. While I’m primarily a solo practitioner both by choice and constraint (nerve damage), I find myself falling into my own “Angos”, each with its own challenges and gifts.

Summer/Fall: Ease & Joy

For maybe 8 months a year, by default, I meditate facing out an open, screenless (if the bugs cooperate) window. A “normal” sit might start at 5:30PM, as the sun paints the trees orange before fading to gray.

Typically my modality (the ‘what am i doing on the cushion’) here is “shikantaza” which is a fun Japanese word that means “just sitting.” A typical sit: a few minutes of “woodshed clearing” (settling in), a quick note of some thought too insistent to dismiss, then the thinking-me recedes, perceiving-me takes center stage, as I semi-consciously note each sound, image, sensation or mental formation. Sometimes, feeling me recedes until there is only all, and words stop being useful. A poetic description might be floating on an ocean, occasionally washed over with love, or gratitude, or compassion, or electric connectedness. Or maybe not.

And then an hour has gone, but as I’m privileged/unemployed, in summer/fall “ango” the sit is augmented by an hour or three outside in the woods (sometimes hiking, often sitting).

This season of practice sometimes feels like cheating. New England in bloom explodes with life and love and beauty. I’ve walked the same trails since the 1970s. Some walks, I can remember a tree from 50 years ago. Each shift in the ecosystem feels like aging — slow, inexorable, constant movement. There’s nothing fixed about a tree, or a bear, or a stream. The lessons of practice yell loudly.

Winter/Spring: Right Concentration

Eventually, as the light fades and it becomes too cold to keep the window open, I turn my cushion to face a small desk with a beeswax candle, a practice known as “fire kasina.”

This deeply concentrative practice is narrower, more full of intent, and intensity. In some sits, the disparate inputs … visual image, mental formation, bodily sensation, sounds … become highly fractionalized and pixelated, and I can become lost in the excruciating detail and buzzing vibrations of the very tip of the candle flame. Somewhat inevitably but without intention, Jhanna states emerge — discrete, definable cognitive states, which, after a lot of paying attention, I can now subtly discriminate between in the moment, like feeling a worn path under my feet on a moonlit walk.

This kind of practice feels like “practice” — literally working on a skill to get better at it and explore its boundaries. It feels like flexing and stretching muscles. Winter Ango has, at least these past few years, been much more “intensive” than other times of year.

In Between The Pendulum’s Swing is Opportunity

For years, some version of this cycle has just naturally emerged: peaceful dwelling leads to hard concentration leads back to peaceful dwelling.

But most of my “aha” moments have come in the swinging of the pendulum between what might be seen as “poles” of practice. Both the awful, disruptive “aha” moments that coincided with real misery in a “Dark Night of the Soul”, and in “dabbling” in narrower, more niche practices.

To the Seeming-Me-Now, these small moments — where the pendulum hauls ass across the centerpoint between seasons — are valuable, hyperplastic opportunities, loaded with imaginal power and open to suggestion.

In short: it’s when I try new stuff.

I used this last one to watch the Pitt.

The Gore of the Real

I’m not really squeamish in the traditional sense. Growing up on a farm, you learn to deal with all of the “gross” stuff pretty quick. Death, in particular, comes at you fast. I saw my first dead animals before I could walk. I held my first animal at the moment of death — a horse we had to put down — at around 7. I took my first life — a chicken with a broken leg in the coop — at maybe 9. I’ve been cleaning trout since I could hold a fishing rod.

But I’ve always felt death and gore differently when it’s people. I can watch a horror movie if it’s not too gory, or if it’s ridiculously gory, but I nope out of anything smacking of “real world” gory.

And yet … my son works in a Mega-Trauma-Center, and works week after week right in the middle of all the stuff that I find hard. So when he said “Dad, if you want to see what work is really like, watch the Pitt, but you should absolutely not watch it because I don’t think you can…” (He knows me well.)

I had to find my way.

Luckily, There’s an App for that. An old one.

Death and Foulness Meditations (Maranasati and Ashuba)

During the pandemic, I did a decent amount of meditation on death and dying. Maranasati is covered in at least two different piles-of-writing from around Buddha-times (Suttas/Sutras), but this is the good one. The instructions are pretty simple: Really imagine all the ways you could die, and see what that brings up, like, say, fear, or panic, or aversion, or sadness. Congratulations, you have a new object of meditation. This constant mindfulness of death — truly memento mori — is straight up Marcus Aurelius, It’s also Zen monastic. Every night the monastics chant:

Let me respectfully remind you
Life and death are of supreme importance
Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost
Each of us should strive to awaken
Awaken!
Take heed, do not squander your life.

