His dinner rarely varies — a tiny Lunchables — the kind that would even leave a toddler hungry — and something frozen in a clouded sleeve of plastic, the kind of meal that asks nothing of a man but three minutes and a fork.

This was the evening of the discount. He had seen the advertisement. The Lunchables, he insisted, was two-oh-four, not three-oh-four, and he said it without anger, without apology, with the weary dignity of a man defending the last small border left to him. The cashier checked. The cashier called someone. The line waited the way lines wait, which is to say with a not-very-subtle collective sigh that is the sound of people who just don’t like lines but really don’t have anywhere urgent to be. He was right. He was always going to be right. He had seen the advertisement.

He paid the four cents in pennies. He counted them out of a small fold of his palm and set them on the counter one at a time, a small brown protest by artifacts the country had abandoned. The cashier looked at them, then at him, and pushed them gently back. Every time, he gathered the pennies into his palm tenderly as if he were sheltering them.

Then he walked back across the street to the park, where the dark was beginning to gather under the trees, and ate his dinner in the uniform he had not yet taken off.

without the conscious perception of some unit of time (say a second), there’s only sequence of states. “Time” is our notion of the speed/direction of going through these states.

In this sense, the progression of the universe is like a book. By itself, there is no notion of “time” but there is a notion of fixed sequence. Our perception of it can be equated to reading the book, except this is not an argument about free will.

If the history of the universe happened in an instant would we say time exists? If it doesn’t exist in that scenario, one can imagine a consciousness perceiving state changes (e.g “time”) so slowly that it seemed as if the entire universe occurred in an instant. So one conscious agent who perceives the state changes at a normal human pace may declare time exists, but this other aforementioned agent may declare time doesn’t exist. So it seems to follow that time is not a property of the universe but a property of the perceiver, an artificial construct conscious agents wrap around the metaphysical universe.

But the slip in the thinking above is that the notion of “an instant” is also an artificial construct since it’s based on some notion of time. There is only sequence and it does not matter to the sequence whether it is perceived to have taken place in “an instant” or an eternity.

But how can all these sequential state changes happen all at once? if X -> Y -> Z, are we saying that X immediately went to Y at the same time that Y went to Z? But Y didn’t exist yet right since X needs to first transition to Y? This is all to suggest there is an existence of the abstract form of indexing, something the word “dimension” suits well.

But maybe sequence is also something we conscious-beings imposed. Take this string of letters “fleajfea”. There is a sequence here but it’s a derived property if one were to choose to interpret things going from one direction to another. More fundamental properties are the ‘j’ is bordered by ‘a’ on one side and ‘f’ on another. In the same way, X -> Y -> Z might just be “XYZ” and it’s meaningless to say the sequence “happened” all at once when “XYZ” always has been and is. Our perception is reading from X to Y to Z, though intrinsically, there is no movement. For some, this may trigger the idea of time being the 4th dimension in the context of spacial intuitions.

So what is there? Outside of conscious perception, there seems to be just dimensions and orderings. Orderings meaning, Y is between X and Z for instance.

A slight shudder always rings through my conscious whenever I have to grok and reason about anything to do with nutrition or diet. At the same time — it’s one of the most important areas of study for obvious reasons AND it’s one of the fields most improperly studied and conflated with various external ideologies and profit-seeking interests. Not to mention the sheer difficulty of producing sound research and drawing lines of causation (e.g. interventional studies instead of epidemiological studies).

For the lay person, it’s gotten to the point in which saying “the research says so-and-so” has lost a ton of its sway since there always seems to be existing research for and against any point of contention. Similarly, references to standout individuals are also diminishing in value due to the ability to always find someone that suggests to the contrary of an example. For instance, Kyle Vogt (vegan) ran 7 marathons on 7 continents in less than 4 days. On the other hand, Zach Bitter (low carb, high fat, animal-based) beat the world record for the 100 mile ultra marathon. Both these examples happened within a span of the same six months. Currently for a lot of people, choosing between all these various espoused diets is just a matter of availability bias. Additionally, these examples may not be that useful since performance is often orthogonal to healthspan. Still fun to track tho :)

Though dietary needs surely differ between people, I believe that for ninety eight percent of people, we aren’t nearly close enough to the optimal fringes for that to relieve ourselves of this responsibility to find results that improve healthspan across the board. There’s still much low hanging fruit.

