A counter-movement has emerged to combat the societal norms being pushed on us:

• Body Positivity — erosion of responsibility for health, “healthy at any weight”

• Symptomatology — neglecting root cause treatment in favor of pharmaceuticals

• Sedentarism — normalization of physical inactivity

At some point, the underlying reality becomes clear:

None of society's antidotes are going to save you.

So, with that said, what’s the solution?

Make a lifestyle change.

Use exercise and nutrition as your vessel.

But here’s where well-meaning people run into a problem:

90% of people who hit the gym never see health or aesthetic improvements.

The reason for this?

It’s simple: they’re not training with a real plan (or the right one).

When the benefits of training are laid out for them, most people understand they need to take action and resist what has become commonplace in our society.

If you’re still unconvinced, this newsletter is a good place to go first:

So where’s the disconnect?

They lack an understanding of the key principles of muscle growth.

Building the most muscle you can requires a plan.

Yes, you’ll get some aerobic health benefits from just going through the motions, but most of your time and energy will be wasted.

So if you’re ready to make a change, I’ve got a pretty good idea of the questions that you’re probably asking (because I asked them myself):

• What should my diet look like to ensure I’m not only building muscle but recovering as well?

• How should I approach my training to maximize muscle growth?

• How can you track the amount of muscle that you’re building?

• How can you assess the quality of the muscle that you’re building?

• How much muscle do you need to build for optimal health?

I’ve got all the answers for you.

Let’s get right into it.

Optimal Nutrition For Muscle Building

We aren’t even going to talk about actually lifting weights yet.

The first step?

Setting the nutritional foundation you need to build and maintain healthy muscle.

So how do you get it right?

Let’s break it down.

Protein: Muscle Protein Synthesis & Amino Acid Profile

Okay, first and foremost:

When we talk about building muscle, recognize that our main objective is to stimulate muscle protein synthesis.

Muscle protein synthesis is the process your body uses to repair and build muscle.

As you might have guessed, consuming protein is critical to triggering this process —it’s in the name.

But here’s what you might not have known:

When you consume protein, your body breaks it down into amino acids.

Your body uses these amino acids as a part of muscle protein synthesis to repair damaged muscle fibers and stimulate the growth of new muscle tissue.

So here’s the big takeaway:

The total protein intake we need to stimulate muscle protein synthesis is defined by the amino acid composition of the protein.

Protein is made up of 20 different amino acids, 9 of which are essential for your body.

Of these essential amino acids, one stands above the rest: leucine.

Leucine is the trigger for stimulating muscle protein synthesis.

Without enough leucine, you can’t expect to maintain healthy muscle mass.

So what’s the leucine threshold you should be aiming for?

To maximize muscle protein synthesis, you need to eat 2.5 to 3 grams of leucine in a single meal — this comes out to roughly 30-50 grams of quality protein.

As you can see in the chart above, muscle protein synthesis begins to take off once the aforementioned leucine of 2.5 to 3 grams is reached.

After this point, you’ll begin to notice diminishing returns.

Next question: how can you go about achieving this threshold?

You can find leucine in plentiful quantities in high-quality protein sources such as:

• Eggs: 0.5 grams of leucine per egg

• Beef: 2.94 grams of leucine per 100 grams

• Chicken: 2.82 grams of leucine per 100 grams

Animal-based proteins like the ones listed above closely mimic the amino acid composition of human muscle tissue, making it easy for your body to use animal-based proteins as a base for building muscle.

But plant-based proteins are a different story.

While plant-based proteins do have some leucine content, it isn’t nearly as plentiful as you would find in animal-based protein sources.

In other words, if the protein you’re eating originated from plants, you’re going to need to eat a greater quantity of protein than you otherwise would if it has been animal-based.

Alright, there’s one more thing you need to know:

If you’re seeking to build muscle optimally, you should be shooting for about 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day (assuming it’s coming from sources high in leucine).

For example, if you weigh 200 lbs, you should look to eat roughly 200 grams of protein per day to supercharge your muscle-building goals.

Meal Timing & Starting Early

Now that you know how much protein to consume daily, another question arises:

How many meals should I split my protein intake into? And how should I time them?

Here’s what the answer revolves around:

When you trigger muscle protein synthesis, its effects last for around 2-3 hours.

The takeaway?

Spreading your protein intake out across…

• 3-4 meals daily

• 3-4 hours apart

…enables you to trigger muscle protein synthesis multiple times throughout the day, maximizing your gains.

Here’s a chart illustrating how this works:

You’ll notice that on the x-axis, I used the sample meal times of 9:00 AM, 12:00 PM, 3:00 PM, and 6:00 PM.

These are the meal times that have worked well for me as I maximize muscle protein synthesis — with the final meal at 6:00 PM, I have ample time to digest my food before going to sleep.

Alright, now let’s talk specifically about the first meal of the day.

I’d advise you to start early.

The reason?

Limiting the amount of time you spend fasting prevents your body from going into a catabolic state, where your body begins to break down tissue (potentially muscle tissue) to fuel your activities.

On top of that, the first protein-packed meal doesn’t just help your muscles:

Eating a high-protein first meal will keep you feeling full throughout the day due to its high satiety effect and will help stabilize your blood sugar levels, preventing energy crashes and hunger later in the day.

It will even release gut peptides like GLP-1 (the same hormone targeted by Ozempic).

The willpower to avoid bad food choices later in the day will come that much easier.

Okay, by now, you’ve got a great idea of how much protein to eat and how to structure your diet appropriately to get the dosages you need at the right intervals.

But what about other dietary variables, like the total number of calories, carbohydrate intake, and fat intake?

Let’s talk about it.

Optimizing Calorie, Carbohydrate & Fat Intake

We’ll start with calorie intake — this is a big one.

If you’re not eating enough food, your body won’t have the fuel it needs to grow in response to your training.

But if you’re eating too much, you’ll eventually reach the point of diminishing returns for muscle building and accumulate unnecessary fat.

So, how do you figure out the right number of calories?

Setting Your Calorie Intake for Muscle Gain

Building muscle requires energy — more energy than you burn each day.

This means you need to eat in a caloric surplus.

A good starting point is to aim for 250-500 extra calories per day above your maintenance level — the number of calories you need to eat to sustain your current body weight given your activity level.

But here’s the challenge:

How do you figure out what your maintenance level is?

The easiest way to get a ballpark number for your maintenance calories is by using an online calculator or a simple formula.

A popular option is the Mifflin-St Jeor Equation, which takes into account your weight, height, age, and activity level.

Here’s the formula for men:

And here it is for women:

Once you have the baseline number from the formulas above, multiply it by a factor that reflects your activity level:

• Sedentary (little or no exercise): Multiply by 1.2

• Lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3 days a week): Multiply by 1.375

• Moderately active (moderate exercise 3-5 days a week): Multiply by 1.55

• Very active (hard exercise 6-7 days a week): Multiply by 1.725

• Super active (very hard exercise, physical job): Multiply by 1.9

By the end of this calculation, you’ll have the approximate number of calories you need to eat to maintain your current body weight.

But here’s something that trips a lot of people up: your maintenance calorie needs aren’t static.

As you gain or lose weight, the number of calories you need to maintain your current weight changes.

Why?

Because your body’s energy requirements adjust with your new body composition.

Let’s break this down.

Gaining Weight? Your Maintenance Increases

As you build muscle (and even fat), your body requires more energy to maintain that mass.

Think of it this way: if you’re upgrading from a small car to a bigger, more powerful vehicle, it’s going to need more fuel to keep running.

The same applies to your body.

As you get stronger and more muscular, you need to give it more fuel — more calories— to sustain those gains.

Losing Weight? Your Maintenance Decreases

The opposite is also true.

If you’re in a calorie deficit and losing weight (whether fat or muscle), your body now requires fewer calories to maintain itself.

With less mass, your body simply doesn’t need as much energy to function.

This is why weight loss plateaus happen.

As you shed pounds, your maintenance calorie needs drop, and what was once a deficit might now just be enough to maintain your new, lower weight.

The Key to Success: Track and Adjust

So, how do you stay ahead of these changes?

You need to track your progress.

Just like monitoring your finances helps you stay on budget, tracking your calories and body weight helps you ensure you’re staying on track with your goals.

As you progress, your calorie needs will shift — sometimes subtly, sometimes significantly.

It’s like fine-tuning a machine.

If you want to build more muscle, you might need to increase your intake over time to match the new demands of your growing body.

If you’re cutting weight, you’ll need to lower your calories as you lose mass to continue creating a deficit.

The key is to stay flexible and listen to the data.

Your body is always giving you signals—you just need to track them and adjust accordingly.

Here’s a quick bullet point guide on how to approach it:

• Track your daily intake: Use a food-tracking app to monitor how many calories you’re eating each day.

• Weigh yourself regularly: Aim to check your weight each day, under consistent conditions (first thing in the morning).

• Adjust as needed: If your weight is going up and you’re trying to maintain or cut, consider reducing your intake. If you’re building muscle but your weight isn’t budging, it might be time to increase your calories.

Alright, now you know how to get an accurate measure of your current maintenance calorie threshold.

But remember: our goal is to build muscle.

So how many calories above maintenance should you be focused on eating?

Here’s a template for you to follow:

• Small Surplus (250 calories/day): Slower muscle gain, with minimal fat.

• Moderate Surplus (500 calories/day): Faster muscle growth, but with a little more fat gain.

Your goal is to find that sweet spot where you’re fueling muscle growth without unnecessary fat gain.

Where Do Carbohydrates & Fats Fit In?

Okay, now you know the amount of calories and protein you should be taking in.

The next question is: how should you split those calories between carbs and fats?

Carbs: Your Body’s Primary Energy Source

Carbs are your body’s preferred source of energy, especially during intense workouts.

They fuel your muscles so you can lift heavier and recover faster.

Carbs also help replenish glycogen, the energy stored in your muscles, which is depleted during exercise.

To build muscle, you want to make sure your muscles are well-fed with carbs.

Aim to make about 40-50% of your daily calories come from carbohydrates.

If you’re eating 2,500 calories per day, that’s roughly 250-300 grams of carbs.

Think of carbs like high-octane fuel.

As a general rule, the more you consume, the better your workouts will be.

Fats: Supporting Hormone Health and Recovery

Fats are essential for hormone production — especially testosterone, which plays a huge role in muscle growth.

Healthy fats also aid in recovery and reduce inflammation.

Around 25-30% of your daily calories should come from fat.

If you’re eating 2,500 calories a day, aim for 70-80 grams of fat.

Think of fats as the oil that keeps the engine running smoothly.

They’re not your primary fuel, but they’re crucial for keeping your system in balance and supporting long-term health.

Alright, after a comprehensive deep-dive into how you should structure your nutrition to optimally build muscle, we can finally move onto optimal training.

Training To Maximize Muscle Growth

Here’s the reality most people neglect: your muscles need a reason to grow.

Training without a strategy means you’re not challenging your body enough to see significant progress.

Whether it’s:

• failing to increase the intensity (progressive overload)

• skipping out on the importance of time under tension

• not giving your body adequate rest to recover

Inefficient training will only lead you to frustration, burnout, and limited gains.

So, how do you build the most muscle through training? Let’s break it down.

The Power of Progressive Overload

You can’t expect your muscles to grow if you’re lifting the same weights, doing the same number of reps, or following the same routine every week.

Progressive overload is the key.

Think of it this way: your muscles adapt to the stress you put on them.

If you’re not increasing the challenge over time, they have no reason to grow.

Here’s the idea visualized:

In the above chart, you’ll see the following pattern:

When you exercise at an intensity that challenges your body, you’ll initially see a decline in your performance.

However, once you allow your body to recover, you’ll be able to push yourself at a greater intensity in future workouts.

Why?

As long as you’ve followed the weight training protocol to plan, your muscles have grown in size and strength — they’ve adapted to handle a greater workload.

When you chain this effect over time, the result is called progressive overload.

So how can you apply progressive overload?

Actually, there’s a variety of ways:

• Increase the weight: Gradually add more weight to your lifts each week.

• Add more reps or sets: If you can’t add weight, push for an extra rep or set.

• Reduce rest time: Increase workout intensity with shorter rest periods.

It’s a simple concept, but it requires consistency and discipline over time.

So what’s the best way to make sure you’re continuously pushing the envelope?

Just like for your daily calorie counts and macronutrient intake: data tracking is non-negotiable.

You need to be able to reference information on your past exercise sessions to assess how to tackle your next workout.

Here’s a variety of important metrics you’ll want to be tracking as you continue to train (I’ll be writing a separate newsletter specifically on this topic in the coming weeks):

• each exercise you did during your gym session

• the number of reps and weight you lifted

• your rate of perceived exertion (RPE)

• your rest times between sets

With these metrics in hand, increasing muscle mass is simple:

Find a way to make the next gym session harder than the last.

Time Under Tension: Why It Matters

Another crucial factor is time under tension.

It’s not just about how much weight you lift; it’s about how long your muscles are working during each rep.

The longer your muscles are under tension, the more micro-tears occur in the muscle fibers.

I know it doesn’t sound appealing, but these micro-tears lead to growth when your body repairs them through muscle protein synthesis.

Here are some popular strategies that you can implement to maximize time under tension:

• Slow down your reps: Focus on the negative (eccentric) portion of the lift — this is when your muscle lengthens under load. For example, during a bicep curl, take 3-4 seconds to lower the weight.

• Control the movement: Don’t rush through the exercise. The goal is to maximize muscle engagement with every rep.

• Isometric holds: Incorporate pauses at the peak of the movement to keep your muscles engaged for longer.

It’s tempting to rush through your sets, but slowing down and focusing on quality reps will have a much bigger impact on your muscle growth.

Think of it like this: it’s better to do 8 slow, controlled reps with good form than to pump out 12 rushed reps with poor technique.

Rest and Recovery: Don’t Skip the Essentials

Here’s something that often gets overlooked: muscle grows when you rest, not when you’re in the gym.

Training stimulates the process by breaking your muscle fibers down, but it’s during recovery that they rebuild themselves.

Let’s zoom in a bit on our prior chart showing progressive overload:

In the above chart, you’ll see that the stimulus of lifting weights brings our performance below baseline.

This makes intuitive sense.

Try hitting 4 sets of heavy bench presses.

By the last set, your performance is almost certainly going to degrade.

Eventually, you just won’t be able to lift the weight.

The growth doesn’t happen until after you recover when you’ll see increased performance and more muscle mass as a result.

Bottom line: if you don’t give your body enough time to recover, you’re sabotaging your gains.

So the question remains:

How can you optimize your recovery from your training stimulus?

Here are some actionable tips to help you maximize your recovery potential (some of which we have already talked about):

• Get enough sleep: Your body repairs muscle tissue while you sleep, so aim for 7-9 hours a night.

• Fuel your muscles: Proper nutrition, especially protein, is essential for recovery. Make sure you’re eating enough to support muscle repair and growth.

• Rest days: Don’t think you need to hit the gym every day. Rest days are just as important as training days because they give your muscles time to rebuild.

• Stretching & massage: Staying mobile will help reduce your risk of injury in the long term, keeping you consistent in the gym

Building muscle isn’t just about pushing harder — it’s about being strategic.

Train hard, but give your body the time and fuel it needs to recover.

If you’re interested in data-driven methods to enhance your recovery, check out my newsletter on HRV — one of the best and most readily available indicators we have for assessing recovery.

Wrap-Up

Building muscle requires a clear strategy incorporating all of the following aspects:

• Nutrition — total calories, protein & amino acid consumption, carbs and fats

• Progressive Overload — focus on increasing the intensity of every workout

• Time Under Tension — keep tension in your muscles as you work them

• Recovery — emphasize sleep & nutrition to aid you in muscle recovery

If you can master these principles, you’ll be setting yourself up for maximum growth.

If you haven’t seen results in the gym, take this information and apply it.

Track your progress to prove to yourself that these principles work — and use the data you collect to inform you of how to get better every single day.

The better version of you will thank you for it.

Until next time.

— Landon

I’ll always remember where I was when I learned how money really works.

Four years ago, in October of 2020, I was sitting at my desk reading an article just like this one.

“They print it out of thin air.“

At first, it sounded like a conspiracy theory.

But the deeper I dug, the more I became captivated — the more I understood.