But Maranasati takes this way further than simply “recognizing” our mortality. It asks the meditator to visualize, profoundly, their own body dying and decaying. There are lots and lots of resources for the modern Maranasati meditator, I used this simple set of “themes” to meditate on:

1. Everyone has to die;

2. Our lifespan is decreasing continuously;

3. The amount of time spent during our life to develop the mind is very small;

4. Human life expectancy is uncertain;

5. There are many causes of death;

6. The human body is so fragile;

7. Our possessions and enjoyments cannot help;

8. Our loved ones cannot help;

9. Our own body cannot help; loved ones cannot help

Written like this, it’s more a contemplative map than a meditation map. But contemplating say, the decreasing of your own lifespan in each moment, allows the feeling tone itself to become the object of meditation. To be blunt: you just sit with the absolute deepening, clarifying misery of each step until you recognize how little power it has.

I spent a good month or so with this during the pandemic, and it was a really powerful bridge towards some lasting change. But I absolutely took the fluffy intellectual Western-buddhism path. I avoided the hard part: Foulness, which in Sanskrit is “Ashuba.”

Ashuba meditation, is a lot less fun than thinking about death real hard. Ashuba meditation challenges the meditator to dwell fully in the grossness of being human. In olden-days, a good Ashuba meditation would be breaking into a fresh charnel ground or morgue, doing a lot of direct seeing/smelling/feeling the reality of human decay.

I did not do this.

Instead, I took the modern, less legally-challenging approach, using visual imagery to dwell in the horror of the 32 different parts of the body falling apart. (I will reluctantly link two PDFs here with the hard-warning that are probably visually disturbing).

I’ve avoided Ashuba like … well like the atrocity exhibition it is … until the this liminal inter-Ango season rolled in with the geese and the rabbits. Until my aversions became a barrier between my son and myself.

Until I wanted to watch a dumb TV show.

Dwelling in discomfort (and initially nausea), hour after hour in the fading days of February into Early March was honestly liberating. By focussing — with deep concentration — on the face of a corpse, or images of a diseased heart, I haven’t developed some switch-flipping ability to dissociate. Instead, bathing in aversion eventually seemed to burn off more of my sense-of-separate-self. I suppose it’s probably just phobia-exposure from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, with a woo-cake layer on top.

Peace Weeps With Joy at Impermanence

But here’s the surprise. Here’s what I find at the bottom of the well.

When there is no longer any knowledge of the difference between corpse and self, when the broken body on the screen becomes my body, aching with pain, disconnection, rot and decay until neither body remains, only one thing seems to be left: the sense of compassion, wonder and gratitude that humans have tried to label forever: Brahmavihara, Agape & Aloha, Chesed, Buddha-mind, God’s Grace.

Watching the Pitt, as the cold, grim reality of a mass casualty incident unfolds in my living room, all that repulsion and rising-gorge has somehow been replaced with all that’s left when everything else burns off.

Love

And when the markets crashed? How can this compare to the time sitting in Ashuba? How ridiculous to let angst, greed, anger and fear into my being, Trojan-horsed inside this imaginary scorekeeping system?

This too shall pass. To dust we shall return. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Boy! Markets! Amirite?

Watching the atrocity exhibition that is a pure red tape and hair-on-fire CNBC hosts, the angst, greed, anger and fear simply never arose, leaving me with the subtle witnessing sadness that often holds the seed of compassion.

All things are indeed impermanent. And yet, somehow, throughout each flicker of reality, each print on the tape, each body in the morgue,

Love seems — if not permanent and undying — insistent.

Who you trust matters, because it’s a black hat/white hat world out there, and the black hats are winning.

***CRACKS KNUCKLES***

First, I want to talk about metaphysics and attention, and then, I want to talk about applying those metaphysics of attention to our current world, which is in the middle of a Semantic War.

NOTE: You had your chance to sign up to the “Finance ONLY Please” sub-category of this email list. You can go back and unsub from the Full Nadig (tm). Also I’ll never know if you hit delete right now. It’s a Sunday for Pete’s sake.

The Metaphysics of Attention

I got asked four separate times last week what my metaphysics were: that is, how I see the nature of reality and the human condition. As someone who writes a lot about finance and meditation, it seemed worth answering:

• First Principles: I am either nothingness, or awareness inside a black box, peppered with sensory input. That’s the baseline.