The task to find a great dietary routine is a tough one. A sort-of-but-not-really cop-out answer is to just go with the “balanced” approach. The word “balance” is almost tautological in this context. In the same way “too ____” implies something bad, “balance” is implicitly tied with good. Can a balanced state be a bad state with that connotation? There’s strong evidence that some of the most restrictive/unbalanced diets could be the best for certain populations. Semantics aside, if balance means to eat moderate carbs, moderate fat, moderate protein, some greens, some animal products, some processed foods, some unprocessed foods, some desserts, some cold-pressed juices, etc — I think 55% of people would do quite well, 40% would end up with some degree of metabolic syndrome as they age on the usual timescale and deal with traditional diseases such as heart disease, Alzheimer’s, etc. 5% would deal with autoimmune issues, bad gut issues, and other more severe ailments.

If one is willing to put in work, one can achieve an “informed balanced” approach. This consists of learning about all these diets (including very unbalanced diets) and identifying common themes. Here are some that I’ve found:

• Low-moderate amount of carbs. Low glycemic index. Bias towards non-grains such as sweet potatoes & cauliflower. Especially reduce intake of whole grains.
• eating fish often. Some should be fatty.
• avocados
• sprouted/soaked nuts
• Not eating too much of one vegetable or fruit.
• Olives & olive oil!
• Moderate amount of eggs
• Some degree of intermittent fasting (12+ hours)
• Less dairy. Some of the dairy would benefit from coming from non-cow (e.g. goat/sheep). Casein free would be preferential.
• Don’t go overboard with protein unless it’s specific to some strategy.
• Every few days, have some nature-fed fatty red meat with some butter.
• Occasionally, bone marrow, organ meat (especially liver), bone broth.

I think with this approach that continues to consider evolving information, we can change the 55, 40, 5 ratio of results to 85, 10, 5. Many in the 85 will do even better than great. For the 5 that deals with various autoimmune issues or other rarer issues, an elimination diet is generally helpful. If you can manage it, try to be very conscious of how meals are making you feel and pick a set of reliable metrics for judging whether that meal was good for you or not. The metrics question is very hard and I’ll probably write a separate piece focusing on just that.

Here are some non-traditional pointers to help you evaluate dietary choices.

• Don’t just look at what nutritional value a certain unit of food can offer. Consider the tradeoffs. We have a bad habit of just trying to maximize the “nutrients” we consume blindly. Yes, whole grains do have more nutritional content than something like white rice, but it also contains potentially detrimental compounds such as lectins. Do the pros outweigh the cons? Possibly. Could you get those nutrients elsewhere?
• Get to know what your body feels like when there’s inflammation happening. Then use those signals to zone in on foods that are inflammatory for you. For me, sometimes my ears get warm and more red, sometimes I get more sleepy or lethargic (can also feel kinda good), sometimes I get short-tempered, sometimes my body temperature increases but I want to keep my jacket on, sometimes I feel a small discomfort in my wrist joint or around my tailbone, sometimes my nose gets more congested and my eyes become more dry.
• Feeling relaxed and free of anxiety is not necessarily a good signal that what you ate was good for you. Some research has started to evaluate different foods and bacterias’ ability to make one feel “less anxious” as a recommending point, but we should be careful with that. In a mice study involving microbiomes, some bacteria caused the mice to be less anxious from the serotonin released by the bacteria but the bacteria was covering a nutritional deficiency.
• Be careful of confusing the effects of electrolyte imbalances with the effects of eating a certain food. They’re certainly related since foods contain electrolytes, but be weary of saying the foods of a meal weren’t right for you because you felt bad afterwards when it was because you didn’t have enough salt, had too much salt, or didn’t eat enough potassium-rich items, etc. This is a common issue when people change diets suddenly. Always remember, electrolytes are king.