Topics I couldn’t explain before suddenly became crystallized for me:

• why the cost of living continues to skyrocket

• why investments go “up“ in value

• why our government seemingly always has excess money to spend

The answer?

Money printing.

One thing’s certain: my discovery of these drivers was timely.

At the time, we were in the midst of a remarkable rebound from the infamous Covid-19 stock market crash.

The catalyst for the turnaround?

Well, money printing.

The US Federal Reserve “printed” $5 trillion of new money to stimulate the economy.

The result?

The influx of new money into the economy caused the price of everything to be bid up sky-high, creating a perfect V-shape recovery back to pre-pandemic stock prices.

But my research on money printing made one thing clear:

We were going to achieve much more than just parity.

From pre-pandemic levels:

• Stock market indices ripped by 30%

• Real estate in desirable locations saw gains of 30%

• Bitcoin saw a 17x return from the lows of the crash

Despite the world being no better off than before the pandemic, the rich got richer.

And new millionaires were minted too:

Yeah — 5.2 million of them, to be exact.

So here’s the question:

If you weren’t one of them, why didn’t you capitalize?

Why didn’t you see it coming?

You didn’t know what to look for.

You sold your assets during the turmoil of the pandemic, only to see them skyrocket in value within the span of a few months.

Your purchase power took a nosedive — losing 30% of its value at the snap of the Fed’s finger.

You missed the biggest buy signal ever issued due to a lack of financial education.

If you understood the mechanism behind money printing, you could have front-run the market and secured your financial freedom.

My goal with this newsletter?

To teach you:

• how money is printed

• track the growth of the money supply yourself

• position yourself to benefit from it

Let’s get right into it.

Decoding The Monetary Cipher

Here’s the thing — they don’t call it “money printing” on its face.

Central bankers rely on complex jargon to obfuscate an otherwise simple procedure: increasing the money supply.

To understand what’s going on, you need to understand the language of finance.

Think of it like a cipher.

A cipher is a method used to encrypt information.

If you’re unaware of the proper method to decode it, you’ll be unable to convert the cipher into anything more meaningful — it will look like gibberish.

If you don’t have an understanding of…

• the language of central bankers

• the mechanism of money printing itself

…you won’t grasp the underlying signal.

Or even worse, be tricked into thinking it isn’t happening.

If you’re going to take anything away from this article: think for yourself.

Don’t take what financial newspapers and economists say at face value.

Why do I say this?

Let’s take a trip back to 2020.

When the Federal Reserve announced it would begin increasing the money supply to stimulate the pandemic economy, news outlets first parroted the narrative that the expansion wouldn’t lead to inflation.

Newsflash: they were wrong — and the people who knew it were banging the drums.

On top of being vocal, market participants who actually understood what was about to happen put their money where their mouth was.

They chose to position themselves in assets that would benefit from inflation, knowing that it was inevitably coming.

When it became impossible to ignore that inflation was beginning to manifest itself, the Federal Reserve was forced to finally acknowledge it.

But they brushed it off, stating that the inflation would be temporary and short-lived.

Again, the central bankers in charge of our financial system were either wrong or malicious — you choose which one to believe.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, consumer prices are still 21.2% higher than they were pre-pandemic as measured by Consumer Price Index (CPI).

And I’ll give you a hint: they’re never coming back down.

Even still, the CPI fails to reflect the true rate of inflation — it’s much higher than the government wants you to believe.

To learn how the government manipulates the CPI metric and the motivation behind it, check out my newsletter below:

Here’s the bottom line:

Trust no one.

The onus is on you to protect your purchasing power.

Now that you know financial literacy is needed to decode the Federal Reserve’s actions, let’s get into how “money printing” actually works.

The Money Printing Mechanism

Yes, the Federal Reserve technically does print physical cash.

But here’s the thing:

The $5 trillion introduced to the economy during the pandemic wasn’t physical.

When we talk about “money printing,” it’s not as simple as firing up the printing press.

To understand how new money is injected into the economy, you first need to understand how US government treasury bonds work:

Treasury Bonds

Okay, let’s keep this simple.

US Treasury Bonds are essentially IOUs from the government.

Individuals, companies, and even foreign governments want to earn a yield on their cash balances.

So what do they do?

They lend their money to the US government, which is offering to pay them interest on their cash balances.

But you might be asking:

What does the government get out of this?

Why would the government be willing to pay interest for access to their money?

Here’s why:

The US government spends more than it collects in taxes — they operate in a deficit.

This means they need to issue debt (bonds) to entice people to front the cash needed to meet the government’s operational expenses.

As we already went over, many entities are willing to buy these bonds for the yield that they provide.

But until now, we’ve left out a major buyer: The Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve: The Buyer Of Last Resort

Now, let’s talk about the big player — the Federal Reserve.

Let’s say that the government needs to finance a massive amount of spending.

For example:

• $1.5 trillion — bailing out the banks that were a part of the 2008 financial crisis

• $5 trillion — economic stimulus in response to the Covid-19 pandemic

If the government can’t raise the money from existing bond buyers, the Federal Reserve will customarily step in as the buyer of last resort.

The Fed has the power to “create” money, enabling them to buy as many bonds as needed for the US government to fund their objectives.

Here’s how it works:

• The Fed announces its plan to buy U.S. Treasury Bonds (and other securities like mortgage-backed securities)

• Big banks buy the bonds on the open market and then sell them to the Fed.

• In exchange, the Fed credits the banks with newly “printed“ money

With the stroke of a few keys on a computer, the Federal Reserve just created new money out of thin air.

So, how does this newly created money cause inflation in the broader economy?

When the Fed credits the new money to the banks in exchange for government bonds, their bank reserves are increased, giving them a greater capacity to lend money to businesses, consumers, and other financial institutions.

Money & credit that didn’t exist before are now part of the system, causing inflation — the money supply has expanded.

Tracking Money Supply Expansion

Okay, now that you know how the Federal Reserve adds liquidity to the system, you might be wondering:

How can you measure the amount of money added to the system?

We can quantify this through what are known as monetary aggregates:

M0: The Monetary Base

The M0 money supply is the physical cash in circulation plus bank reserves.

Think of this as the hard cash in people’s hands and bank vaults.

M0 reached an inflection point in response to the 2008 financial crises and, more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic stimulus.

Currently, we have about $5.67 trillion of physical cash + bank reserves in circulation.

M1: Liquid Bank Deposits

M1 Money Supply includes everything in M0, but it also adds liquid bank deposits.

This is the money sitting in checking accounts and savings accounts, ready to be withdrawn at any time.

In other words, it’s money that’s easily accessible — cash in hand or a swipe away on your debit card.

See that massive spike in 2020?

I’ll let you guess what happened around that time:

Money printing.

We went from around $4 trillion to $16 trillion in the blink of an eye, eventually increasing even further to the current figure of $18.1 trillion.

M2: Savings

The M2 money supply metric includes all of M1, but adds money market savings accounts, certificates of deposit (CDs), and other types of savings.

M2 is the money supply metric that’s most useful to you when benchmarking your investments against monetary inflation (more on this later on.)

It’s a wider view of the money supply, representing not just the cash in circulation but the near-cash equivalents sitting in your savings accounts.

This money isn’t as liquid, but it’s still part of the overall money supply.

Our M2 money supply currently sits at $21.1 trillion in circulation.

Using Money Supply Metrics To Your Advantage

Now, you might be wondering:

How can I use these money supply metrics to my benefit?

These metrics are invaluable due to their correlation to financial markets.

Let me explain:

In the following chart, you can see that the amount of securities (bonds) held by the Federal Reserve is directly correlated to the M2 money supply.

In other words, the amount of securities they’ve purchased dictates the amount of money in circulation.

This lines up perfectly with what you’ve already learned: not exactly a shocker.

But here’s what you might not already know:

When you dig deeper, you’ll find that the vast majority of the movement in asset prices occurs in tandem with the M2 money supply.

Here’s a chart (borrowed from MicroStrategy) showing how the S&P500 stock index (an index of the 500 most valuable companies in the US) moves relative to the M2 money supply:

Spoiler alert: the movements are virtually identical.

When money supply goes up, asset prices go up.

Now, let’s get to the heart of this.

What does knowledge of these relationships enable us to do?

With these metrics in your toolbox, you can predict asset inflation with certainty.

Let’s again look at the Covid-19 pandemic as an example:

In March of 2020, the S&P500 crashed to the tune of a 37% drop.

But if you knew what to look for, the widespread panic was an obvious opportunity.

As the market plummeted, the Fed announced its intention to purchase trillions of dollars of securities (thereby injecting liquidity into the market).

As a result of the purchase, the M2 money supply began to skyrocket — at the exact same time that the stock market was having a meltdown (you can see this disparity on the above chart).

The result of the stimulus?

The market didn’t just rebound — asset prices across the board went up by 30% above prior highs (the same % increase as the money supply).

I don’t know how else to say it: this isn’t a coincidence.

Let’s look at this dynamic over the long term for good measure.

Here’s a chart displaying:

• M2 Money Supply

• Net Worth Held By The Top 0.1%

• Net Worth Held By The Bottom 50%

What do you see?

The net worth of the top 0.1% tracks the increase in the money supply perfectly, while the bottom 50% hardly see their wealth increase by comparison.

But why?

What do wealthy people own that poor people don’t?

Assets that keep up with the monetary inflation rate.

The ultra-wealthy understand the game that’s being played.

To understand the game and how the wealthy combat inflation through their investment vehicles, this newsletter is a good place to go:

Staying Ahead Of The Money Printer

Let’s face it:

The money supply rarely ever contracts — and if it does, it’s very short-lived.

The writing is on the wall.

The Federal Reserve is going to continue to print money at the behest of the US government as long as the dollar system exists.

But now you have an edge.

You can use your knowledge of how money is created to your advantage.

Here are some actionable steps you can take that will keep you ahead of the curve:

• Monitor Economic Indicators: Keep an eye on the news headlines and key data like M2 money supply, but don’t take what they say at face value. Sift through the noise to develop the conviction in your positions needed to double down during market crashes.

• Use A Proper Hurdle Rate: Use the rate of expansion of the M2 money supply as the hurdle rate on your investments. If the money supply grew by 10% in a given year, but your investments only returned 7%, you lost 3% in purchasing power.

• Buy & Hold Assets: Buy scarce and desirable assets that will keep up with the rate of monetary expansion and hold them over the long term to defend the purchasing power of your dollars.

Stay informed, stay prepared, and always keep an eye on the money supply.

Until next time.

— Landon

*The content of this article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Do your own research before making any investment decisions.

Detach from the divisive programming that has come to define the mainstream media.

It will allow you to notice something that’s otherwise quite obvious:

Humans actually have a lot in common.

There’s not a person on planet Earth who doesn’t have aspirations.

And when you pick apart each of these aspirations one by one, you’ll have a second realization:

Turns out, they’re all pretty similar.

Most people’s desires line up pretty closely with each other.

Barring the specifics, yours are going to be pretty close to mine:

1. Financial Abundance (Live comfortably, create a sense of security for my future)

2. Freedom and Independence (Autonomy, living life on my own terms without excessive restrictions or dependence on others)

3. Good Health (A healthy life, free from illness or suffering)

4. Love and Meaningful Relationships (Building deep, loving relationships with family, friends, and partners)

5. Personal Growth & Self-Improvement (Continued growth & improvement)

6. Meaning in Life (Finding a sense of purpose, leaving a mark on the world by creating something of lasting value)

But here’s where people stop being so similar:

For every person who has what they really want in life, 99 others have failed to manifest their dreams.

So if everyone has similar goals, why is it that so few actualize them?

Here’s the answer:

Your mental model.

Think of it as the operating system for your mind.

It’s the engine you use to interpret the information you’re absorbing on a daily basis.

It’s integral to both:

1. who we are

2. who we become

If you’re anything like I used to be, you’ve probably hardly even spent time thinking about the way you think.

Here’s the reality:

A well-configured mental model streamlines the process of becoming the highest version of ourselves.

The problem?

Most people go about their lives using mental models that impede their success:

• Fixed Mindset: Believing that abilities and intelligence are static, which limits potential for growth.

• Victim Mentality: Believing that you have no control over your life and that external circumstances determine your fate.

• Dwelling on Failure: Focusing excessively on mistakes without learning from them or moving forward.

• Pessimism: Always expecting negative outcomes and focusing on the worst-case scenarios, viewing challenges as insurmountable obstacles rather than opportunities for growth

• Complacency: Accepting mediocrity and avoiding efforts to push beyond your comfort zone.

• Inaction: Failing to take decisive action due to fear, doubt, or laziness, leading to stagnation.

• Passivity: Letting life happen to you instead of actively taking control and shaping your circumstances.

• Low Self-Esteem: Lacking belief in your ability to succeed, which leads to a passive, negative approach to life.

• Dependence on External Validation: Relying on others’ approval for self-worth, rather than cultivating internal confidence and self-belief.

If these patterns sound like you in any capacity, then you’re in the right place.

Recognizing it is the first step.

Most people aren’t even aware of it when these mental barriers hold them back.

Their mental model stays hidden in their subconscious, never seeing the light of day for a chance at improvement.

They stay stuck, processing the inputs the world flings at them the same way their whole lives, wondering why their life never changes for the better.

Ask yourself:

Is my current model serving me as best it could, or is it time to upgrade?

If you answered the former, let’s dive in.

Blueprint: High-Performance Mental Models

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” — George E.P. Box

Not all mental models are created equal.

Some help us navigate life more effectively, while others hold us back.

The difference comes down to a few key characteristics.

A pragmatic mental model has specific qualities that make it useful.

So, what makes a mental model strong?

Here are the key attributes that separate robust mental models from mediocre ones:

1. Input Conversion

2. Malleability

3. Predictive Power

4. Scalability

5. Bias Mitigation

Let’s dive right into each one.

1) Input Conversion

Let’s face it: life throws a lot at us.

Things are going to go wrong.

But here’s what most people fail to recognize — you can interpret the exact same situation in vastly different ways.

This is where mental models come in.

A mental model that’s truly working for your benefit doesn’t just receive inputs — it converts them.

Every experience can be turned into a catalyst for growth, regardless of if it feels positive or negative in the moment.

“I just lost my job.”

“I failed my exam.”

“I just suffered an injury.“

These are situations no one wants to be in, right?

But here’s what sets resilient people apart — they flip the situation on its head.

An elite mental model transforms these negative experiences into motivation.

Here’s an example:

Jocko Willink is a former Navy SEAL best known for his philosophy of “Extreme Ownership“.

Needless to say, he’s weathered the storm

His strategy for doing so?

When something bad happens, he says:

Good.

Why? Because he’s intent on turning that bad thing into fuel for the next step.

• Lost your job? Good — now you have time to explore new opportunities.

• Failed an exam? Good — now you know where to focus and improve.

• Injured while training? Good — now you can work on aspects of your training you were neglecting like nutrition, flexibility, or mental toughness.

To most, this kind of thinking might sound absurd — almost robotic or detached.

But this is what separates growth from stagnation.

Think about it: being negative serves no purpose.

You can’t control the world around you.

But you CAN control your perception.

Why would you relinquish the one lever of control you have?

Why would you ever subscribe to a mental model of defeatist thinking?

Construct a mental model that turns setbacks into stepping stones.

There’s no reason to settle for less.

2) Malleability

Mental models shouldn’t be rigid — you don’t want to stick to the same approach forever.

The best ones are malleable, constantly evolving as new information, circumstances, and challenges arise.

You should be able to reorient the way you think about things based on feedback.

What’s working? What isn’t?

When you take an iterative approach, you can construct a mental model where improvement is inevitable.

Step by step, you can recalibrate your mental model along the way.

You apply what you’ve learned, make small adjustments, and keep refining your path to reach higher ground.

By embracing malleability and an iterative mindset, you allow your mental model to grow and evolve alongside you, always pushing you toward your highest potential.

To learn more, check out my newsletter on my philosophy of Personal Gradient Ascent, and how iteration is a key component to learning to think like a machine:

3) Predictive Power

A good mental model doesn’t just help you react to your environment.

It helps you predict outcomes.

With an elite mental model, you can anticipate the future before it arrives.

Think about the most successful people you know.

They don’t just respond to life as it happens — they anticipate challenges, see opportunities before others do, and make moves that keep them ahead of the curve.

That’s the power of a mental model with predictive capabilities.