• From that blank awareness (a very definitive cognitive state, that just happens to be empty), I find both solipsism (I am all that is real), and monism (everything is all that is, but it’s all one thing including me). (RABBITHOLE: So far the preponderance of evidence is that I don’t exist, except as part of everything, which means we’re all the same thing anyway. This mind-bender bridges Thomas Merton and John Wheeler just fine, by way of Heinrich Pas and Jed McKenna.)

• EVERYTHING on top of that… like everything, including everything I’ve ever seen, done, felt or thought, is essentially a cognitive trick to make navigating complex dynamic systems (the world as presented, and our species constraints/gifts) easier. (RABBITHOLE: When consciousness reboots, the first thing that floods in is stories, even before there’s an observer. It’s story all the way down.)

What that means (for me, find your own meaning) is that in moments of consciousness, where I feel like I have agency (as opposed to, say, dreaming, or trance states), the only thing that matters is attention. The more time I spend in meditation, the more clear it is to me that there is only right now. You can tell a story about the past, but you can only encounter that story in the present. Same for all your plans and worries about the future. There is only the present experience.

(RABBITHOLE: At the “woo” level this shows up in Vipassana meditation, and frankly all other kinds of meditation if you really do the work. Paying attention — really paying attention, where there is literally no other awareness but the object of meditation, took me forever and feels like step 1. In Buddhism it’s Samadhi - single pointed awareness. In Christianity it’s nepsis — the watchful attention brought about by the Jesus Prayer, or the single word mantras of the Cloud of Unknowing. There are parallels in Jewish and Islamic contemplative traditions as well, but I haven’t practiced those).

But What Kind of Attention: The McGilchrist Brain

If attention is all we get, it’s probably worth understanding the different ways we use our only gift. For me, the most important framing metaphor helping me navigate life the last half-decade has been the been the divided brain.

(RABBITHOLE: Not in the way you learned in school, but in the incredibly nuanced and rich way presented by Dr. Iain McGilchrist in his 1,600 page Opus, The Matter With Things. Tom Morgan wrote a great cheat sheet for it, and the book is absolutely worth the months it will take to give it a surface read, and the years it’s taken to get down the rabbitholes. I am utterly uninterested in whether there’s materialistic perfection in his diagnosis — even as metaphor it’s too accurate for me to dismiss.)

Here’s the Zine version:

In short: Left brain narrow, persnickety and technical, sure of it’s separateness and scarcity, right brain broad, open and alert, aware of the whole in all its abundance.

The major thrust of McG’s work is to document his diagnosis of the western world as suffering from left-brain capture, highlighting all that we have lost and all that we miss living our lives in left-brain dominant thought. I’ve tried to embody a simple lesson: Don’t use left-brain thinking — the part that reads and studies and classifies and “knows things” and contains most of “me thinking” — to live what is primarily a right-brain existence — natural open and present reality and the state of “what it’s like to be human.”

Practically speaking, that’s meant meditating, spending self-less time in the woods, making things with my hands, or exercising in some mindful way. It’s been transformative, improving my health, happiness, relationships, and honestly, how people and things now seem to show up in my life. ***** would recommend. AAA+.

But…

carrying that sense of calm wholeness and radical acceptance— the Silence Beyond Self — back out into the ridiculously artificial storytelling world of human society rarely seems to work. 10 Seconds after firing up the browser, I’m inundated with INFORMATION and FACTS and LANGUAGE and DATA and that just scratches my left brain with a toothbrush so hard (especially with the dopaminergic hacks the techbros have gotten so good at). This is all foundational to McG’s diagnosis but it’s very hard to retain metacognitive awareness when your doomscrolling.

Clearly, some sort of balancing act is required, and one which, no matter how much I meditate, doesn’t just magically happen.

Outcome Orientation

A very simple answer came this week from Cedric Chin at Commoncog in a piece called “Outcome Orientation as a Cure for Information Overload”. I recommend the whole thing, but here’s the glamour shot:

At all times, whenever you are doing something or reading something, you should ask yourself the question:

“What is the outcome I am trying to achieve here?”

You may then continue with the action or consumption if you wish, but you must answer the question honestly first.

The point is not to control your time allocation, the point is to always be aware of why you are consuming something, as you are consuming it

That’s it. The point is not to control your time allocation, the point is to always be aware of why you are consuming something as you are consuming it. If you do this, you will automatically change your time allocation as a result.