Here are some big topics that need to be reexamined in science & mainstream knowledge:

• Health assessments — For instance, bloodwork is only a snapshot in time. E.g. inflammatory markers will be higher after just working out. Reliability of cholesterol assessment dependent on how long you’ve fasted for before test and what diet you’re on.
• Cholesterol’s link to heart diseases and other health issues.
• RDA for electrolytes and water. It may be counterproductive to set one since one’s needs for these vary so much depending on a variety of factors.
• Fiber
• Saturated fats

TLDR: deadlift and sunbathe nude.

“Hey sorry but are you headed east?”

“East? No I’m not.”

“Hey are you guys going towards the east side of LA?”

“Oh we just got here. Are about to check in”

I’ve been cost cutting and on this Thanksgiving weekend, after flying in to LAX from SFO and enduring poor internet service when trying to figure out which transportation options would get me home to Arcadia for cheap, I decided to try hitchhiking. On the third ask, I scored a goal. He sounded like a honest, nice guy who was so in tune with his empathetic and social senses that after not being able to come up with an excuse of why I couldn’t come along, decided it’d be too awkward to continue the hesitation for any longer with no valid excuse, so he began mentioning reasons why it might be inconvenient to go with him.

“Umm I parked at a parking spot away from the airport and you’d have to find the shuttle stop with me and ride the shuttle to that parking lot.”

“Ok, that’s alright with me.”

So the adventure began.

In our search for the shuttle stop, he quickly collected his street senses and threw me a few questions to gauge whether I’m an innocuous being with a sane mind. I responded that I was going home to visit the family for Thanksgiving. That I just flew in from San Francisco. That I work as a software engineer. Most notably, he wrapped a request to see my Instagram profile in a question that was crafted to sound like it came out of generic curiosity of my life. After that initial bit, we warmed up to each other quickly and he remarked with a smile that us trying to find the shuttle stop was like an Amazing Race mission.

He was at the airport because his one of his grandparents had just passed away and he flew to Minneapolis for a day to attend the funeral. I felt sorry for his loss and began to talk more about my family. I told him about how I grew up in a town full of peacocks and how my dad is rigidly patriotic about the US. Through our conversation, he eventually revealed that he’s the lead singer for a small country band, had a few small records deals in the past, and is now touring small venues quite often. Two weeks ago, he just had a few shows in Texas, his hometown.

We got to the parking lot and with all the shock my mind had already taken from this choice of hitchhiking, I was numb when I saw that his ride was a big, shiny, very new racing yellow RAM 1500 pickup truck with black racing stripes across the top. It was awesome. I hopped in, he turnt his country music station on which happened to be playing Christmas music to his dismay, he handed me his phone to navigate, and we were on the way to the Hollywood Highland train stop where he’d drop me off.

“I don’t like playing in packed venues anymore. I had friends who were at the Harvest music festival shooting.”

“Oh wow, yea that must change things for you. That’s rough. Do you like LA more than Texas?”

“Hell no. LA has been good to me, but I want more space. I want to move to Nashville and buy some land and have a few horses.”