It helps you see what’s coming and act with clarity, instead of being caught off guard.

4) Scalability

Most areas in life are far more interconnected than they might seem on the surface.

For example, fitness and finance may seem like two completely different domains —one is about physical health, the other about monetary wealth.

However, on a deeper level, they share several fundamental principles that can help you excel in both areas:

• Discipline and Consistency (hitting the gym occasionally won’t lead to long-term fitness, sporadically saving or investing won’t build financial security)

• Delayed Gratification (saying no to short-term pleasures like junk food, resisting the temptation to overspend today so you can save and invest for the future)

• Tracking Progress (measurement is crucial in both domains: tracking calories, workouts, or finances)

• Compounding Effect (investments grow exponentially over time as interest builds upon itself, while in fitness, consistent effort leads to gradual improvements in strength)

• Risk Management (injuries in fitness can set back your progress, poor financial decisions can derail your financial health)

The best mental models are scalable.

They aren’t limited to just one part of your life — they apply everywhere.

Whether you’re…

• making decisions about your career

• improving your health

• building stronger relationships

…a good mental model is rooted in timeless principles.

It provides a framework that guides your behavior across the board.

Think of it this way: a scalable mental model is like a toolkit.

You can use the same tools whether you’re fixing a leak, building furniture, or crafting something entirely new.

It’s adaptable, versatile, and applicable in any situation.

The mental models that work best in life are the ones that connect the dots between different areas — your emotions, intellect, physical health, and relationships — so that you can approach life in a holistic, well-rounded way.

5) Bias Mitigation

Let’s be real for a second: we all have biases.

Whether we realize it or not, they influence:

• our thoughts

• our decisions

• how we see the world

Our biases can distort reality.

They make us cling to ideas that may not serve us well and cloud our judgment when making important choices.

So how do you make sure your mental model stays clear?

You need to constantly analyze yourself.

Ask yourself tough questions.

Is your thinking aligned with the facts?

Or just based on comfort or convenience?

We love to tell ourselves we’re doing our best, don’t we?

But let’s be honest — are we really?

Here’s the truth: there is always something more you can do to improve.

A strong mental model keeps you constantly striving, constantly questioning, and constantly improving.

But this only works if you stay objective.

The moment you let your biases creep in, convincing yourself that you’ve reached your peak or that external circumstances are to blame for your shortcomings, you lose.

An elite mental model forces you to look at the data, at the facts, and face reality as it is — not how you’d prefer it to be.

Are you truly maximizing my potential, or are you letting your biases hold you back?

Mental Models: Practical Application

Now you know the key attributes that make up elite mental models.

The next step?

Figuring out how to implement your own.

So how do you solidify the adjustments you make to your mental model?

How can you stop yourself from reverting to your old mental model over time?

Here are the practical methods I used to internalize them:

1) Input Conversion: Reframe Challenges in Real-Time

• Practice reframing immediately: When something goes wrong, stop yourself before reacting. Find the positive in whatever went wrong, and go from there.

• Keep a daily log: At the end of each day, I write down a challenge I faced and how I was able to reframe it. This helped me cement the habit of converting my perceived problems into opportunities.

Example: Instead of saying, “I had a terrible workout today,” ask, “What did I learn from that workout that I can apply next time?” Make every experience a stepping stone, not a setback.

2) Malleability: Embrace Change with Iterative Adjustments

• Start with small experiments: Identify an area of your life where you can introduce a change for the better. Try it for a week, and assess how it worked.

• Conduct a weekly review: At the end of each week, I reflect on what worked and what didn’t. Then, I make slight adjustments based what I observe.

Example: If you want to improve your productivity, start by adjusting one element of your routine — say, spending 15 minutes planning your day out the night before. At the end of the week, review whether it helped, and adjust accordingly.

3) Predictive Power: Build Anticipation Into Your Planning

• Set aside time for forward-thinking: Each week, I block out 30 minutes to anticipate potential challenges and opportunities. I ask myself, “What’s likely to come up this week? How can I prepare?”

Example: If you know that certain days at work are always chaotic, start preparing for them in advance by organizing your workload earlier in the week. The more you predict, the fewer surprises will throw you off.

4) Scalability: Mental Model Across Life Domains

• Apply Learning To Multiple Domains: I go out of my way to study principles from various domains — psychology, fitness, finance, business — and look for ways to apply those lessons in different areas of my life.

Example: If you’re learning about problem-solving in a business context, consider how those skills can help you overcome personal challenges, such as sticking to a fitness goal or improving communication in relationships. The more you cross-pollinate your learning, the more you unlock new possibilities for growth.

5) Bias Mitigation: Build Awareness Into Your Routine

• Daily bias check: At the end of each day, I take 5 minutes to reflect on any decisions I made. Ask yourself: “Was I influenced by my emotions or assumptions?” Write them down. By identifying biases, you can start addressing them.

• Seek external feedback: I ask people I trust to challenge my assumptions regularly. Why? They may see biases that I don’t. Having an external perspective will help keep your thinking objective.

Example: If you notice you’ve been avoiding certain challenges because of fear, acknowledge it. Write down an action plan to approach those tasks the next day, while focusing on facts rather than emotions.

Alright, now you have:

• the building blocks of what makes an elite mental model

• practical ways to apply these new frameworks to your life

Your next step?

Implementation.

Take a hard look at your current mental model.

Ask yourself:

How is my current way of thinking holding me back from achieving my aspirations?

Then, go from there.

I’ll end with this reminder:

Everyone has the same goals.

Build a mental model that gives you the pleasure of achieving them.

Do it for you.

Until next time.

— Landon

No, building muscle isn’t just for gym bros or meatheads trying to max out their bench press or “get big.“

Sure, vanity might be the main reason people start hitting the gym — looking good aesthetically is appealing — but that’s far from the only reason to begin your fitness journey.

The people who discard the importance of muscle mass simply lack the education needed to come to an otherwise obvious conclusion:

Building muscle is beneficial for everyone.

Countless people say no to weight training because they don’t think building muscle is “for them.”

Here’s the thing: muscle is one of the most critical organs in your body for maintaining overall health.

Yet, it remains an afterthought to 99% of people.

If you feel even the slightest calling to take care of the only body you’ve got, then building muscle isn’t optional — it’s an obligation.

In fact, when the stakes are presented to you in plain terms, it’s hard to see building muscle as anything other than essential.

The goal of this newsletter is simple: to make you see that building muscle is essential for your:

1. Metabolic Health

2. Longevity

3. Mental Health

So if you’re already a gym-goer: great, keep it up.

But if you’re not?

I’m going to provide you with the data-driven reasoning you need to kickstart your pursuit of good health.

It’s your choice from there.

Here we go.

1) Muscle For Metabolic Health

The Hidden Cost of Neglect

Muscle is about so much more than just aesthetics — and it does a hell of a lot more than just help you lift heavy objects.

Muscle plays a critical role in maintaining your body’s overall metabolic health.

Now, what do I mean by “metabolic health”?

Simply put, we’re referring to how efficiently your body extracts, processes, and uses the energy from the food you eat.

Specifically, I want to talk about how muscle is the main driver in helping you metabolize the carbohydrates you eat — a process called glucose disposal.

To illustrate the importance of glucose disposal, I offer you my personal experience with prediabetes, a condition that occurs when your body fails to sufficiently process the amount of sugar in your blood.

Trust me: this is something that’s likely affecting you right now too, whether you know it or not.

If you aren’t being intentional about:

1. building muscle mass

2. your nutrition

Then odds are, you’re already on your way toward being diagnosed with it.

If you don’t know what diabetes is, you’d better start taking notes.

According to the American Diabetes Association, it’s now the 8th leading cause of death in the United States at around 100,000 people per year.

Here’s a chart showing how type II diabetes cases have skyrocketed in the United States in recent years:

Over the 42-year period from 1980 to 2022, the number of Americans diagnosed with diabetes has skyrocketed from around 5.5 million to roughly 25 million people.

And when you look into prediabetes — a precursor to full-blown type II diabetes — the numbers get even bigger.

The number of people that fall into this bucket is estimated by the CDC to be one-third of the U.S. population.

Freaking 98 million people.

What’s even more shocking?

Over 80% of the people who fall into this camp don’t even know they have it.

The lack of awareness here is staggering.

If you’re…

• under-muscled

• don’t know how effectively your body is processing the sugar you eat

• your style of eating is anything like what I’m about to describe

…then you need to listen closely.

My Wake-Up Call: Poor Eating Habits → Prediabetes

My story begins when I got my driver’s license at 16.

With newfound freedom, I found myself driving anywhere I wanted.

Unfortunately, that included a lot of fast-food joints.

At the time, I was a pitcher on my high school baseball team, and I was obsessed with increasing my pitching velocity.

As the saying goes: “mass equals gas.”

In simple terms, here’s what it means:

The more you weigh, the harder you can throw the ball.

While it’s certainly not a 1:1 correlation, physics makes this at least generally true.

Anyway, I approached putting on weight in just… a horrifically wrong way.

I made use of my new car by driving to and from:

• school

• baseball practice

• fast-food drive-thrus

Some days, I’d have fast food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner:

• McDonald’s Egg McMuffin’s for breakfast

• a pastrami sandwich from Togos or Jersey Mike’s for lunch

• Chipotle burrito bowl or 4x4 In-N-Out burgers for dinner

And when I didn’t feel like getting in my car, I just had the food delivered.

Just take a look at this screenshot of my DoorDash account:

Yeah — I saved over $3,600 in fees with their premium service.

Now, keep two things in mind:

1. This is just my savings. The actual amount I spent on fast-food? Likely 10x higher.

2. This doesn’t even account for all the fast food I physically drove to pick up.

Needless to say, I was eating junk food at an insane rate.

I was eating well over 4,000 calories a day — and that resulted in rapid weight gain (shocker I know.)

When I was a sophomore in high school, I weighed about 130 pounds at six feet tall.

Yes, I’m not joking, it’s still on my driver’s license to this day.

By the time I entered college, I had bulked up to 180 pounds — a 50-pound gain in just a few years.

My fastball velocity improved from 78 mph to 91 mph, earning me the opportunity to play Division 1 baseball.

On the surface, it was a huge success.

But it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

The composition of that newly added weight was suboptimal, to say the least.

Let’s just say that a lot of that weight gain wasn't muscle — I got a liiiiittle chubby.

But excess body fat accumulation wasn't the only place my eating habits began to rear their ugly head: they began to show up in my medical reports.

I hate to be the one to give you this reminder, but here it is:

When you’re a healthy guy, but you continue to do unhealthy things over time, you’re eventually going to be… unhealthy.

And my unhealthy habits caught up with me when I was 18.

My Prediabetes Diagnosis

After finally visiting my doctor’s office (it had been roughly two years since my last visit), he noticed that my blood sugar levels were much higher than they should have been.

He went straight to the logical conclusion: I was developing diabetes.

To test me for it, they gave me an Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (OGTT)

I’ll explain more on this later.

The test results came back with both good & bad news:

Luckily, I wasn’t yet a full-blown type II diabetic, but my results did place me firmly in the camp of having developed prediabetes.

At the time, I didn’t really even know what this meant for me.

I didn’t know anything about the severity of the issue, or even what diabetes was at the time.

But a single conversation with my doctor and a few quick Google searches cleared things up quickly.

“So what if the body can’t process the sugar from the carbs I’m eating efficiently?”

The inability to manage your blood sugar (aka type II diabetes) can lead to cascading health problems:

• Fatigue & Low Energy: your cells are unable to absorb sugar (glucose) from your bloodstream properly, causing constant sluggishness, even when blood sugar levels are high.

• Cardiovascular Diseases: damage to the blood vessels in the heart, increasing the risk of heart attacks, strokes, and arterial diseases.

• Nerve Damage: damage to nerves throughout the body, causing tingling numbness, or burning sensations (can lead to severe pain or complete loss of feeling over time).

• Eye Damage: damage to blood vessels in the eyes, can cause blurred vision, floaters, and even blindness.

• Chronic Kidney Disease: damage the blood vessels in your kidneys, which can lead to kidney failure, preventing waste products from being filtered out.

• Obesity: Excess sugar in your blood gets converted into fat, leading to rapid weight gain and all the risks associated with obesity.

That was all I needed to hear — that was my wake-up call.

Alright, long tangent, I know.

But I figured it was worthwhile to give you my personal experience.

Why?

Because many of you might be eating your way down the same slippery slope that I did without even knowing it.

But here’s the silver lining: building muscle can help defend your body against these problems.

To explain to you why this is true, you need to understand the underlying dynamics of glucose disposal — and how muscle is crucial to that process.

Let’s dive in:

The Basics: How Your Body Handles Glucose

When you eat carbohydrates, your body breaks them down into glucose (sugar).

Despite being essential to your body (it’s the main fuel your body runs on), an elevated blood glucose level is toxic to the body.

Your body also needs a mechanism to remove extra glucose from the bloodstream — this mechanism is called glucose disposal.

Muscle tissue’s role in this is HUGE — it’s responsible for a whopping 80% of all the glucose disposal your body performs.

And the more muscle mass you have, the better.

Let’s break this process down step-by-step:

1. Carbohydrates → Your Mouth

• Enzymes in the mouth & small intestine break down carbohydrates into glucose

2. Glucose Bloodstream Absorption, Blood Sugar Spike, & Insulin Release

• Glucose is absorbed into your bloodstream, raising your blood sugar levels

• The pancreas detects this rise and needs to remove some glucose from your bloodstream (excess glucose is toxic)

• To do this, the pancreas releases insulin, a hormone that helps glucose enter your cells (think of insulin as a key unlocking the door to your muscle, fat, and liver cells so they can use or store glucose)

3. Glucose Storage (Glycogen)

• Muscle Glycogen: glucose that’s extracted from the bloodstream can be stored inside muscles as glycogen, a molecule ready to provide those muscles energy when you exert them (muscles hold about 80% of the body’s glycogen stores)

• Liver Glycogen: the liver also stores glycogen so it can regulate your blood sugar, releasing glucose back into your bloodstream when it sinks too low (this is where the other 20% of the body’s glycogen is stored)

• Fat Accumulation: if there’s no room to store excess glucose in your muscles or liver, it will be converted into fat (Note: you’d probably like to avoid this)

4. Glucose Disposal

• Muscle Exertion: your muscles burn through glycogen when you exercise, fueling your performance and creating more room for new glucose to be absorbed

• Glucagon Release: when blood sugar drops (like between meals), the pancreas releases the hormone glucagon (the opposite of insulin), which tells the liver to release stored glycogen into the bloodstream to be used by your cells as energy

• Insulin Decreases: after your body uses or stores glucose, insulin levels drop

5. Cycle Repeat

• Once your existing glycogen stores have been diminished, you can now eat more carbohydrates and safely store the excess glucose as needed

Now that you understand this system from a high level, you’re probably wondering:

So where does this mechanism go wrong when it comes to type II diabetes & prediabetes?

On the surface, it may seem like the above outline has all the bases covered: it can dispose of extra glucose via muscle, your liver, and in the worst case scenario, fat accumulation.

But even still: excess glucose can and will build up in your blood over time if you over-consume carbohydrates.

And when it does, it will wreak havoc on your body.

Here’s how:

Glucose Disposal Gone Awry

Let’s start with some basic statistics:

• The average American eats upward of 300g of carbs per day (likely around 250g of glucose per day when subtracting fiber)

• The average person burns approximately 150g of glucose per day through essential functions, assuming a sedentary lifestyle

• 60-70% of Americans fail to meet the CDC guidelines for physical activity (150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity)

• A person who exercises will burn through an additional 20-80g per hour of training depending on the intensity and duration of the exercise

Given these statistics, and what you now know about glucose disposal, it shouldn’t really be surprising that we’re facing both an obesity and type 2 diabetes crisis in the United States.

Why?

The vast majority of the population:

1. doesn’t exercise to burn off any of the excess glucose stored in their muscles

2. is under-muscled, so they wouldn’t have the initial capacity to store the excess glucose even if they were to start working out

This means the following:

The sedentary person consuming 250g of glucose daily, yet burning just 150g has a major problem here.

This equates to roughly a 100g surplus of glucose daily — or 66% more glucose than the body can safely dispose of without muscular exertion.

Disastrous.