This seems stupidly simple, but it’s actually really hard to do.

Cedric is talking about this specifically in the context of dealing with information overload, which is great. But I actually don’t think it goes nearly far enough. It’s not just intention, and its not just paying attention.

It’s paying attention with intention.

That’s my metaphysics. At least, my Ontologically Aspirational Metaphysics. Use my balanced attention on purpose. Honestly, it’s required a bit of “Reverse McGilchristing.” I’ve spent so much time trying to get my left brain to shut up, sometimes I forget that these meatsacks have a left brain for a reason.

The challenge then, in processing the endless stream of garbage coming into our lives, is to sort out what matters. This is something I felt like I was good at in my youth: quickly and accurately sorting the world into what matters, and what doesn’t. This is relevance realization — knowing what to pay attention to and why — and it’s is a big part of why humans are cool. Predator vs. Prey. Good food vs. spoiled. And the buckets and what we call them matter. “Red” and “Blue” are less useful berry-distinctions than “edible” and “poisonous.”

While I’m still good at parlor trick relevance realization — scanning data for gems, engaging with novelty effectively — I’ve deliberately tried hard (at least since the accident) not do this with people. To divide them into in-groups and out-groups as a cognitive shorthand to minimize how much time I have to dwell in the stream of information, if nothing else.

But I’m not sure that really works anymore, no matter how much I try to practice love and hope. As much as I want to embrace monistic universal love, and will still try for peace, I get to choose who I spend my time and attention on.

Right Action & The Semantic War

As I was once told by a meditation teacher in a very solemn setting: “So you’ve seen some sh&t. Are you going to get off your f#$king ass and do something about it?”

In Buddhism, this “now what” is often talked about as “Right Action” — what do we DO out there in the seeming-world of other people to make things better. To help the long arc of human flourishing nudge upwards, and to erode the suffering of the world?

From my reality tunnel, the actual thing on my doorstep isn’t jackbooted thugs. It’s a semantic war:

• In semantic war, words are the weapons. I’m not making a political point about Denali or Fort Bragg — every party in power all over the world renames monuments and state property and organizations. It’s how we ended up with a Space Force and a Kennedy Center.

  But there’s a big difference between an institution renaming property, and insisting that the rest of the world just decide to call a body of water something made up. The “Gulf of America,” or the lists of banned words like “woman” from government websites are no different than the scene where Captain Picard on Star Trek: TNG is tortured solely to get him to deny a simple truth.

  

  It’s not “silly.” It’s not a “distraction.” It’s not an “error” that they’ll fix here and there when outcry is strong enough. It’s not the same as ignoring someone’s pronouns (that’s just means you are personally, individually and deliberately being an asshole). This is Orwellian mental assault.

• The Battles in this war are to shift Common Knowledge. The most powerful force in the world isn’t Nuclear Weapons or even Love. It’s Common Knowledge. If you can change what “everybody knows” then you have changed the world. Here’s how Ben Hunt described it 13 years ago:

  The power source of Common Knowledge is not the crowd seeing an announcement or a press conference. The power source of Common Knowledge is the crowd seeing the crowd seeing an announcement or a press conference. This is why sitcom laugh tracks exist. This is why American Idol is filmed in front of an audience. This is why the Chinese government still bans any media mention of the Tiananmen Square protests more than 20 years after they occurred. The power of a crowd seeing a crowd is one of the most awesome forces in human society. It topples governments. It launches Crusades. It builds cathedrals. And it darn sure moves markets.

  This is the intent of all the silly “Gulf of America” and “RedWhiteAndBlueLand” BS. Everyone knows it’s silly now. But if enough people to say it in front of enough people, that’s what changes reality. The Overton Window shifts, and what was universally considered insane (Lets make Canada a state before Puerto Rico!) becomes a Thanksgiving dinner conversation.

How you protect yourself, your assets, your family and your clients in the middle of this semantic war isn’t obvious. It’s tricky. Once we step outside Solipsism, we interact with people and institutions. Our success — in whatever endeavor we’re pursuing — will depend on how they respond to the chaos.

In short: you need to pick your partners very very carefully, and honestly, very very quickly. As institutions norms and structures dissolve, not only will it be hard to know what’s real, it’s going to be very hard to know who you can actually trust. Not just “they tell the truth” or “they won’t break this law” kind of simple “trust”, but “when presented with ambiguity, they will make decisions that I would understand and would actually be in my interest.”