At some point during our conversation, I asked if I could hear one of his songs, and he humbly obliged. I also realized I still didn’t know his name yet. To respect his privacy, I won’t reveal his name or his band’s name. But his song was great. Their sound is a country rock sound with powerful vocals by the man who was sitting to my left. I really liked it. He then asked me to play a few songs I like. I showed him “Everything” by City of the Sun which I described as a sonic representation of an intense sunrise. In the middle of the song, he turned to me, smiled slightly, and said — wow, you know what, this sounds like a sonic representation of an intense sunrise. Then I showed him “Desert Woman” by ZHU, which he really enjoyed, so much so that he wanted to play it twice. He noted that he liked how dark it was and how it had a lot of minor chords. Towards the end of the trip, he gave me some directions on where to walk since he’d drop me off at a convenient spot in front of a hotel close to the station, and told me never to hitchhike again since it’s dangerous. I didn’t say OK because this experience was such a good one; I was more convinced hitchhiking is a fine thing to do. I felt really appreciative of his kindness and happy that I got to know an interesting person like him. He gave me a tap card for the train that he didn’t need and a bottle of water. I thanked him again and walked onto the streets, wondering what had just happened.

We should place an incredible amount of emphasis on maximizing healthspan (longevity + health), likely much more than we already do.

The basic reasoning involves having more time to do things you enjoy or the belief that the future will carry a higher utility per unit of time versus the present. E.g. There’s a ton more people living close to Rockefeller’s standard of living today than during his time. Or it may be better to be an average person born today in 2021 than to live through Jeff Bezos’ life as richest man on Earth and being born in 1964 (his birth year); since by the time the baby is 50, the world may be a place in which via virtual reality / neural-linking, this person could literally live through Jeff Bezos life optionally, so Jeff’s set of joys/utility may be a mere subset of what this baby could experience. By the time this technology is available, Jeff Bezos may already be long dead.

But that tech sounds far off from the present, right? Would trying to extend life by a couple extra years really make a difference? As much as it doesn’t seem to matter, the fact is for every additional chunk of time you add to your life, there’s a chance that within that additional time, another discovery or invention is introduced that can extend your life by a little more, and so it cycles on. Following a great health protocol might give you seven extra years and there’s a chance in that extra seven years, we discover some drug that can extend your life by another ten years, and within that ten years, we discover a gene therapy that extends your life by another thirty years, etc. I strongly believe the first people who will reach the escape velocity of life will not realize they crossed that threshold until much later. It would be terribly sad to be the last generation who didn’t have the option to have more time.

Moreover, we underestimate the wide ranging methods that can help give that incremental amount of extra time. For instance, improved cryogenics or some sort physics / mechanical engineering advancement that makes meaningful time dilation accessible. It’s not just biochemistry and pharmaceuticals.

All in all, living for one more year could snowball into having the choice to live indefinitely. And the utility also snowballs exponentially. Choices in life are all based on our time horizon, and with a different time horizon, it’s surprising how much our plans change.

Here was the first attempt hahhaa. Turns out the filters are really dense and air has to be really pushed through to get a high CADR. When there’s other paths the air can take, the air doesn’t go through the filter as much.

Here’s attempt two. I bought a cheap box fan, kept the fan in the box, and cut a rectangular piece out from the box to fit in the filters. I cut slivers in the back to allow airflow in which gets blown out through the filters. This also didn’t work that well. I think there were still too many escape areas for air and also some air still blew back out from the back sliver cuts.

The next attempt strived for maximal simplicity and fewest parts. I removed the top from a smaller circular fan and would place the filters on top of the open fan, covering the entire circumference. When I had purchased the fan, the top didn’t seem slightly curved and protruding outwards, but it actually was. This made it difficult to flatly place the filters on top.

This was my attempt at venting CO2 from the inside without letting the micro particulate matters and some VOCs get in from the outside. I wedged the filters between the sliding window and wall, and had to cover the rest of the opening with a cardboard cutout wrapped in plastic trash bags. The plastic trash bags seemed more air proof than the cardboard and also would have loose excesses that can be used for taping against the window/wall. This also didn’t work. Smoke pollutants from the outside continued to get in.