This excess glucose has nowhere to go, causing you to develop chronically high blood sugar levels (and by extension, all of the life-threatening effects of diabetes.)

But hold on: you might remember that excess glucose can be stored as fat as well.

So why can’t the body just continuously store the excess glucose as fat without elevating your blood sugar levels?

Here’s the answer:

The number of fat cells your body has to work with is actually relatively limited.

Additionally, the amount of fat each of these fat cells can store is also restricted.

Eventually, these fat cells accumulate so much fat that even they become overwhelmed by the amount of excess glucose — they become dysfunctional.

The creation of new fat cells can’t solve the problem either, as new fat cell creation tends to be limited, especially in fully grown adults.

Once your body can no longer use fat as a venue to store the excess glucose, disaster starts to kick in.

In response to chronically high blood sugar levels, your pancreas will resort to pumping out increasing amounts of insulin in a desperate attempt to make your cells absorb the excess glucose.

As you might imagine, this is NOT a fix to the problem.

It’s the beginning of a vicious cycle that can quickly become a runaway train without treatment.

When your cells experience a state of elevated insulin for a prolonged period, your cells actually become accustomed to insulin.

The result of this? It requires more and more insulin to get the muscles to accept glucose from outside the cell — otherwise known as insulin resistance, the defining characteristic of type II diabetes.

Once this happens… well, congratulations.

You’re officially a diabetic.

When you’re presented with this brutal reality, it’s difficult to maintain the belief that building muscle is simply a luxury — your views shift to understanding muscle building as a necessity.

Building muscle saves the average American from the catastrophic effects of excess carbohydrates.

Remember, as long as the intensity of your workouts is high enough, you can burn through roughly 80 grams of glucose in an hour — almost all of the excess caused by the standard American diet.

Better yet, the more muscle you build, the more glycogen you can actually store within your muscles.

Here’s the bottom line:

Building muscle is one of the best defenses we have against insulin resistance, and in turn, maintaining overall metabolic health.

Now you might be wondering:

Is there a way to measure the degree to which my cells are insulin-resistant?

The answer is yes, and it’s called an Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (OGTT).

It’s the same test that was given to me during my personal run-in with diabetes.

OGTT: Quantifying Insulin Resistance

Here’s what an OGTT is and how it was administered to me:

• I arrived to my appointment in a fasted state and then immediately took a blood test to determine my baseline blood glucose reading

• I then received an orange sugary drink (think of it as Fanta on steroids) to see how well my body processed the sugar

• Over the next couple of hours, they took blood samples at regular intervals to see how efficiently my body had processed the glucose out of my bloodstream

In a healthy person, your blood glucose level will rise after consuming sugar, but it should return to normal range in as your pancreas produces insulin to counteract this.

However, in cases of prediabetes or full-on type II diabetes, insulin resistance prevents the body from effectively processing that glucose bloodstream, leading to chronically elevated blood sugar levels.

Here’s how this process looks graphically for a healthy individual, a person with prediabetes, and a person with type II diabetes:

Each of these groups has a different ability to metabolize glucose, and this is visible in the shape of the curve and the timing of blood sugar returning to baseline.

• Healthy Person (Green)

  • Baseline around 90 mg/dL

  • Peaks at around 135 mg/dL about 40 minutes into the test

  • After 2 hours, blood sugar returns to about 95 mg/dL (5 mg/dL away from baseline)

  • Takeaway: Quick rise and return to baseline. The body efficiently uses insulin to bring blood glucose back down, reflecting healthy glucose metabolism.

• Prediabetic Person (Yellow)

  • Baseline around 105 mg/dL

  • Peaks at around 160 mg/dL about an hour into the test

  • After 2 hours, blood sugar returns to about 120 mg/dL (15 mg/dL away from baseline)

  • Takeaway: Delayed peak and slow return. Insulin resistance is emerging, and the body is having a harder time handling glucose, but it still manages to bring levels down slowly.

• Type II Diabetic (Red)

  • Baseline around 140 mg/dL

  • Peaks at around 220 mg/dL about an hour into the test

  • After 2 hours, blood sugar still stats are around 180 mg/dL (40 mg/dL away from baseline)

  • Takeaway: Sharp peak and slow return. Severe insulin resistance leads to prolonged high blood sugar, confirming that the body is struggling to process glucose and is at risk for further damage.

Alright, this is already a pretty convincing argument in favor of building muscle.

I mean… come on.

The main takeaway here?

The amount of muscle you’ve packed on could very well determine whether or not your blood tests look like the green line or the red line.

But I’m not going to stop there.

There’s even more reason to build muscle I haven’t even talked about yet.

Convinced already? This next one’s a no-brainer too.

If not? I forgot to mention, you gave me three strikes when you started reading.

Let’s start with the next section.

2) Muscle Helps Fight Aging

If you read the title of this section and thought, “I’m young, this doesn’t apply to me,” I totally get it.

I’ve been there myself.

Most of us, if we’ve been lucky, know what it feels like to be relatively invincible in our youth — that implicit confidence that you can put your body through anything and still recover unscathed.

But here’s the truth: “I’m young, I’ll worry about it later” isn’t a rational perspective.

It’s easy to believe while you’re young, but as you age, reality will slowly set in.

The ability to take a long-term view when it comes to your health is a superpower that will pay huge dividends in the years ahead of you.

The Modern Cheat Code: Low Time Preference

We live in a world geared toward instant gratification — fast food, social media, quick dopamine hits.

And it’s tempting to think, “I want to live now!”

But here’s the reality: if you choose to “live it up” in your 20s without thinking ahead, you won’t have a strong foundation to build the rest of your life on.

This doesn’t just apply to health, but finances, personal growth, and more.

At the end of the day, you have a choice.

You can either waste your 20s partying and find yourself staring at the ceiling at 30, wondering why you’re still the same person.

Or, you can use your most robust years to work hard and set yourself up for success later in life.

There are no do-overs.

For those who choose the long-term perspective, I’m here to help.

Muscle is Your Retirement Account for Physical Health

You can think of building muscle like investing in a retirement account.

The goal of an investment account is to ensure you can maintain your standard of living even after you stop working.

Building muscle isn’t much different at all.

It ensures you maintain a similar quality of life even after your body begins the physical and cognitive decline that comes with aging.

The more muscle you build up in the present, the longer your…

• physical function (like walking up stairs or carrying groceries)

• self-reliance (performing daily tasks without assistance)

• life enjoyment (participating in hobbies and sports, avoiding being bedridden)

…will last into old age.

Just like neglecting your financial investments won’t yield a secure future, living a sedentary, high-stress lifestyle isn’t going to cut it if you want to age well.

You have to be proactive about this.

This is your reminder: muscle isn’t just about looking good.

It’s about setting yourself up for a healthier, stronger, and longer life.

Most people intuitively understand what lifespan means — it’s simply how long you live.

But when you invest in yourself, you’re focusing on something far more important: healthspan.

Healthspan extends the idea of lifespan and asks a more important question: What portion of your life are you physically functional, autonomous, and free from chronic health issues?

Living a long life is one thing, but living a long and healthy life is something entirely different.

What’s the point of adding more years to your lifespan if you can’t enjoy them?

If you’re riddled with health complications, immobile, or reliant on others, those extra years lose their quality.

Muscle is More Than Just a Vanity Metric

Muscle is critical to your overall health, and here’s the reality:

You start losing it quickly as you age.

The above chart illustrates the average decline in muscle mass by age group.

It’s important to note that these figures are what you would expect to see in a person who lives a sedentary lifestyle and doesn’t exercise often.

As you can see, without intentional training, the average person begins to lose their precious muscle mass as early as age 25, at around 3-5% per decade

From 40 to 70, that loss accelerates to around 8% per decade.

After 70? Muscle mass drops by up to 15% per decade.

This age-related muscle loss is known as sarcopenia, and while it’s not impossible to build muscle later in life, it gets a whole lot harder.

Why You Should Start Building Muscle Now

This muscle loss means two key things for you:

1. You get the best return on investment while you’re young. You’ll gain more muscle for the same effort when you start early. In other words, putting in time at the gym in the present gets you more results compared to waiting until later in life.

2. The muscle you build now creates a buffer for the future. The larger the muscle base you build while it’s still relatively easy, the better off you’ll be when natural muscle degradation kicks in.

But if you’re already past those younger years, don’t worry.

The good news is that if you start working out today, you can still slow, prevent, and in some cases, reverse muscle loss.

The Data Speaks Clearly

Let’s look at this from a data-driven perspective.

As Dr. Peter Attia points out in a recent discussion, the decline in muscle and physical function as we age isn’t as steady and inevitable as we think.

Contrary to popular belief, this decline isn’t a smooth, continuous process — it’s preventable to a large degree.

The gradual loss of strength, mobility, and autonomy comes in discrete step-downs, often triggered by periods of inactivity.

As guest Dr. Luc van Loon points out, there are plenty of examples of an elderly relative who experienced a sharp decline in health following a sudden period of inactivity — a hip surgery for example.

Oftentimes, it’s this period of inactivity that leads to the downward spiral that culminates in their eventual passing.

Why?

This period of being bedridden accelerates the loss of muscle mass and physical function, making it harder for them to recover, leading to a cascading effect of declining health.

So, what does this all boil down to?

You have the power to take control of your healthspan.

The solution is deceptively simple: take the long-term view, start now, and be ruthlessly consistent in your approach to diet and physical activity.

Every workout, every healthy meal, and every step counts toward extending your healthspan.

Your children, grandchildren, and future self will thank you for it.

By maintaining muscle mass and physical function, you’re not just adding years to your life, but life to your years.

Real quick: if you want to further explore maximizing your longevity, check out one of my previous newsletters on VO₂ Max — it’s got all the information you need to stay solid on the aerobic front.

Anyway, onto the last benefit of building muscle I’ll go through: enhancing your mental health.

3) Building Muscle Benefits Your Mental Health

Okay, this will be brief.

But I just want to touch on the mental benefits you’ll get from building muscle — because they’re THAT important.

I don’t even need to cite studies for this part — it’s just common sense.

But for all the data-oriented people out there, trust me, there are plenty of studies out there to support this, like this one: PMID: 27789950

Plus, you don’t ALWAYS need a study to know something is true.

It’s called inductive reasoning — recognizing patterns based on experience.

And this is one I’ve witnessed in my own life and seen repeated in countless others.

Building muscle is tangible proof that you can stay consistent and build toward something real.

There’s something powerful about physically transforming yourself.

Whether it’s slipping into a smaller pair of pants, noticing the definition in your shoulders, or seeing your quads start to take the classic tear-drop shape, it’s exciting.

Maybe you hit a new personal best on your squat or deadlift.

Or maybe it’s the simpler things, like doing 10 push-ups for the first time, or nailing your first bodyweight pull-up.

These little wins? They’re addictive.

If you can push through that initial phase where progress seems slow, the dopamine hit you get when you finally see results will keep you showing up.

And I’m sure plenty of gym-goers will back me up on this: exercise makes life’s other challenges seem smaller in comparison.

When you push yourself through a tough workout — when you willingly embrace physical difficulty — you build mental muscle too.

Developing the mental toughness to grind through a grueling session in the gym doesn’t just prepare your body.

It prepares your mind.

It strengthens your resilience for other challenges in life, whether they’re physical or mental.

This kind of discipline has a ripple effect.

Over time, you’ll notice it not only improves your physical strength but also helps to stabilize your mental state.

Suddenly, the difficulties in your life don’t feel quite as overwhelming because you’ve already proven to yourself, over and over again, that you can push through hard things.

And the confidence that comes from that? It’s priceless.

Building muscle isn’t just about aesthetics or strength — it’s about showing yourself that you can consistently show up, put in the work, and transform.

And that’s a skill that will serve you well beyond the gym.

The Solution: Start Building Muscle Now

By now, hopefully, I’ve convinced you that building muscle isn’t reserved for gym bros who are solely focused on their physique.

In fact, an enhanced appearance is trivial in comparison to the main benefits you’ll accrue:

• You’ll enhance your overall metabolic health

• You’ll extend your healthspan for longer than it would otherwise be

• You’ll supercharge your confidence and mental resiliency

Building a solid base of muscle should be a priority for everyone reading this.

The topic of how to build muscle optimally will make up an entire newsletter of its own in the coming weeks.

But I do know that some of you will want to take action and get started as soon as possible.

It’s completely understandable!

So for now, here’s some actionable advice you can apply TODAY to start seeing results immediately:

• Progressive Overload: Gradually increase the weight, reps, or sets in your workouts each week to challenge your muscles and encourage growth.

• Be in a Caloric Surplus: Consume more calories than your body burns daily to provide the necessary energy for muscle growth and recovery.

• Eat Enough Protein: Aim for about 0.8-1 gram of protein per pound of body weight daily to support muscle repair and growth.

• Prioritize Rest: Ensure 7-9 hours of sleep per night, and include rest days to let your muscles recover and grow.

• Track Your Progress: Keep a log of your workouts to track weight lifted and reps completed so you can have confidence that you’re continually iterating and improving.

These simple steps will take you probably 80% of the way there.

Take them and apply them.

“I wish I hadn’t started,” said no one ever.

Until next time.

— Landon

Every single coach I worked with throughout my athletic career instilled this mentality in me.

Here's what hard work meant to me until I was around 22:

• More is ALWAYS better

• Rest was for losers

• Grit is the difference between mediocrity and success

• The difficult things must be done, despite the circumstances

But I couldn't have been more wrong.

My perception of hard work was incomplete — and I paid the price.

Despite lacking perspective, I found success with this mentality early on (which only bolstered my half-baked beliefs).

I was far from the best player in the early years of my high school baseball career.

I wasn't promoted to my high school's varsity baseball team until my senior year.

And even still, this was likely out of courtesy, not skill level.

When I became a senior, a sudden realization hit me:

If I was hardly good enough to play on a varsity baseball team, my childhood dream of playing professional baseball wasn't going to happen.

I saw the baseball career I'd devoted countless hours to coming to a close.

So I got serious.

I applied the lessons in hard work I'd learned from my coaches as I understood them.

After a year of working my a** off, I'd gone from being a mediocre player to securing a roster spot at a D1 collegiate program — something just 2.4% of high school baseball players accomplish.

In other words, I got miraculous results — at first.

The results didn't last.

While it might seem counterintuitive, the perception of hard work that got me further than most also ended my career early.

But how could "hard work" have been detrimental to my career?

Let me explain:

Once I got to college, I knew other players of equal skill were vying for the same goal I had — to play in the major leagues.

So how could I ensure it was me who was drafted by a major league team instead of the others?

The answer in my mind was exactly what I had worked for me in the past:

Outwork everyone else.

So I did — I devoted my spare time to doing as many reps as I could.

But my focus was completely lopsided.

I did copious amounts of reps, but I didn't assign the same amount of urgency to my recovery.

With each rep I did, I built up excess wear and tear that I never addressed — my chances of injury rose higher and higher.

I was a ticking time bomb.

And it led to breaking points.

Every.

Single.

Time.

I could never seem to stay on the field or in the weight room.

I suffered injury after injury:

• Torn UCL (ulnar collateral ligament in my elbow)

• Strains of all kinds (tricep, rotator cuff, lower back, hamstring)

• Knee tendinitis (prevented me from building any real lower body strength)

My repeated injuries cost me my consistency.

I lost the ability to make progress daily and have each small breakthrough eventually compound into success.

But what caused me to be an injury magnet in the first place?

The answer is simple: I overtrained.

I pushed myself too hard, too often.

I failed to respect the fine line between hard work and overtraining.

I never acknowledged that performance gains aren't made during your training — they're made while you rest and recover.

I never asked myself:

• Am I fully recovered from my last training session?

• When is it smarter not to push through — am I seeing diminishing returns?

• At what point does my training become detrimental to my performance?

All in all, my perception of hard work lacked nuance.

After 3 1/2 years of fighting off injuries, I finally decided to hang up my cleats — without ever pitching in a single game for the team.

The most regrettable part of it all?

If I'd known what I know now, I could have changed the outcome of my athletic career.

Your body's readiness to train can actually be quantified through a metric called heart rate variability (HRV).

With HRV, you can optimize your workload and recovery routines to prevent overtraining, reduce injuries, and track your improvement at the same time.

The fitness tracker I wore during my playing career gave me this data right at my fingertips.