That’s a tough ask.

Black Hats & White Hats

That’s why I’ve decided that, as crass or as simplistic as it may seem, to put a few labels of my own on the world.

White Hat: People and institutions that feel like they are pro-human-flourishing/anti-human-suffering.

Black Hat: People and institutions that feel like they put those second, or even parallel to the pursuit of money, power and influence. Mammon and Moloch.

Let me be excruciatingly clear: I am not holding myself out as some kind of white hat moral scion who has done and will do no wrong. While I ascribe to White Hatdom, I have and will make bad choices, hurt people, and screw stuff up. I’m a mammal.

Both groups are going to do bad things, and good things. Both groups will have good actors, and bad actors. Despite their coding, they don’t really mean “evil” and “good” in some broad, moral sense. They do the work of “Good guys” and “Bad guys.” But mostly, they are a Hollywood pastiche. They are Spy vs. Spy:

For those of you under 50, Spy vs. Spy was a regular cold-war era strip in MAD Magazine. No words are ever included, but it’s clear who the “good guy” was — the one in the white hat of course. They both do horrific stuff to each other each panel. But at a glance, you knew the game. And above all else, nobody — not even the spies — seemed to take it all that seriously. They know it’s just a game, no matter how cartoon-lethal.

The genius of the comic (coming from a Cuban chased out by Castro) was that he never even hinted at what either side was fighting for, or who they were. That was for us to decide.

Discerned Alignment

Who gets the white hat is a matter of discerned alignment. My definition of White Hat (pro-human-flourishing/anti-human-suffering) seems simple, but discerning who or what aligns with this is hard. So I choose to rely on yet-more-shortcuts… I pay attention to what they say, what they do, and ideally, to how I feel when I am with them. If those are aligned, well, that’s a good start. But ultimately discernment is always personal, always a right-brained call about a left-brain sort. Always just a “gut check.”

My version of a white hat may not be yours, and that’s cool. But I’m guessing you find the world just as confusing as I do, and some level of semantic sort is going to be helpful in navigating the coming chaos.

My humble request (for all our sakes) is this: know what it is your seeking alignment with, and then put real time and attention on making sure you’re discernment is as sharp as it can be. The old shortcuts — party, country, company, culture, caste — just don’t seem to have much discernment power anymore.

Disclaimer: Not one iota of this went anywhere near AI. I used Perlexity.ai to find some links.

Zines!

As a special bonus: I made a lot of Zines in 2024 - north of 3000. So here’s a short video on how to make your own efficiently. If you want to play along:

Here’s the PDF for the original 1991 Riot Grrrl Zine which changed the world. More over at 85bb65.com.

The Mixtape

Here’s the new music, or keep reading for thoughts and stories:

So What?

"Young Lion" – Sade (UK/Nigeria)

I hadn’t thought about silky smooth Sade in a minute, as the zoomers say, which is fair, given her rise to fame happened in the first Reagan administration. Young Lion is a song about her son Izaak, and is beautiful in it’s own right. It’s also a stunning opener to the outrageously good Transa collection of 45 songs in support of our Queer-and-in-crisis friends. Don’t sleep on the rest of the collection either, with high spots from Julien Baker, Lucy Liyou/Grouper, Sharon Van Etten/Ezra Furman and Adrianne Lenker.

"Eden" – Baths (USA)

Baths (Will Wiesenfeld) is a noisecore/glitch/electropop genius, and outdoes himself with this hypnogogic tour of LA. Seemed like a nice smooth way in. Electronica often calms me down. Especially when it’s drenched in layers and reverb.

"Pavement" – Mallrat (Australia)

There’s a lot of music coming out right now that seems to reflect on the loss of SOPHIE, arguably one of the most promising and innovative musicians and producers of the last 20 years (I featured a track from her posthumous album last month).

To me, Mallrat’s indie-pop crosses over into Sophie territory in "Pavement." Gen-Z is gonna do just fine.

"take me by the hand" – Oklou (France), Bladee (Sweden)

… see what I mean? This is a killer track from another next-gen SOPHIE, Oklou.

"Ferry Lady" – Panda Bear (USA/Portugal)

Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox of Animal Collective) seems to be a “feat.” on every other track played by Sirius XMU sometimes, but for good reason - his voice and harmonies are like nobody else’s in the indie world. He’s also a nice bridge out of the electronic haze into some more core rock and roll in this mix.