Abstractly, this is how I had thought about addressing the problem:

1. I need air.
2. Preferably the air is somewhat fresh (low CO2, VOCs) and doesn’t have pollutants from the wildfire smoke.
3. Polluted air comes mostly from the windows or doors and some walls with discreet cracks.
4. Air is fluid, moves according to pressure, and each particle is extremely small. Will be very hard to manage with stiff materials. A substance that has the ability to “fill in” would be helpful. Fluids that harden may be effective at covering the cracks.
5. Ultimately decided that putting some positive pressure on the wall may do the trick. Fight air with air. Tested by having a fan blow air against the wall, and it reduced the pollutants coming in noticeably!
6. For the issue of polluted air form windows and doors — if I wanted to keep the ability to vent out CO2 and indoor VOCs outside, I’d need some filter between myself and that outdoor air. I could filter at the point of entry, point of inhale, or anywhere in between. (It’s fun to think about the in between option since it’s less standard).
7. Outside filtering, I could also consider chemical conversion (e.g. with algae farm) or artificial replacement of desired air (e.g. mask that’s connected to small tank of compressed breathable air). Turns out algae farm solution will require a lot of algae to make a difference. And artificial air from a tank will likely be more unhealthy.

DENNIS(42) is wearing a grey shirt with dirt covered jeans. TIMOTHY(11) is wearing a graphic tee shirt with cargo shorts and some beat up runners.

EXT: DENNIS’S YARD — MID-AFTERNOON

DENNIS has his back faced toward the road, throwing dirt into a deep hole with his shovel. He does this while standing awkwardly far away from the hole. A large dirt mound can be seen right by the hole. TIMOTHY bikes along the road and sees Dennis working. He stops on a skid. He pulls out his camera and takes a photo of Dennis shoveling. Dennis hears the camera shutter and turns around, which startles both himself and Timothy. Timothy quickly puts his camera away.

DENNIS: Hey kid, do you mind deleting that picture?

Timothy grins at Dennis.

TIMOTHY: Oooo, why? Is it a secret?

Dennis smiles back and drops the shovel.

DENNIS: It’s something top secret. So secret that no one will ever know about it.

Timothy opens his eyes and mouth in excitement.

TIMOTHY: Wait mister. Can you tell ME at least? Please? Please?

He walks to the kid with a smile.

DENNIS: No can do buddy. Maybe when I finish the job you can. Boss wants it done by sundown.

Timothy tilts his head in curiosity. After a moment, Timothy gasps in fear.

TIMOTHY: Is it because you’re… burying a body?

Dennis drops his smile, but then chuckles.

DENNIS: Pssh, now do you think I’m that kind of guy? I don’t believe I’m burying a body. You’re not supposed to see the hole.

Timothy takes a step back, scans Dennis with an intense gaze, and thrusts his pointer finger at Dennis.

TIMOTHY: LIAR! There’s a body in there! I know it! Why else would you not want to tell me about this hole? How many people did you throw down there, YOU DIRTY DIRTY MURD-

Dennis quickly puts his hand around Timothy’s mouth and looks around to see if there’s anyone watching, and sees no one. He kneels down by Timothy while keeping his hand on Timothy’s mouth.

DENNIS: Listen, kid. If I let you see the hole, will you stop yelling and not get the cops called on me?

Timothy nods his head with his eyes wide in excitement. Dennis slowly releases his hand off of Timothy’s mouth.

DENNIS: Okay, just one peek. I think it should be ok if you glance at it really fast. Don’t look at it any more than that.

Timothy half-walks, half-skips to the hole while Dennis walks aside to grab his water bottle. Timothy kneels down to observe what’s in the hole. The edge of the hole collapses, and he slips, falling head first into the hole.

Dennis hears Timothy’s cry of surprise as he falls in. Dennis tenses up and turns around. He shakes his head at himself and softly taps his knuckles against his head. He walks to the hole and takes his first look inside. At the bottom, lay a motionless body. He sighs and proceeds to continue his work, burying the hole and the body.