Yet, I ignored the data because I accepted the false pretense that I just needed to keep pushing through, regardless of the circumstances.

In this article, I'll show you how my perception of hard work and training has evolved through the incorporation of HRV.

It's my hope that this knowledge helps YOU make more intelligent decisions when it comes to your training volume, intensity, and recovery.

What Is HRV?

To explain HRV, we'll start by introducing a different metric: heart rate.

Most people have heard of this metric before — it's a simple measure that tracks how many times our heart beats per minute.

But here's what you might not know: the amount of time between these beats isn't equal.

Take a heart rate of 60 bpm (beats per minute) as an example:

Given that there are 60 seconds in a minute, if the duration between each of your heartbeats was equal, each beat would happen exactly once per second.

But this isn't reality (and as you'll later learn, isn't ideal).

If you monitor your heartbeats through an ECG machine, you'll quickly find that the duration between each heartbeat isn't the same.

One set of beats might have 0.95 seconds between them, while the duration between the next set of beats might be 1.05 seconds.

This means the duration between your heartbeats has variability.

You can measure this variability in a metric called heart rate variability (HRV).

So what causes this variability?

HRV stems from your nervous system — particularly, your autonomic nervous system.

Your autonomic nervous system controls the involuntary actions we take for granted throughout our day-to-day lives.

Thanks to the autonomic nervous system, you don't have to consciously think about:

• sweating

• breathing

• producing saliva

• digestion

• and most relevantly, adjusting your heart rate

Your autonomic nervous system is made up of two branches which counterbalance each other:

• Sympathetic (SNS) - promotes fight or flight response (stay alive)

• Parasympathetic (PNS) - promotes relaxation & energy conservation (rest & digest)

The SNS and PNS systems work together as your body's resource management system (and are also responsible for HRV).

Your body doesn't have unlimited amounts of the resources it needs to function, so naturally, your body has to make sure it's allocating its resources efficiently and effectively.

When one system (PNS or SNS) needs resources, they're siphoned off from other bodily processes where there isn't an immediate need for them.

Let's say a sabertooth tiger begins charging toward you.

Your SNS (responsible for fight or flight response) will immediately kick into overdrive.

You'd see all of the following bodily changes in an instant:

• increased heart rate

• increased respiratory rate

• increased adrenaline production

• increased pupil dilation

Because of this sudden uptick in demand for energy by your SNS, your body must temporarily borrow the energy from other sources that aren't immediately necessary for survival.

In other words, bodily functions important for long-term health and recovery are temporarily suppressed in favor of avoiding death in the present moment.

Considering you could be seconds away from being mauled, this is exactly how you want your body to manage its resources.

As a result, you'd see the energy allocation to the following bodily functions dry up:

• decreased digestion

• decreased immune system activity

• decreased urine production

• decreased reproductive functions

Let's say the energy your SNS siphoned off was enough to help you successfully escape from — or even fend off — the sabertooth tiger.

What happens when there is no longer an immediate threat and life returns to normalcy?

When an elevated SNS is no longer necessary, the strength of the signal it sends to the rest of your body will begin to decline.

At the same time, the PNS, which regulates the maintenance activities that your body performs for you (like digestion, immune system activity, etc) and is primarily active at rest, will increase the strength of its signal.

This reversal in signal strength reallocates the energy needed for your fight or flight response back to the bodily functions necessary for maintenance, long-term health, and recovery.

This brings your body back into homeostasis (balance).

Throughout your daily life, the SNS and PNS are constantly competing with each other to regulate your body's resources in a tug-of-war type fashion.

As you learned above, this power struggle affects your heart rate.

In a healthy individual, these systems send simultaneous signals to your heart via neurotransmitters — to both speed up and slow down your heart rate.

Your heart seeking to accommodate two different signals at the same time results in a heart rate with variability in the timing between each beat: HRV.

Why Is HRV Important?

Now that you understand the systems that govern your HRV:

Why is your HRV even worth tracking?

And how should you interpret your HRV readings?

Here are the answers:

HRV has been shown in numerous studies to:

• positively correlate with athletic performance and training adaptation

• negatively correlate with the risk of overtraining and injuries

In other words, when your HRV is higher:

• your performance goes up

• your chances of overtraining or injury go down

For these reasons, using HRV as a guide to dynamically structure your workout intensity, volume, and recovery activities can be extremely beneficial to you.

So how can you actually derive insights about your readiness to train from HRV?

Before you can obtain any meaningful information from your HRV measure, you first need to track your HRV over several days to identify your personal baseline.

Once you have an established baseline, you'll be able to compare it to your current HRV measure to determine your body's relative readiness to train.

Important note:

Even though you can continuously monitor your HRV data throughout the day (your heart is always beating), you should instead take a single measurement at a standardized window of time each day, typically one when you'll always be at rest.

As you'll soon learn, HRV fluctuates greatly throughout the day for a wide range of reasons, so isolating a constant window of time to take the measurement is critical to ensuring it's meaningful.

I'll be diving further into the best practices and nuances when tracking HRV in the next section.

But for now, let's stick to illustrating how to interpret HRV by walking through an example:

Let’s say you’ve got a training session scheduled for after you’ve finished reading this newsletter.

After you've done your workout, you finally get in bed for a well-deserved night of sleep.

When you wake up the following morning, your HRV reading will be in one of three categories:

• Above baseline

• At baseline

• Below baseline

We'll play out each of these different scenarios below:

HRV Above Baseline

When your HRV reading as measured during your rested window is higher than your usual baseline, it indicates your body is in a well-recovered state and primed for physical exertion.

But why is this the case?

The higher the variability in your heart rate, the more responsive your heart is to both SNS and PNS signals.

This is a sign that your autonomic nervous system is balanced — neither the SNS or PNS is crowding the other out.

The more balanced your SNS and PNS are at rest before training, the more potential the SNS has to rise to the occasion when you begin to train.

Knowing this, you can feel confident in proceeding with your planned training session and even consider increasing the intensity or duration if you feel up to it.

However, as mentioned above, it's extremely important to take your HRV measurement during an isolated window of time when you are in a RESTING state.

If you fail to measure your HRV during the appropriate conditions, your interpretation of your body's readiness to perform may be wildly off.

Let's explore how this is possible:

If you measure your HRV when your SNS is highly active (during a workout), your HRV will be much lower than it actually is at rest.

Just like the interaction with a sabertooth tiger, intense exercise will activate the SNS to prepare your body for increased physical demands.

Recall that the variability in your heart rate is caused by a tug-of-war between the SNS and the PNS.

When both systems propagate signals of roughly equal strength, you'll have a higher HRV.

If the SNS signals start to overshadow the PNS, the PNS signals won't be as competitive in regulating your heart rate anymore.

The stronger signals from the SNS overpower the signals from the PNS, increasing your heart rate and actually lowering your HRV.

During an acute activity like exercise, a lower HRV is good — it's exactly what you should want.

As you recover, your HRV will increase as your SNS and PNS signals gradually become balanced again.

So what's the main takeaway here?

If you measure your HRV at the wrong time (during a workout), you'll be deluded into thinking your body isn't prepared for its next workout and needs more rest.

In reality, your body could easily return to having an HRV equal to or higher than baseline when it enters a renewed state of rest, signaling that you are primed to perform.

HRV At Baseline

When your HRV as measured during a resting state is roughly equal to its usual baseline, you've got the green light to work out at a similar intensity that day.

Just like having an HRV above baseline, it's a sign that the recovery you're doing to prepare yourself for your next workout is adequate.

However, you likely don't want to push your intensity any further without beefing up your recovery procedure as well — this will likely have a negative impact on your HRV.

In other words, you're doing everything right — keep doing what you're doing.

HRV Below Baseline

When your HRV as measured during a resting state is significantly lower than your usual baseline, it's a signal that you likely haven’t fully recovered from the prior day’s training.

As illustrated in the section discussing an HRV above baseline, a low HRV isn’t always cause for concern.

It's completely normal to have a low HRV during acute exercise — your HRV will decrease as your body further activates the SNS to meet the demands placed on your body through training.

The issue arises when your HRV is chronically low — when your HRV is low at rest.

If your HRV is low outside your time spent exercising, it’s a strong indication that there are other factors causing extra stress to your body:

• fatigue

• dehydration

• mental stress

• illness

Take the last bullet point as an example:

When your body is already working hard to fight an illness, you have fewer resources available to assign to exercising or cognitively challenging tasks.

If you decide to go sprinting while you have a fever, your body isn’t going to perform well relative to if you were healthy.

Your body can't just decide to stop fighting the illness because you’ve decided to exercise — fighting it off is a pressing matter.

When your HRV is low at rest, your SNS is preoccupied and has fewer potential resources to allocate to your training.

In the absence of illness, waking up with a low HRV can signify that your body is dealing with other forms of wear and tear.

With this information, you can derive several insights you can use to tailor your approach to ensure you're optimizing your recovery.

First, you can experiment with adjusting the following variables in your training regimen:

• intensity

• volume

• frequency

For the average person training with the broad goal of bettering their overall health, these variables are flexible and can be changed as needed.

For example, if you find yourself unable to adequately recover from highly intense workouts, but still want to hit the gym 5 days a week, then you should consider lowering the intensity of each workout so you can better meet your body's recovery requirements.

However, many athletes participate in competitive settings where intensity is not negotiable.

For example, if you're expected to participate in a marathon, the intensity is fixed.

In this circumstance, you'd lower your workout intensity and volume ahead of the event to ensure your HRV is at its peak before the event (for optimal performance), then use your HRV reading the morning after the event to assess your recovery status.

If your HRV is low (as you'd expect), you can use this as confirmation that your body needs much more rest before you begin to train again, preventing you from chronically overtraining and eventually sustaining injuries.

A low resting HRV is also an indicator that you'd likely benefit from placing more emphasis on the other side of the equation — your recovery.

I'll be writing in-depth on the benefits of being attentive to areas like your sleep, nutrition, and hydration for your HRV in the final section of this newsletter.

How Can You Track Your HRV?

Now that you're aware of how you can properly interpret your HRV to your benefit:

How should you actually go about tracking it?

There are several best practices to keep in mind:

Selecting A Measurement Window

Most modern fitness wearables like WHOOP, Garmin, and Apple Watch come with a built-in capability to continuously measure your HRV.

But as you've already learned, it's best to measure your HRV during an isolated window of time where conditions are always the same.

When you first begin to track your HRV with a wearable, you'll notice the following:

Your HRV fluctuates A LOT.

There are a multitude of variables that can influence your HRV to a large degree:

• Training - oscillation between training and recovery affects HRV

• Breathing - a slower, more controlled respiratory rate can increase HRV, while rapid, shallow breathing may decrease it due to increased sympathetic nervous system activity

• Hydration - inadequate hydration can lead to decreased blood volume and increased heart rate, both of which can negatively impact HRV

• Diet - meal quality and quantity can both influence HRV

• Alcohol - a single night drinking can reduce your HRV for up to 5 days

• Sleep - maintaining high-quality, consistent sleep is beneficial for HRV, while poor sleep quality and inconsistent sleep times can decrease HRV

HRV’s ability to synthesize so many distinct inputs makes it a powerful metric, but its generalized nature can also be viewed as a weakness.

Your HRV fluctuates dramatically throughout the day for a plethora of reasons, making it nearly impossible to capture the exact context of why these movements are occurring.

Essentially, you'd have to track every single thing you did every day in excess in order to meaningfully interpret your continuous HRV data.

For the purposes of assessing your body’s readiness to perform, you simply don't need to add this level of complexity.

By controlling for all the external variables using a defined collection window in a rested state (as mentioned before), we can take a clean look at your HRV without all the noise.

So how can you go about choosing a proper window to track your definitive HRV measurement for the day?

The consensus view amongst researchers is to measure your HRV first thing in the morning.

By measuring HRV first thing in the morning, we can create a consistent baseline that is affected by the smallest number of environmental factors possible.

However, there are some issues with this approach:

• heart rate typically increases when you know you're being measured

• even minimal physical movement or cognitive activity can influence HRV

Luckily, you don't have to measure your HRV consciously.

Wearables can passively track your HRV while you sleep, thus avoiding even greater amounts of "noise" caused by environmental factors.

Fitness wearable company WHOOP uses its sleep-stage tracking technology to isolate your HRV throughout each stage, calculating your overall HRV using a dynamic average.

They emphasize your deepest periods of sleep to maximize consistency and accuracy.

To make your interpretation of your HRV value easier and free of noise, WHOOP only shows you the dynamic average they calculate from your time asleep.

While other devices like Garmin do allow you to view your HRV in real-time, using an average of your HRV throughout your time asleep still gives you a much clearer and concise picture of your recovery status.

Baseline HRV Improvement Over Time

As we've discussed above, before you can garner any insights from your HRV measurement, you need to have established a baseline.

Your initial baseline measurement should be the average of your HRV as measured during your defined window over at least a couple of days.

However, you shouldn't stop with just the initial baseline.

You must continue to calculate new baselines periodically if your fitness wearable doesn't already do this for you.

But why is this necessary?

As a byproduct of both optimizing your training and recovery routines and increasing physical fitness that will come from your workouts, you'll begin to see your baseline HRV trend upward.

In other words, your baseline HRV will continue to evolve over time.

Just like a muscle, your nervous system responds to stimulus, recovers, and then shows increased resiliency once recovery is complete.

Here's a simplified chart showing how the process works:

HRV Comparisons Between People

Throughout this newsletter, I've been careful to say that a higher HRV is ideal — not a high one.

The reason for this is the following:

Heart rate variability is an extremely individualized metric that often differs significantly from one person to another.

For example, two elite athletes with approximately the same level of fitness can have a completely different HRV.

But how can this be the case?

Genetics and age are the two factors outside of exercise that play the largest role in determining your HRV.

In the above chart, you can see the effect that age has on the HRV values of the middle 50% of the population.

As age increases, your HRV begins to decline.

You can also use the chart to observe the wide range that HRV varies due to genetics and differences in training.

This chart shows only the middle 50% of the population, meaning there are many outliers both higher and lower than this range.

While athletes well-trained athletes do tend to have higher HRV values due to their training, genetics plays such a large role in determining your HRV that comparison on a population level isn't meaningful.

For this reason, HRV isn't a metric you should be comparing from person to person.

Instead, your HRV should be used as a personal marker to track your own improvement.

In other words:

• when we compare between people, a higher HRV value doesn't hold much weight

• on an individual level, a higher baseline HRV over time is a sign of fitness improvement

So now that you've understood the value in tracking HRV, isolated a measurement window, and are aware of interpretation best practices:

What behaviors should you implement in your daily life to maximize your HRV?

How Can You Improve Your HRV?

What are the biggest levers you can pull to maximize your HRV?

Every action you can take toward maximizing your HRV falls into one of two categories:

1. Training Optimization

2. Recovery Optimization

We've already discussed how optimizing the intensity, volume, and frequency of the workouts in your training routine allows you to recover more effectively from your workouts, increasing your HRV.

But throughout this newsletter, we haven't yet been specific about what a quality recovery actually entails.

Here are the core building blocks of a recovery routine that will keep your HRV, and by extension, your body's readiness to perform at the highest they can be:

1. Rest: Ensure you get enough sleep (8-9 hours) and incorporate rest days into your training schedule to allow your body time to adequately recover and prevent overtraining.

2. Nutrition: Consume a balanced diet rich in protein, carbs, and healthy fats.

   1. Amino acids from proteins are vital for the synthesis of neurotransmitters and enzymes that regulate autonomic functions, influencing HRV.

   2. Carbohydrates replenish glycogen stores depleted during exercise, ensuring a stable energy supply, reducing physiological stress, and supporting a balanced autonomic nervous system, thereby enhancing HRV.

   3. Healthy fats reduce inflammation and support cell membrane integrity, which can improve HRV by promoting better heart function and autonomic balance.

3. Hydration: Dehydration can impair cardiovascular function, increase heart rate, and reduce stroke volume, leading to lower HRV.

4. Electrolyte Balance: Maintaining proper electrolyte levels, especially sodium, potassium, and magnesium, is crucial to enhancing HRV.

5. Alcohol Avoidance: Alcohol consumption has a noticeable negative impact on HRV, with a single night out drinking causing a reduction in your HRV for up to 5 days.