"Sick Dogs" – hey, nothing (USA)

Hey, nothing, is rapidly becoming one of my favorite new artists in any genre, and right at the top of my “wanna see live” acts. They’re just a straight up killer garage band with something to say, and they could have emerged out of a 1996 basement in any suburb in the U.S.

"Open Wide" – Inhaler (Ireland)

I’m really uninterested in people who wanna hate on a band because they have famous parents, or are gay, or wear green, or whatever other BS people come up with to exercise their hate organs. Inhaler, which is indeed fronted by Bono’s son Elijah Hewson, age 25, is just a great band, and one of the few I would actually *want* to see in some giant stadium or festival. I dare you to hate this.

"After You" – Courting (UK)

It’s very hard not to compare Courting to other post-punk geniuses like Fontaine’s DC or maybe Yard Act, which is fine, we need lots of great bands. No idea if they are this tight live, but I’d love to find out. “Can we split off in groups of two…” is such a great hook. This is their third album, and they have improved and really found their voice a lot since their first EP, Grand National, cracked them into the indie playlists.

"Spells" – Freak Slug (UK)

For some reason, and I know this makes no sense, every time I hear this song I think of Yolandi’s voice and vibe in “Ugly Boy” from Die Antwoord. While Freak Slug’s genre ain’t Zef hip-hop, there’s a certain level of quirky slink that flavors them both. This song has been stuck in my head. A lot.

"It's a Mirror" – Perfume Genius (USA)

Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) is another clearly talented musician I don’t listen to often, but this song got on repeat a few weeks ago and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. I’m not exactly sure what it’s even about, other than loss, mental health, despair, and all that fun stuff.

"Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation" – jasmine.4t

A headphones-recommended little bit of bedroom pop. The lyrics are bonkers, the catchy is real, and the sense of insanity that we’re all feeling definitely comes through:

The deep freeze freezer you’ll see me there with my breathing regulated
Compensated and forgiving for all injuries I find
With my eye movement I’ll see you dent cans just to get the discount
We can rewind and un-dent reprocess and desensitise

There’s nothing in my head but the screaming
Got nothing left to dread but my leaving
The tub fills with my blood hits the ceiling
I won’t act but it’s all that I’m dreaming

But the real surprise is the ALBUM. Just dropped on the 17th of January, You Are The Morning is just beautiful and smart all the way through. It was hard to pick a favorite. Check out Elephant, or the ElliotSmithLike title track.

"Rebel Girl" – Bikini Kill (USA)

I’ve had Riot Grrrls on the brain lately. There was something about the early ‘90s that is feeling very now to me. The AIDS crisis was in full swing (and in San Francisco killing friends with regularity). Clinton won, but there was little sense of hope from that victory. Rodney King. Anita Hill. It was a moment.

As a 25 year old, already divorced loser (mistakes were made) who didn’t fit in with anyone in finance, hanging around record & comic book stores filled my soul. And that’s where the Zines were.

"Firefighters" – Being Dead (USA)

Is it surf-rock? punk? Who knows. Doesn’t matter. I struggled with which tune to pick from the incredible new album from Being Dead, EELS. There’s basically no song it I don’t like, but this is probably the easiest to just headbang to. Technically Firefighter dropped in the summer, and I listened to it a bunch then, but it’s worth the time for the whole album.

"Didn't Know Why" – Tunng (UK)

Eliot Smith meets Kraftwerk in half-time? Tunng’s “folktronica” (I hate myself) gem "Didn’t Know Why" is just interesting. There’s not much music that’s actually interesting coming out on the regular.

"DARE" – Torba

Totally new to me, Torba is a lookback into the late ’90s industrial scene: loud, black caverns where Nine Inch Nails was the soundtrack, Zima was the drink of choice, and you definitely didn’t want to use the bathroom. I have no idea who you are, Torba, but “3AM warehouse in Arlington, MA 1998” called, and they’re waiting for your set. Listen to the whole thing.

"affirmations" – June Henry

I have no idea who June Henry is, and this came up on a scroll through new music lists but ooooof. “affirmations" is just a voice memo, but it hurts, in a way that makes me think.

There is life beyond this
We will find our medicine
With friends like these who needs
Pharmacies or Governments
My feet are planted firmly
I’m not leaving Kansas
I won’t say I’m not afraid

BONUS ZINE VIDEO!

See ya soon. Be kind to each other.

Dave