A fasting state has a lot of evidence pointing towards increased longevity. Additionally, in various circumstances, a low metabolism state points at increased longevity. Both these cases are not fun to be in as they’re accompanied by fatigue, cold-sensitivity, anxiety, mental slowness or erraticity, and a pale mood. (Though people often detail the positive boosts associated with fasting, those boosts are a relative comparison often stemming from a different set of mechanisms such as reduced inflammation from baseline. It also depends on how long you fast.) How about if one’s skin starts flaking and hair starts shedding more rapidly? As horrifying as it sounds, it actually might depend. In a state of deliberate starvation, this often is a sign of cell turnover to cull the bad/old cells through a trigger of autophagy.

On the other hand, after an intense workout, one feels great and would generally associate that set of actions with better longevity outcomes. Again, the positive boosts are likely offsetting some negative entities/processes, that depending on your own lifestyle, may be present to different degrees. There’s also a debatable potential cost (to longevity in isolation, not necessarily healthspan) to frequent working out as it constantly engages anabolic pathways. Regardless of the opinions on these topics, one should hesitate to just associate “feeling healthy” due to traditional fitness metrics (e.g number of push ups, sit-ups, energy levels, etc) to a contribution to greater longevity. Performance is often orthogonal to longevity.

So what’s a great way to judge one’s longevity potential? This is an open question that many are working on figuring out and I hypothesize about frequently. Traditional metrics have been blood pressure, cholesterol, weight, blood sugar, etc. Some of these metrics still stand strong against new science, but some are coming into question such as cholesterol. Blood sugar and insulin sensitivity are still great metrics as metabolic syndrome is being identified as the root of many more diseases/conditions than previously thought. What’s coming to the forefront are markers of inflammation such as C-reactive proteins, and the newer generation of metrics involving telomere length and DNA methylation (e.g. Horvath’s clock). Definitely google DNA methylation if you haven’t heard about this (hopefully you’ll also become entranced by the spectacular world of epigenetics).

Despite progress in this area, I still struggle to see developments that are directly accessible to me on a frequent basis. If I do a health experiment, I’d like to see how my longevity metrics are impacted. As mentioned above, feeling good or energized is not enough.

Here are my guesses at what might be good signals of longevity that are accessible. They focus on inflammation:

1. Body temperature — The outdated view is our internal temperature should be 98.6f. The more updated view is our temperatures vary between 97 and 99 with an average around 97.9f if we had to generalize away all the other factors such as age. Reduced average body temperature is likely a sign of reduced inflammation and that’s actually one of the theories on why the modern average has been dropping since the mid 19th century. When I eat a low inflammation diet for many days, my average body temperature hovers around 97.0f during the daytime.
2. Heart rate — Another potential proxy for inflammation and “extra work” that your body has to do.
3. Skin & Joints — Inflammation expresses itself through acne, subtle red bumps (like those frequently found on the back of upper arms), skin irritations, joint pain/discomfort. Though inflammation almost affects every part of you, I mention skin and joints specifically since it’s more noticeable for the average person.
4. Lower caloric intake with same energy levels — It makes sense to me that if you’re able to function at the same level with fewer calories, your body is processing and using those calories more efficiently. If your body is constantly carrying loads of inflammation, there’s an energy expenditure that goes into the immune system to do that. Also, as non-scientific as this is, it seems to make sense that any chunk of input into your digestive system that’s not converted into energy has a higher prior probability of harming our body than benefiting it. Plus, we can work backwards and also infer that a lower energy capture could signify that food isn’t being digested well — that’s both a sign of poor internal functioning and it leads to further internal disarray as undigested materials flow down the digestive tract and cause all havoc (including, thump thump, you guessed it — inflammation). I wonder if this low intake heuristic could also be applied to electrolytes and vitamins.

Ultimately though, there are a million things we can easily track about our body unintrusively from finger jitters (potentially signaling electrolyte imbalance) to varying temperatures to nerve firings to CO2/VOC/other gases we produce to measurements of stool and urine to density or thickness of our nails. There should be a device that can continuously measure blood pressure. All together, these thousands of data points can be fed into a ml model that gives a holistic overview of how we’re doing on various dimensions.