6. Mental Wellness: Incorporating techniques such as meditation, deep breathing exercises, or hobbies can increase HRV by lowering your stress level.

Aside from the core aspects listed above, other activities can provide a marginal benefit to your HRV:

1. Active Recovery: Engage in low-intensity activities such as walking, stretching, or yoga. This can help increase blood flow to muscles, reduce soreness, and promote healing.

2. Proper Warm-Up and Cool-Down: Incorporate proper warm-up routines before training to prepare your muscles and a cool-down routine afterward to help your body gradually return to a resting state.

3. Stretching and Flexibility Work: Stretching can help improve flexibility, reduce muscle stiffness, and prevent injuries.

4. Massage and Foam Rolling: These techniques can help release muscle tension, improve blood flow, and reduce soreness.

While there's a practical limit to the amount of recovery you can do, seeking to maximize your recovery is a good rule of thumb.

When you don't neglect the areas listed above, you give your body the chance to handle workloads your body might have otherwise had difficulty with before.

To wrap things up, here's my final advice to you:

Hit your workouts with intensity and be willing to push yourself to new heights, but don't neglect the activities that are critical to your recovery.

Use HRV as your gauge to determine your body's readiness to perform.

When you adhere to this approach, you won't succumb to overtraining.

You'll be able to stay consistent, allowing your training sessions to compound into eventual success.

Until next time.

— Landon

Difference in opinion is largely rooted in our interpretation of data.

You'll find this is true across many facets of life:

• Nutrition - same data, different dietary approaches

• Sports - same data, different managerial decisions

• Politics - same data, different policy solutions

Sadly, even when people use data as a basis for their conclusions (as they should), it's inevitable that some of their interpretations will be faulty.

If your lens for viewing the data is incorrect, referencing data alone won't save you.

Out of all the areas faulty interpretation can be found, it's prevalence in economics is the most devastating to society.

I studied economics throughout my early college years, and quickly cultivated a fascination for the subject.

My class-time was no longer enough to satiate my craving to learn — so I began to research economics in my free time.

But with every new book, podcast, and social media post I consumed, my perspective gradually began to change.

By the time I entered my master's program, I realized the worldview I had constructed based on the teachings of my college textbooks crumbled under the slightest bit of scrutiny.

The way I interpreted the underlying metrics in our curriculum was now fundamentally different than that of my professors.

Our divergence in interpretation manifested itself in one metric more than any other:

The inflation metric — Consumer Price Index (CPI).

For the high-achievers out there, using the CPI as the expected inflation rate in your wealth management strategy can have devastating consequences for you and your loved ones.

Using one wrong number can destroy your ability to:

• plan for your future retirement

• gauge your investment performance

• secure the quality of life you want for yourself

In a world where inflation is much higher than most realize, maintaining the conventional approach is toxic to your wealth — you can't just play copycat.

You might think you're getting by just fine.

But when the underlying reality and your wealth preservation strategy are at odds with each other, the result won't just be a slap on the wrist.

You won't just lose a couple dollars here or there.

Your life savings will be wiped out — you'll suffer economic death.

Here's how to defend yourself:

What is CPI?

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a government-issued metric that seeks to measure the cost-of-living over time.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the CPI accomplishes this by measuring the change in prices paid by consumers for a market basket of goods and services.

Published on a monthly basis, the CPI measurement synthesizes over 80,000 different prices across a variety of different categories:

• Food & Beverages

• Housing

• Apparel

• Transportation

• Medical Care

• Recreation

• Education & Communication

• Other Goods and Services

The CPI is widely used by governments, economists, businesses, and investors alike as the definitive inflation rate.

Here's a description of how each of these parties utilize this data:

• Governments - use CPI to adjust tax brackets, social security benefits, and pensions to account for inflation

• Economists - analyze CPI data to assess inflation trends, which helps in forecasting economic conditions and making policy recommendations

• Businesses - use CPI to set pricing strategies and employee wage negotiations

• Investors - use CPI to evaluate real returns on investments, and make informed decisions on asset allocation

So why did I decide not to use CPI in my own investment strategy?

Let's dig deeper:

CPI: A Flawed Metric?

Substitution

The CPI wasn't always a cost-of-living index (COLI).

Before 1990's, the CPI was constructed as a cost-of-goods index (COGI).

You might be thinking:

What's the difference?

In the COGI CPI, the goods and services that the basket was composed of remained stagnant — they didn't change monthly or yearly.

Here's a simple example:

Let's say our food subcategory is made up of two items: steak and chicken.

Over the past month, we will say that steak has risen in price from $10 to $11 per pound, while the price of chicken rose from $3 to $3.10 per pound.

In case the respective inflation rates were 10% and 3.3%.

But how would these rates be aggregated into the overall food subcategory measurement?

Under the former cost-of-goods index, the CPI would be measured using the Laspeyres Index.

• pt = prices in the current period

• p0 = prices in the base period

• q0 = quantities in the base period

When plugging in our values to the given formula, we arrive at 8.46% overall food inflation.

Now, let's evaluate how the CPI is calculated in the present day.

When the CPI was changed to reflect "cost-of-living" in the 1990's, the BLS introduced the assumption that as prices increase, consumers will switch to cheaper goods due to their greater affordability.

Despite seeming like a rational assumption, an issue arises:

By accounting for substitution, we are no longer measuring the price level required to maintain a constant standard of living.

Thus, we now run the risk of understating the inflation rate the consumers are actually experiencing.

To better reflect the product substitutions consumers were assumed to be making, the BLS changed the formula for how the inflation rates within each subcategory are aggregated together.

The new formula is called geometric mean.

This method reduces the impact of significant price changes in any single item, thereby smoothing out the inflation rate and mimicking the effects of substitution.

In some cases, this process can make the overall inflation that occurred appear lower.

Here's the formula in action:

After plugging in the inflation rates for steak and chicken from our example, we obtain a result of 6.6% for our cost-of-living CPI metric.

This figure is significantly lower than the 8.46% measure we obtained from the cost-of-goods CPI, about 1.86% lower.

While this difference might seem small to the untrained eye, this is a HUGE amount in terms of inflation.

To put this in perspective, the Federal Reserve’s entire yearly inflation target is 2%.

Many economists have been critical of the dampening effect this formula change can have on the reported inflation number, arguing the older version measures true inflation at a higher accuracy.

Hedonic Adjustments

In the 1990's, the BLS also oversaw the introduction of hedonic adjustments to the CPI.

In a nutshell, here's the concept behind hedonic adjustments:

If the price of a good increases because of quality improvements, the price increase should not be counted as inflation.

Take the example of the price of a car increasing from $30,000 to $40,000.

At the extreme, if the entirety of the cars price is deemed to be due to quality increases (due to enhanced driver assistance, increased horsepower, UI improvements, etc), the CPI will record 0% inflation.

In real-world scenarios, the entirety of the increase will almost never be attributed to solely quality increases — there will be some recorded inflation.

But an obvious question arises:

How do you quantify what portion of price increases are due to quality upgrades?

The BLS uses what are called hedonic regression models to estimate the portion of price increase that is attributable to quality improvements.

However, this approach has drawn scrutiny, as many economists argue that the inputs to this model are completely subjective.

Due to this subjectivity, we could very quickly find ourselves in a place where valid price inflation is being written off as just a quality improvement, understating the true inflation rate.

Weighting

In the section discussing substitution, I detailed how the overall inflation rate for a single subcategory is calculated.

To illustrate this, I used the example of steak and chicken within the food subcategory.

However, once the overall inflation rate for every subcategory has been calculated, these subcategories need to be aggregated into even broader categories.

Then, these broad categories must be even further aggregated into a final headline CPI number.

This process introduces another concern about how the CPI can understate inflation.

In order to accomplish this, the BLS assigns a weight to each based category based on the amount of spending consumers commit to said category.

This is done to emphasize that certain categories are more important to consumers than others.

In the chart above, we can see that in November of 2021, the food category made about about 14% of the total weight of the index.

It's important to understand how the weightings of the individual categories can affect the overall CPI measure.

For example, if everything except for shelter increased in price by 8%, but shelter only increased by 1%, the inflation print would only come out to be around 2-3%.

Why?

Because shelter was assigned an extremely heavy weight of about 32%, skewing the results toward that category.

So how is this potentially detrimental to the accuracy of the CPI?

Here's an example using real-world consumer expenditure data:

As consumer spending patterns shift, the weights will be adjusted accordingly.

Here's why this is problematic:

As inflation erodes the value of the dollar, more and more consumers will find that they can no longer afford the goods and services they're accustomed to purchasing.

To remedy this, they'll have to settle by purchasing lower-quality products instead.

When this is reflected in the survey data, the BLS revises the weights for the categories that the more expensive items are found in downward.

Over the long term, a degrading quality of the consumer basket is a clear trend.

In 1976, American's consumed approximately 78 pounds of beef per person.

In the present day, this figure has dropped to just 58 pounds per person.

This decline in beef purchases was accompanied by a surge in chicken consumption, as Americans modified their diets to avoid the rising costs of beef.

We went from consuming 48 pounds of chicken on average in 1979, to 101 pounds in the present day.

When we compare the CPI's assigned weight for the subcategory titled "meats, poultry, fish, and eggs" across this period of time, we see that despite chicken intake rapidly increasing to compensate for meat falling, the weight assigned to this subcategory has fallen:

• 1979 Weight: 4.189

• 2023 Weight: 1.722

This represents a 58.9% decrease in weighting.

In other words, the most desirable, nutrient-packed foods are making up far less of the CPI calculation than they once were because consumers have changed their spending patterns to purchase lower-quality food.

Owners Equivalent Rent

As you observed in the visual in the above section, shelter is by far the most dominant category in the CPI, making up about 32% of the total calculation.

However, you'll probably be surprised to learn that the shelter category doesn't actually include the prices of homes.

Let me explain:

In 1983, the BLS removed housing prices from the CPI calculation under the justification that houses are an investment asset, and thus shouldn't be included in a index seeking to to track consumable goods.

However, the BLS maintained that rent is suitable to stay in the CPI.

Here's the reasoning:

Rent can be seen as the cost of consuming housing as a service, which aligns with the CPI’s focus on consumer expenses.

This framing enraged dissenting economists, who make the sound argument that a house IS a consumable good and should remain in the index (houses are meant to be lived in, if you don't perform upkeep the house will deteriorate).

Aside from this, many economists also take issue with the metric that was introduced to replace home prices — owners equivalent rent (OER).

Instead of measuring the change in home prices directly, the BLS has opted to survey homeowners, asking them to answer the following question:

“If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished and without utilities?”

The issue here is that the respondent's answer to this question is entirely subjective.

If they are not currently renting their home out to anyone, it's unlikely they are unable to answer this question accurately — it's nothing more than a guess.

As a result, the data used in this section of the CPI not only fails to reflect the rising costs of housing, it also fails to be based on any objective measure.

For comparative purposes, we can looks to other metrics in order to assess the performance of the CPI in tracking the increase in shelter costs.

The Case-Shiller index is a measure maintained by Standard & Poor's, which tracks the increase in home prices over time.

When we graph the Case-Shiller index and CPI's owners equivalent rent side-by-side, it's clear that owners equivalent rent doesn’t reflect the rate at which home prices are increasing in the slightest.

For economists who believe housing prices should be directly measured, the above reality creates doubt in the CPI's ability to measure the true rate of inflation.

Government Incentives

It's crucial to understand the calculation of the CPI is not a trivial matter.

This is far more than a bunch of math nerds bickering with each other for bragging rights.

The CPI has a dramatic, cascading effect on a variety of different aspects of our financial lives.

As such, we need to remain vigilant as citizens to ensure the government is reporting this metric accurately.

It so happens that government has a huge incentive to understate the CPI and the true amount of inflation that's occurring.

As a result, many economists have attributed the changes made to the CPI calculation we’ve discussed to malice.

While strong incentives don't necessarily make something so, they certainly need to be factored into the equation.

So what incentives does the government have to keep the CPI artificially low?

Skimping on Pensions

Benefits from retirement plans like Social Security and private pensions are adjusted upward based on inflation (CPI) to ensure that retirees' purchasing power is maintained over time.

By keeping CPI artificially low, the government can avoid paying you the true increase you should be receiving.

Increased Tax Revenue

Tax brackets are adjusted via the CPI.

This means that if the CPI is understated, and tax brackets aren't raised as fast as your wages are increasing, you'll continuously be pushed into higher and higher tax brackets.

Essentially, the government earns more revenue off of you through taxation despite your real purchasing power remaining unchanged due to inflation.

National Debt Reduction

The US government debt is in nominal terms.

This means that high inflation eats away at the national debt because it allows the government to pay back the debt using dollars that are far less valuable than when the debt was initially accrued.

If investors are convinced through a lower CPI that inflation is low, high inflation will eat away at their debt (while they won’t be paying investors higher yields to compensate for it).

Bonds and Securities

Inflation-linked bonds (TIPS) provide investors with protection against inflation by adjusting the principal and interest payments based on changes in the CPI.

If the CPI fails to reflect the true rate of inflation, the government can pay you less than you deserve.

Thus, the value of the principal and bond payments you're entitled to from the government will lose purchasing power over time (even though they say it won't).

GDP Boost

When the inflation rate is reported as lower than reality, real GDP growth is boosted higher artificially.

You can click here to see Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella claim that the real GDP growth is likely flatlined or negative, despite the positive reports currently being issued.

So let’s sum things up here:

There are a series of practices that are currently being used during the calculation of the CPI to reduce it.

• Substitution

• Hedonic Adjustments

• Weighting

• Owners Equivalent Rent

In addition to these questionable methods, the government is also highly incentivized to artificially suppress the reported inflation rate they publish.

Looks pretty shady to me.

But despite all of the concerns I just laid out, let's give the BLS the benefit of the doubt.

Let's assume the CPI is an accurate measurement of total inflation across a variety of goods and services.

This still isn't the inflation rate you should care about from a wealth-preservation perspective.

Here's why:

CPI ≠ Inflation

Here’s the truth: inflation and CPI are not the same thing.

This false equivalency is one of the worst things I was taught in during my graduate financial education.

CPI is considered to be the definitive inflation measurement in the eyes of the vast majority of government officials, economists, businesses, and investors.

But contrary to conventional thinking, this measure of inflation isn't that useful to us when we take the role of an investor.

Let's set the record straight:

Inflation is not the rate at which a basket of consumer goods and services is going up in price.

In reality, inflation the rate at which the total money supply in circulation is going up.

The price increases consumers experience are a symptom of inflation.

As we know, the prices of goods and services don't all go up at the same rate.

This is the exact problem the BLS attempts to solve when aggregating the price increases of over 80,000 items into the single metric we know as the CPI.

But the CPI leaves out the inflation rate in the category where price increases are the most extreme: assets.

Assets tend to increase at an inflation rate far higher than any good or service.

While the CPI averages around the Federal Reserve’s target of 2% a year, the rate that assets tend to go up is around 7% per year.

Why?

As billionaire Michael Saylor explains it, inflation is a vector.

Think of it this way:

The price of everything is constantly varying everywhere, all the time.

The inflation rate of an item is determined across a virtually infinite number of dimensions.

For example, the inflation rate of an item is dependent on it's:

• scarcity

• desirability

• location

• quality of ingredients

• period of measurement

• etc.

Because of differences in these characteristics across items, some items are highly sensitive to increases in the money supply, while other goods and services are much less so.

Among these characteristics, the scarcity and desirability of the item are most correlated to how it will react to increases in the overall money supply.

The reason assets tend to increase at a much faster rate than goods and services is because they tend to be highest in these two attributes.

For example, the price of a vintage car is likely to appreciate far more than a bag of rice I can buy at Costco.

Historically, assets with the highest scores in scarcity and desirability have increased at the rate of monetary inflation, which has been about 7%.

If you'd like further examples and a more in-depth breakdown on this topic, check out my previous newsletter below (I also show you how your dollar's have lost 95% of their purchasing power).

Now that you understand the price of assets are excluded from the CPI, and these assets also happen to experience the highest inflation rate, you're probably wondering if there is another metric you should be using:

So what's the alternative?

The YOU Index

As we've learned above, inflation causes consumers to switch from higher quality products to lower quality products when the prices overtake their ability to pay.

Over time, the BLS accounting for this shift through substitution and dynamic weighting results in a diminishing quality of the cost-of-living index over time.