First and foremost, the benefits of keto have been striking for me but I hesitate to proactively recommend it too often since it’s common that people try to do it for a month or two, feel terrible during that period due to electrolyte deficiencies, digestive problems, etc, and end up at a net loss, becoming very turned off by it. When I talk about keto, I’m also not talking about doing it for 2–3 months for the purpose of losing weight; I talk about it in the frame of long term health building. So if you’d like to make an improvement in your health, possibly first develop a general awareness of how different foods make you feel, lean towards a paleo way of eating, go low carb, and try intermittent fasting. If you’ve proven to yourself that you’re able to be consistent in these things, then think about keto.

Ketosis is a state that can be objectively measured and is not just a collection of eating habits. Keto involves a high fat, low carb diet, but that’s not enough. You know you’re in ketosis when your blood ketone levels exceed around 0.5 mmol/L. People frequently use a small finger prick device to test. When you’re in ketosis, you’re engaging different metabolic states and systems. Ketones are a different source of fuel for your body derived from fat (as opposed to glucose).

Entering ketosis is a non-linear shift. If your carb, fat, protein ratio is at 70:10:20 and then you lower carb intake and increase fat intake to make your ratio 50:30:20, there’s a decent chance you’ll be worse off. If you cut to 5:75:20, suddenly your body might love you. We shouldn’t interpret each added/removed input to our body as having an effect that’s just dependent on what that input is. The effect of that added/removed input is also dependent on the other inputs to your body. So if you currently consume things that can be represented by set N. N affects what an added/removed input X may have on you. Since ketosis is based on a non-linear shift, it might be difficult to just want to dip the toes into the pool to try it out and de-risk what seems like an extreme diet. Cutting a small amount of carbs may not be representative of what ketosis would eventually feel like.

There’s also a period of transition of one week to a few weeks where one will likely feel really bad but need to maintain the ratio. Once you start consuming a lot less carbs, your body will start consuming the glycogen stored around your body. Only once your glycogen stores are essentially depleted does your body enter ketosis. In this transitionary period, your body dumps a ton of electrolytes and your body will be uncomfortable with the fact that your energy inputs are less than your energy outputs (at that point, your body isn’t geared to burn fat yet, so it’s still seeking carbs as the energy input). Best thing to do during this period is to hold the ratio and get in plenty of electrolytes especially salt.

Your digestive system will also need to get used to the high fat intake. Your stool will likely go through a roller coaster of textures and densities :P. Make sure you aren’t diluting your stomach acid and other gastric juices. Check the pH of your drinking water and make sure you don’t drink too much liquids immediately after meals.

If you’re able to make it through the tough transition and sustain ketosis, you’ll reap the benefits of higher energy levels, greater mental acuity, absence of food comas, superb insulin sensitivity, less inflammation, and greater metabolic flexibility (ability to burn fat as fuel easily).

If you’re concerned about the risks of keto, you should be. A tiny sliver of the population is genetically predisposed to do very poorly on a keto diet. It’s also had the empirical experience of a much smaller population compared to normal diets. For a point of logical reasoning, it makes sense that there’s some validity to the diet being good for our bodies if you think it from the evolutionary perspective and what kinds of foods we had access to. There’re also many indigenous populations that have lived this way for much of their culture’s history. All in all, this is an ongoing subject of research and has many open questions left to be resolved.

Here are some general tips to keep in mind if you decide to embark on the journey:

• Even though you think you’re eating enough fat, you probably aren’t. You should be eating a disgusting amount of fat.
• In the tough times, think — more electrolytes, more fat, foods that are easier to digest (e.g. maybe for the tiny carb budget, just do white rice. reduce intake of spices especially spicy, numbing ones). It is common to feel like you have the flu during the transition period.
• Expect mess ups. And these mess ups will be painful. You won’t be able to just read a hundred articles and execute perfectly for what’s right for your body. You’ll have to be very aware of how your body’s feeling and experiment. I had digestive problems and had to think a long time from first principles to figure out that maybe my tap water pH was the culprit. That fixed a big set of problems for me. I’ve also had days where I felt really salt deficient, then had too much salt and sat by the toilet puking.
• Eat, eat, eat. Don’t worry about calories. Your body will tell you when you’re full.
• You won’t crave carbs as much as you’d think after a while. Part of our love of carbs relates to our built up metabolic reliance on it and also the carb-loving bacteria in our gut that diminishes once you cut carbs for long enough.