In other words, as inflation grinds the quality of the goods and services in the index down over time, the CPI fails to measure the cost of maintaining a constant standard of living.

The index gradually becomes one that measures the increase in the cost to survive.

But what if your goal isn't just to "get by"?

At the end of the day, why are you even investing?

Why are you delaying your current consumption and investing the money instead?

You want the future to be better than the present.

You're aspiring toward a certain way of life.

You want to be wealthy!

You don't want to be a renter.

You want to be an owner.

You need to use an inflation hurdle rate that makes sense for YOU.

Sure, if you want to live in a cookie-cutter home you don't own watching Netflix and eating junk food, the CPI might be a decent estimation of inflation for you.

But if you want to be wealthy, you're going to have to get a little bit more creative.

Despite the obvious nature of this observation, mainstream finance still recommends using the CPI inflation rate to benchmark your investment portfolios.

So what should I benchmark my investment performance to instead?

You need to construct your own basket of the things you desire in your aspirational lifestyle.

Instead of constructing the basket of goods around commodities that are relatively easy to acquire, create your own basket composed of the things you want that are difficult to acquire.

Drop the cost of a bag of chips from your index, and replace it with the cost of a house in Newport Beach, CA.

Drop the cost of soap and detergents from your index, and replace it with the cost to buy a portion of the 500 most valuable companies in the US.

Drop the cost of a t-shirt from your index, and replace it with the cost to buy a sports team.

This basket of goods will yield the real inflation rate you need to beat to make progress toward your goals in life.

And I'll give you a hint:

It's going to be a lot higher than CPI.

Adjust Your Investing Philosophy

When you realize the inflation rate that matters to high-achievers isn't CPI, most traditional investment paradigms are shattered.

Traditionally, CPI is used as a benchmark to ensure that your investments are beating inflation.

The difference between nominal and real yields is inflation.

The S&P500, a basket of the 500 most valuable companies in the US, returns an average of 7% each year nominally.

An investor must now subtract inflation from this total to arrive at their real returns.

In conventional finance, if the CPI that year was 2%, your calculation would look like this:

Using CPI as inflation, you made 5% real return — your purchasing power increased by 5%.

Or so you would believe.

But what if I told you that almost the entirety of your investment gains are a result of monetary inflation?

In the above chart, MicroStrategy has used the M2 metric to approximate the increase in the money supply over time.

Over the past 100 years, the money supply has increased at an average rate of 7% per year — the true inflation rate.

When this figure is graphed next to the S&P500 index, you can see they move up in tandem with one another.

The fact they increase at the same rate is not a coincidence.

When you adopt the worldview that inflation is a vector, and that scarce & desirable assets appreciate at the same rate of money supply expansion, you realize the following:

This means your real returns for this investment are effectively ZERO.

Your purchasing power hasn’t increased.

The other assets you’re looking to buy are likely rising just as fast.

You might be beating CPI inflation — making getting by in life easier.

But you aren’t beating real inflation.

You’re simply keeping up with it's true rate.

Here are some of the implications of this:

Let’s say my goal is to buy a house in the best neighborhood around.

The houses there all cost $7,000,000+.

When real estate in that neighborhood is also going up at the monetary inflation rate of 7%, I need my savings/investments to be returning at least 7% to keep pace.

In this case, only returns beyond 7% are considered real return.

Using a CPI benchmark of 2% as your real return threshold only results in you deluding yourself into believing you're making financial progress toward your ideal life, when in reality, you aren't.

If you returned 4%, you don't have 2% real gains on your hands — this is ludicrous.

You've lost 3% and gotten further away from your new house in Newport Beach, CA.

Let's take a look at another MicroStrategy chart below for a comparison of how various assets perform on average versus monetary inflation:

As we can see, high quality real estate, emerging market equity, small-cap stocks, high-yield stocks, and the S&P500 index are the only categories that have been able to compete with monetary inflation over the past 20 years.

Other investment assets, like the 60/40 and 40/60 portfolios, developed market equities, bonds, the average home, cash, and commodities haven't kept up historically.

This means that if you held any of these assets over the last 20 years, while the nominal value of your investment is likely larger than it was before, you likely still lost purchasing power of over the last 20 years if your goal is purchase assets that the wealthy own.

My advice to you?

Don't get suckered into investments that offer a low return like bonds just because they're deemed "safe".

When inflation is redefined to be over 7%, holding anything yielding less than this is toxic to your wealth.

I'll be spending entire future newsletters on the topic of what assets to buy to protect yourself from inflation over the long term.

But that's it for this week's letter.

Until next time.

— Landon

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I vividly remember the final days of my high school baseball career.

I felt like I was on top of the world.

After a breakout season, I'd just pitched the game of my life to propel us to the CIF Southern Section championship game.

I was wearing the logo of the D1 college team I had just committed to with pride.

By advancing to the collegiate level, I knew I'd made it to the last step before I'd be living my life-long dream of playing baseball professionally.

Every ounce of momentum was on my side, and I was ready to push forward into the next chapter of my life.

But when I got to my college campus, I got stopped dead in my tracks.

I suffered years of mediocre progress.

I began to struggle with elbow discomfort during the earliest days on my new team.

An MRI revealed I had torn my Ulnar Collateral Ligament (a ligament in my elbow).

I was forced to undergo Tommy John surgery (a full-on UCL reconstruction) leaving me unable to pitch for what I expected to be 12-14 months.

I ended up spending over two full years in rehab — only to emerge as a shadow of my former self.

After three and a half years of being dragged down by injuries, I decided I needed to move on.

I hung up my cleats without ever pitching a single inning for the team.

I could hardly keep my voice together when it came time to tell my friends, family, and coaches, who had supported me the whole way, about my decision.

I had to come to terms with the fact that my dream of playing in the big leagues would never come true.

There was one question that nagged at me:

"How could I have let this happen?"

The question festered in my mind, damaging my dignity and sense of self-worth.

Despite this, I pushed myself toward creating a new future outside of baseball.

I applied myself to academics with a fervor I never had before — I earned 22 A grades in a row to conclude my education.

During my master's program, I learned about subjects like statistics, programming, and machine learning.

I found the technical intricacies fascinating, but the underlying conceptual frameworks far more valuable.

The principles I learned influenced the very core of my philosophy on how to approach life.

But the importance of one concept completely overshadowed the rest:

Neural networks.

After studying how machines learn and improve over time, I noticed that a similar approach might be beneficial to my own self-improvement.

Since adopting this way of thinking, I can confirm this to be 100% true — it's driven me to new heights in every facet of my life.

The principles of building neural networks taught me:

• how to learn from my mistakes

• persistence

• how to pace myself

• iteration

It's also exposed flaws in the way I had tried to progress toward my goals in the past.

As a result, I finally have the answer to the burning question that had plagued my mind for over two years:

I failed because I stuck to approaches that weren’t working.

At the end of the day, my inputs hadn’t resulted in the outputs I had expected.

And I didn't have the awareness to change it until it was too late.

The hard work I put in to get back on the field was always diluted by other destructive behaviors.

For every step I took in the right direction:

• physical therapy

• weight training

• conditioning

There were always counterproductive things to offset them:

• alcohol & junk food

• voluntary sleep deprivation

• video games, binge scrolling on social media, partying

I was told I needed to be patient for good things to come.

But the premature end to my baseball career came from the opposite: a failure to change course and invest more of my time into the things that drove results.

Now that my story is out of the way — here are the lessons that neural networks taught me about self-improvement:

The Human Brain -> Artificial Neural Networks

The first artificial neural networks (ANNs) were inspired by the biological neurons found in our brains:

• Sonar was first inspired by bat echolocation

• Velcro was first inspired by plant burrs that attach to animal fur

• Submarines were first inspired by the dimensions of fish

• Planes were first inspired by the flight of birds

Over the course of their development, these technologies gradually evolved from nature-based conceptual designs.

For example, submarines don’t have moving fins or tails — they have propellers.

In the same way, modern neural networks have deviated from their original biological inspiration, but they still loosely maintain similarities to the neurons in our brains.

Here's how the neurons in your brain compare to one of the simplest neural network architectures: the perceptron.

Biological Neurons

Here’s an illustration of a single neuron cell:

• Dendrites - receives electrochemical signals from other neurons (inputs)

• Synapses - the strength of each signal is modulated by synapses, which determine the importance of each input

• Cell Body - process signals and integrates them together to determine overall level of activation

• Thresholding Mechanism - if the level of activation exceeds a specific threshold, the neuron generates a spike in electrical activity

• Axon - relays the electrical spike signal to other neurons (output)

While the the above image might illustrate the anatomy of just one neuron, the total number of neurons in our brains is far from just one — it's been estimated to be around 86 billion!

The highly complex logic our brains are capable of is a result of these individual neurons’ ability to work together.

Here’s a drawing showing what numerous neurons look like strung together by their dendrites and axons:

Perceptron (Artificial Neuron)

You’ll notice that the perceptron is extremely similar in structure to the biological neurons they’re modeled after:

• Inputs - a perceptron receives multiple inputs (x1, x2, …, xn), which represent the data being fed into the model.

• Weights - each input to the perceptron is multiplied by a corresponding weight (w1, w2, …, wn), determining the importance of each input.

• Summation - the perceptron sums the weighted inputs to produce a single value (Σ(wi * xi)), representing the combined influence of all inputs.

• Activation Function - the perceptron applies an activation function to the summed input, determining whether or not it exceeds a certain threshold.

• Output - if the activation function’s condition is met, the perceptron produces an output, often binary (0 or 1), indicating the perceptron’s decision or classification.

Just like the neurons in our brains, perceptrons can be chained together to create models that are capable of much more complex logic.

Here’s a visual displaying what is commonly called a multilayer perceptron (MLP):

Alright, now that you understand the basic structure of neurons and perceptrons, let’s ask two critical questions:

How do artificial neural networks actually learn to become just as good, if not better than humans at certain tasks?

And how can you optimize your own self-improvement by studying the neural network models we’ve created?

How Neural Networks Learn

If you have data to train your neural network on, you can create a model with shocking levels of intelligence within the span of a couple minutes (or even seconds).

Here's a brief introduction into the amazingly complex things you can train neural networks to do:

• Email Spam Detection (Is an email spam or not?)

• Object Detection (Does an image contain a human, a cat, or a dog?)

• Social Media Sentiment Analysis (What do the masses think on a certain topic?)

• Activity Recognition (Are you walking, running, lifting weights, or sitting right now?)

But how can this process be so efficient?

How is it possible that the model can learn such complex concepts so quickly?

An understanding of this process serves as the philosophy that will enable you to reach the pinnacle of any realm of human endeavor.

The entire process is systematized in an optimization algorithm — gradient descent.

The goal of gradient descent is to minimize a specific value.

In this case, we want to minimize the error (cost on the chart above) that our neural network suffers when making its predictions.

The error is the difference between the network’s predictions and the real value.

For example, assume you’ve trained a model to predict the price of house based on data you’ve collected.

If for a given set of inputs, your model predicts a price of $500,000 when the real price of the house is $1.4 million, you should probably go back to the drawing board.

Given enough quality data, a neural network can learn just about anything.

Better yet, leveraging the blazing speed of computers, artificial neural networks can perform this task at a breakneck pace.

So how is it done?

1. Recall that each input in our perceptron has a weight (importance) associated with it. First, we initialize a new neural network with random weights, feed it our data as inputs, and allow it produce an output.

2. Next, we calculate the overall amount of error by comparing the network’s output to the actual value it should have predicted.

3. Now, we need to figure out how much each weight contributed to the overall error.

   To do this, we use a technique called backpropogation to compute the gradient for each weight.

4. Once we obtain each gradient, we can determine which direction we should adjust each weight to lower the error — we call this gradient descent.

5. We now adjust our weights by small or smaller amounts in the opposite direction of the gradient depending on how fast we would like our model to learn (learning rate).

6. Lastly, we feed our data as inputs yet again, and repeat the process above until the weights are set at values that accurately convert our inputs into the desired outputs. This is how neural networks “learn“ through training.

I know — it’s a lot.

I’ll spare you from the calculus involved, but if you’re curious to learn more, I won’t stop you.

But a surface level understanding of this process is all you need.

Now, I’m going to do two things:

• Flip what you’ve learned on it’s head — we’re going to talk about gradient ASCENT (not descent)

• Equip you with this framework to supercharge your self-improvement

The combination of the two points above = Personal Gradient Ascent.

Personal Gradient Ascent

First, let’s invert gradient descent.

Instead of optimizing for the lowest value we possibly can, we’re now optimizing for the highest value possible.

When applied to your personal life, the question is this:

How can you create a model that outputs the pinnacle version of you?

First, you need goals — this usually isn’t the hard part since everyone has them.

Next, you need to figure out what the most important factors are that will move you toward your goals.

Here’s how you can copy the neural network framework to do this:

• Start tracking data on various metrics over time (create a dataset)

• Calculate the degree each input contributed to your success (find what works for you)

• Adjust each weight accordingly (double-down on what’s working, cut out the things that aren’t)

Take my fitness journey for example:

Thanks to my Whoop fitness tracker, I’m able to track dozens of metrics related to my health over time.

Tracking this data led me straight to the activity that has damaged my health the most:

I’ve suffered an average of 24% decline in my next-day recovery after my nights out drinking.

On top of that, I’m 11% worse than the average person’s next-day recovery.

Here’s a screenshot so you know I’m not just making it up:

Thanks to the data, I can clearly see that drinking alcohol has a strong negative correlation to my health.

So what should I do in response?

Well, what would a neural network do?

It would increase weight on alcohol consumption (the network will place more importance on this variable.)

On the mornings following alcohol consumption, the model would predict lower recovery scores.

For a person who is looking to optimize their overall health, the evidence is clear:

Alcohol consumption isn’t a good thing.

Through research and experimentation, I’ve also come across metrics that have a positive correlation to my health.

Among the most important is VO₂ max, and personally, I’ve been putting in the work to optimize it.

If you’d like to learn more, you can read my newsletter below:

Another goal you might want to optimize for is financial security.

In the present, you might be focused on intense budgeting, spending huge amounts of time scouring the internet for coupons to accompany your purchases.

To be clear, I’m not saying this is an outright bad thing.

The point here is that your model is likely to teach you that spending your time increasing your income is much more important to achieving financial security.

At the end of the day, it’s all about figuring out what to prioritize.

Once you’ve got an initial idea of what you should be prioritizing, you can:

• Start tracking even more data to further refine your model through iteration (just like a neural network would)

• Create multiple models that will help you better implement behaviors that optimize your main model

Now you might be asking for clarification on my second bullet point.

Here’s what I mean:

You can create multiple models that all work together.

You’re simply changing what you’re optimizing for in each one.

For example, now that I know VO₂ max is important to optimizing my overall health, I can create an entirely separate model with the goal of improving my VO₂ max.

For my new model, I would identify the most important factors that influence VO₂ max.

Some of the inputs I analyze as a part of this model might be:

• Resting Heart Rate

• Time Spent in Exercise Zone 5

• Maximal Heart Rate

• Body Fat Percentage

Now let’s go a level deeper:

Let’s say I find out the amount of time spent training in Zone 5 has a high positive correlation to my VO2 max.

I can create another model that enables me to understand the most important factors when it comes to maximizing my time spent in Zone 5.

The inputs that would be a part of this model could be:

• Anaerobic Threshold (Lactate Threshold)

• Lactate Clearance Rate

• Glycogen Stores

• Hydration Status

You can get as granular as you want with this.

This approach allows you to not only iterate on your master model targeted at achieving your overall goal, but also iterate toward improving the individual actions that increase or decrease those metrics.

When you continue this process over a long enough period of time, you’re virtually guaranteed to reach your goals — even when you’re starting from scratch.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert in a field in his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success.

"Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness."

Gladwell nails it here.

By applying the principles of building neural network’s to your pursuits, you open the doors to limitless improvement (as fast as it can be done).

You’ve been given the only framework you need to reach your goals.

All thats left to do is execute.

Until next time.

— Landon

And for the three and a half years I played, I hated every minute of it.

I would dread Tuesdays and Thursdays when they arrived:

• 110 yard sprints (we ran 16 sprints with 16 seconds of rest between each one)

• Uphill lunges (I swear the hill had a 60-degree incline)

• Shuttle runs on the warning track (while we inhaled the dust others kicked up)

Simply put: it wasn't my cup of tea.