Other resources:

• The Ten Defining Characteristics of a Well-Formulated Ketogenic Diet
• Ketosis - advantaged or misunderstood state? (Part I) - Peter Attia

Value comes in two forms: offers utility or can lead to utility (e.g. trading for something that gives you utility). For the latter in the form of an exchange medium, like many other social constructs, it’s a kind of Catch-22. Tom doesn’t really want X but thinks Jessica wants X. Jessica doesn’t really want X but thinks Tom wants X. Suddenly, they go from both not wanting X to both wanting X.

So that’s all it takes to turn a valueless X into something valuable. To maintain this belief that someone else wants it. Easy? Maybe to establish this for a few weeks or few months. How about maintaining this belief for centuries and millennia? How will Bitcoin do this?

Though Bitcoin is programmable scarcity that’s trustless and anti-fragile, if everyone understood what this meant and really internalized what that fixed scarcity meant, would that understanding be enough to infuse Bitcoin with value? It’d be a significant step but it wouldn’t be enough. Why? On day 1 of Bitcoin, if people heard somebody bought it for $1000, but then heard no other price data for a year, how much would they buy it for at the end of the year? How about after 5 years of no price data. There’d be greater and greater uncertainty of how others still value it.

It seems obvious that a market or exchange would be important to resolve an issue like this and a bunch of crypto exchanges already exist. So problem solved right? To any other store of value or exchange medium, possibly. But to Bitcoin, not quite.

Bitcoin’s value is much more dependent on price data from exchanges than other assets. An object like gold has natural utility and the support of cultural reinforcement (e.g give gold ring in proposal, play video games and board games with gold, gold in Game of Thrones). On the other hand, Bitcoin is beautifully but dangerously pure, especially if its function is solely defined to be a store of value. Unlike in history when royalty can show off their wealth by coating objects in gold and crafting gold relics, reinforcing gold’s value by taking advantage of gold’s aesthetic property while associating it with wealth, Bitcoin lives in the abstract. Its sole purpose is to be value. It’ll take time for people to figure out which of Bitcoin’s abstract properties could be reified in a way that could turn into a symbol of value in order to start building cultural backing. (Think — how might a wealthy person show off their bitcoins and thereby reinforce bitcoin’s association with value? Priceless art works can be shown off, real estate can be shown off, etc. ) Therefore, exchanges play an especially important role in helping establish the belief that Bitcoin has value.

Moreover, this means that Bitcoin’s value in at least its early innings is almost dictated completely by its exchanges, obviously in the literal sense but also in the structural sense. If an exchange suddenly starts falsely listing gold’s price lower and lower, there’d be a threshold where people would lose trust of the exchange since there’s a sense of gold’s value and support from its natural utility. If an exchange began to lower bitcoin’s price artificially, people have a lighter prior of disbelief and will more likely decide to go with it. What is Bitcoin but pure value and what is pure value but an abstract price. Hence, Bitcoin is only as trustless and anti-fragile as its exchanges.

Bitcoin was designed with edge cases in mind and to cater to the widest possible possibility space. If we hope to preserve those properties that make it durable in extreme circumstances such as a nuclear catastrophe or a breaking down of trust in society or corruption or a legion of hackers, the exchanges must offer the same properties. If the price data is no longer there, Bitcoin’s value, at least in the early eras, will begin to erode. If the price data can’t be trusted, Bitcoin’s value is at risk. Let’s support those who are working to strengthen or decentralize the exchanges.