Once my playing career came to an end, I took advantage of my newfound freedom.

I completely abandoned the cardio I hated doing.

It took two years before I realized I had made a mistake.

I picked up hypertrophy & strength training for the vanity.

But overlooked the importance of cardio for longevity.

This realization has caused my view on health & fitness to completely 180.

I've got several running theories for how and why my perspective shifted:

• Is it a result of maturity? Can I understand things now that I couldn't internalize at the ages 18-22?

• Has completing a major stage in my life (graduate school) made me more aware of the passing time, and by extension, my own mortality?

• Was it born out of my quest to seek a better day-to-day quality of life?

• Have my in-depth studies of Bitcoin shown me the benefits of a longer time preference? (This topic could fill an entire newsletter by itself)

Whatever the cause, theres one thing that's certain — I'm a data-driven person.

I began scouring the internet for information that could help me answer the question:

What are the best metrics I can use to track and optimize my long-term health?

Through my research, I landed on the gold standard of health metrics: VO₂ max.

What is it?

VO₂ max is the maximum rate your body can utilize oxygen during exercise.

It's measured as the milliliters of oxygen used in one minute (per kg of body weight).

Essentially, it measures how quickly you can:

- intake oxygen into your lungs

- channel it into your blood

- distribute it to your muscles

- utilize the oxygen in metabolic processes to create ATP (energy)

So what is the VO₂ max metric actually indicative of?

It measures how efficiently your body can convert oxygen into energy — specifically, the body's limit for producing aerobic energy.

It's important to recognize that despite reaching the point of peak oxygen utilization, you'll still be able to continue increasing intensity.

How?

You'll begin to tap into other forms of eneergy production, such as starting to use other forms of energy through your anaerobic system.

As a result, VO₂ max isn't able to tell you what your maxium exertion is, but it can give you an understanding of your aerobic engine.

Why is it important?

While genetics account for about 20-40% of the variability in VO₂ max amongst the population, the evidence is overwhelmingly clear:

You can increase your VO₂ max through targeted training.

But why would increasing your bodies ability to utilize oxygen be beneficial to you?

As illustrated above, VO₂ max measures the combined efficiency of multiple bodily systems:

• Respiratory System - Lungs

• Cardiovascular System - Heart & Veins

• Muscular System - Muscles

As a result, VO₂ max is often used as a measure of an individuals cardiorespiratory fitness.

Here's when we know:

The American Heart Association has established that low cardiorespiratory fitness (and thus low VO₂ max) is associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and all-cause mortality.

Cardiorespiratory fitness can also be seen as a strong predictor of mortality, alongside cigarette smoking, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes.

The takeaway?

We want our VO₂ max to be as high as possible.

But there's a problem:

As you might expect, our cardiorespiratory fitness and VO₂ max fall naturally as we age.

According to the literature, the average person's VO₂ max will drop by:

• 1% per year after you turn twenty (10% per decade)

• 1.5% per year after you turn fifty (15% per decade)

These rates of decline might not seem like a lot.

But compounded over time, this decline leads to drastic differences in quality of life:

The above chart illustrates the decline in VO₂ max for individuals with low, average, and elite levels.

The dotted lines indicate the required VO₂ max score to complete each respective activity.

As we can see from the chart:

• a person with an average VO₂ max will lose the ability to walk up stairs around the age of 50 years old (using solely aerobic energy)

• a person with an elite VO₂ max won't lose this ability until they are around 75 years old

To combat the effects of aging, you can train to improve your VO₂ max.

By achieving higher levels through training, you can better prepare yourself for the decline you'll inevitably be faced with.

A high VO₂ max won’t just increase the quality of life you experience, it’ll increase the length of your life too.

The above chart divides VO₂ max scores into performance buckets by age and sex.

Going from zero exercise to an average VO₂ max results in a 50% reduction in premature death for the average person.

It doesn't stop there.

On average, if you're able to train your way into the high or elite VO₂ max category, you'll reduce your risk of premature death by 4-5 times.

How To Improve

By now, you're probably convinced that training to optimize your VO₂ max is worthwhile.

So what's the best way to train?

According to Dr. Peter Attia, you want:

• 80% of your training volume in zone 2

• 20% of your training volume in zone 5

You might ask why the volume is divided so unevenly.

Here's the reasoning:

You'll spend the majority of your training time in your zone 2 to build a large aerobic foundation (your VO₂ max is reflective of your aerobic efficiency after all).

This zone is less physically demanding, allowing you to perform large amounts of volume before recovery and fatigue become issues.

While in zone 5, you'll push the limits of your aerobic system AND stress your anaerobic (glycolytic) energy production system.

Unlike zone 2 workouts, zone 5 provides an extremely intense and acute stimulus on your body.

Because of this, you can only stay in this zone for so long until overtraining becomes an issue.

Dr. Peter Attia uses the analogy of maximizing the area of a triangle.

To maximize the area (VO₂ max):

• we need a wide base (zone 2)

• we need a high peak (zone 5)

But what does the actual training within each of these two zones look like?

Let's start with zone 2:

When you train in this zone, you should be aiming to sit at an RPE (rate of perceived exertion) that allows you to maintain a conversation with another person.

While you should be able to speak, it should be mildly difficult to (you shouldn't want to).

Dr. Peter Attia refers to it as "the all-day pace" and recommends that people spend around 4 hours a week, split into 3 total sessions in this zone.

You can perform this training in any of the following ways:

• Brisk Walking

• Slow Jogging/Running

• Cycling

• Swimming

• Rowing

• Elliptical Trainer

• Hiking

As long as you're able to keep a steady pace that allows you to maintain the same level of intensity for an extended period of time, you're good to go.

There is no real upper boundary to the amount of zone 2 training that you should do.

The upper limit is dependent on the following:

• how much free time you have during your week to allot to it

• whether your body can handle the workload

Now that you've got an idea of zone 2 training, what should your zone 5 training look like?

This post by Dan Go nails it.

By performing an activity of such high intensity that you can only maintain that pace for about 4 minutes, you'll need roughly an equivalent recovery time.

Dan is cites research studies that confirm performing this style of zone 5 workout once a week is enough to see continued improvement.

This matches Dr. Peter Attia's recommendation of a single session a week performed for about 30 minutes.

While sprinting is a great option when it comes to training in zone 5, it's far from the only option.

Here's a bunch more to consider:

• Cycling

• Stair Climbing

• Swimming Sprints

• Hill Repeats

As long as you adhere to the guidelines above, you'll be training optimally for improving VO₂ max.

How To Track It

Lastly, if you're going to do the work to improve your VO₂ max, you're going to want a way to track your progress.

In a clinical setting, you’d use a specialized face mask to measure the volume of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your breath at peak aerobic capacity to determine your VO₂ max.

But there's an issue:

Most of us don't have ready access to equipment of this kind.

So what are our other options?

Fitness Trackers

Modern fitness trackers can use advanced algorithms based on heart rate data, activity level, and sometimes other physiological markers to estimate your VO₂ max.

Devices like Fitbit, Apple Watch, and Garmin provide convenience and continuous monitoring, making them a great tool for tracking trends and relative changes over time.

However, these devices have some limitations:

• Incompatibility Across Models - comparison across different fitness trackers may be difficult because of variance in their algorithms (which can lead to inconsistencies in VO₂ max estimates)

• Heart Rate Accuracy - the accuracy of the heart rate monitor can significantly impact the VO₂ max estimate (factors like temperature, altitude, and hydration can affect heart rate and, consequently, VO₂ max estimates)

Additionally, what if your fitness tracker doesn't have this metric built into their service at all?

Personally, I'm a Whoop user and don't have access to this data.

On top of this, while I think a fitness tracker is a worthy investment, the necessity for one still represents a barrier to entry for people who don't own one.

Beep Test

The beep test, also recognized as a shuttle run test, is a field test that can be used to estimate an individual’s VO₂ max.

It involves running back and forth over a 20-meter distance at increasing speeds until exhaustion, with pace set by audio beeps.

While it still doesn’t beat measuring the actual oxygen and carbon dioxide in your breath, plugging your beep test score into to a formula allows you to approximate your VO₂ max value ― they have a 0.92 correlation.

Here's how you can conduct the test:

• Place two markers down 65 feet (20m) apart.

• You’ll be guided by audio beep signals, so find a way to have the audio running with you conduct the test (I use this Youtube video).

• When you hear the first beep, begin sprinting over to the opposite marker.

• If you reach the marker before the beep, rest until the next beep sounds, then sprint back to the other marker (all beeps on each level have the same time between them).

• As you continue to progress, the audio recording will inform you that you've advanced to a new level (all the sprints at the new level will have a shorter time between them).

• If you fail to reach the marker before the beep, continue sprinting until you reach the marker, then immediately turn and try to reach the opposite marker before the next beep sounds.

• If you fail to reach the required marker before the beep for a second time, you’re eliminated from the test.

• Record the level you were on and last completed shuttle number as your result.

Once you've completed the test, you can plug your level and last recorded shuttle number into the following formula to see what your corresponding VO₂ max is:

Utilizing a spreadsheet application like Excel or Google Sheets makes it easy to repeat this process over time.

Here's a table I made in my personal spreadsheet that shows the corresponding VO₂ max scores you achieve by mazing out each level of the beep test:

There are a number of advantages the beep test holds over fitness trackers:

• Direct Measure of Endurance - the beep test measures endurance and aerobic capacity directly through physical performance (unlike algorithm fitness trackers).

• Widely Validated - it is a well-researched and validated method for estimating VO₂ max.

• Practical and Accessible - it requires minimal equipment and can be performed in various settings.

However, these advantages should be weighed by the potential downsides of this metric as well:

• Maximal Effort Required - it requires you to exert max effort while fitness tracker do not (in reality you should be fine with this as you’re already doing so in your zone 5 training).

• Motivation and Pacing - your performance can be influenced by your motivation and ability to pace yourself.

• External Factors - factors like surface type, footwear, and weather conditions can affect your performance.

Overall, fitness trackers are useful for monitoring trends and relative changes in VO₂ max over time, but for a more accurate and validated assessment, the beep test or a lab-based VO₂ max test is preferable.

Ultimately, it's up to you to determine the standard of the tests you'd like to uphold.

Wrap Up

To ensure your training optimizes your VO₂ max and extends your longevity into your old age:

1. Do at least 3 zone 3 training sessions per week for around 4 hours total.

2. Do at least one zone 5 training session per week for over 30 minutes total.

Follow the instructions above when conducting these training sessions.

Track your progress using lab-testing, fitness tracker estimations, or beep test results.

Best of luck to you.

Until next time.

— Landon

The system is rigged.

Look around you.

The prices for housing, healthcare, quality food, and formal education are skyrocketing.

Every passing day, the building blocks needed to lead a good life are moving further and further from your reach.

No matter how much you save, it seems like you just can't get ahead.

A shocking 63% of WORKING Americans have already been pushed to the brink of financial ruin — they can't even afford a $500 emergency expense.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news.

But things are only going to get worse for the average person.

How do I know this?

After hundreds, perhaps even thousands of hours of studying, I know that this problem is systemic.

Once you have this understanding, it should be no surprise that despite the poor and middle class suffering, the richest among us have never been doing better.

Lamborghini just sold 10,000 cars for the first time in it's history.

So how can the wealthy create such a large divide between themselves and the average person?

Because THEY know how the system works.

A lack of financial education is the greatest cost to your livelihood you will ever endure.

The average person will spend a third of their entire life focused on bringing home the next paycheck.

40 hours a week x 52 weeks x 40 years = 90,000 hours.

But they won't devote a few hours to understand how to retain the value they have already earned.

They'll never understand that their savings, productivity, and time are being stolen from them.

Wake up.

Through education, you can understand the rules of the game.

And you'll be able to play like the wealthy play.

Let me show you how.

What Is Inflation?

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've likely at least heard of inflation.

Everyone experiences it's effects when purchasing just about anything.

It's the subject of conversation everywhere from economic forums, to cable news, to major newspapers, and even on X (formerly known as Twitter).

Financial markets move violently based what the inflation rate is reported to be.

And your education on the subject determines if you benefit or suffer from it.

But what actually is it?

To explain inflation, I offer you my personal experience with it:

My family first started the Dal Rae Restaurant 73 years ago.

Since it's establishment in 1951, it's distinguished itself as one of the best steakhouses in the Los Angeles area.

We’ve prided ourselves with preserving the restaurant's original atmosphere to a tee.

Everything from the dimly lit leather booths to the table side service remains frozen in time.

Our longest-tenured customers bring their grandchildren in to dine on the same food they did as kids.

But there is one thing that was unable to stand the test of time: the menu prices.

When the Dal Rae first opened, we served our 16oz New York steak for $3.95.

Today, we are forced to charge $68 to earn the same margin.

See for yourself.

Over the course of 73 years, our steaks have gotten 17x more expensive.

But what's driving this?

Is cattle more scarce than it was back then?

Nope, we have roughly twice the amount of cattle to source from in the present day as we did in 1951.

Are we price gouging and taking advantage of our customers, without whom we would lose our family livelihood?

Nope, we maintain the same profit margin on our steaks since we first opened.

The culprit is inflation.

Inflation is an increase in the total money supply.

Under the current fiat monetary system, governments have the ability to expand the money supply at will by "printing" new dollars.

Here's a simplistic example:

Assume all of the money in the world adds up to $100 million (it doesn’t, but stay with me here).

If I bring another $10 million into circulation out of thin air and give it to my friends, we would move the total supply from $100 million -> $110 million.

Thus, the inflation rate would be equal to the 10% increase in the money supply.

This manipulation of the money supply has cascading effects throughout the entire economy.

The price increases you see in goods, services, and assets are a symptom of inflation.

The reason for this comes down to the basic principles of supply and demand.

In other words, if you:

• Hold the amount of goods, services, and assets in the economy constant

• Increase the supply of currency in the economy

More money (higher demand) will be chasing the same amount of stuff (stagnant supply).

Price increases will ensue as market participants bid up prices in competition with each other to secure limited resources for themselves.

In effect, the end result is the currency has become less valuable — it's been debased.

However, the price increases that result from inflation don't manifest themselves equally in all goods and services.

As billionaire Michael Saylor puts it, inflation is a vector.

What does this mean?

Think of it this way:

The price of everything is constantly varying everywhere all the time.

When we observe pricing trends in the market, it's obvious to us that the cost of a loaf of bread isn't going up as fast as real estate prices in Newport Beach, California.

But why?

The main drivers are scarcity & desirability.

When the prices of goods rise due to increased demand, manufacturers of those goods are incentivized to further increase the supply of the good to satisfy the consumer.

The more easily the supply of a good can be increased, the less the good will go up in price, even in the face of massive inflation.

This is why most highly industrialized foods and things like internet streaming services tend to show little price appreciation overall.

However, assets that are scarce and hard to create more of tend to be the most respondent to inflation.

For example, no matter how hard you try, you'll never be able to recreate another Mona Lisa — it's a one-of-one work of art.

As a result, the price of the original will keep pace with the true inflation rate, because demand for ownership of this historical artifact cannot be satisfied by increasing the supply of the asset.

An understanding of this aspect of inflation is critical to understanding the philosophy the rich use to preserve their wealth across generations.

Now if you've had any prior education in finance, you might take issue with something I've implied above:

The traditional investment community believes that the returns from these assets tends to outperform inflation by a wide margin.

For example, assume the S&P 500 stock index has an average year, returning 7% on your investment.

If the inflation rate reported by the government is 2%, traditional investment advisors would think that you've made 5% real returns.

Sadly, this is completely untrue — yet it is continuously taught at the highest levels of education.

The reason?

The government-issued inflation number provably understates inflation.

This means that, contrary to popular belief, your real returns are 0%.

Or much, much smaller than you think.

I'll have a separate newsletter coming out soon that explains why this is the case.

Saving Is For Losers

Here's the truth:

The government has destroyed the ability for people to save in dollars over the long term.

Saving for your retirement in a bank account simply isn't a viable strategy anymore.

The advice your grandmother gave to you no longer works.

The game has changed.

Inflation is designed to steal your purchasing power.

Let's assume my grandfather decided save his profits from the restaurant in a bank account earning him 0% interest on his money.

Colloquially, you might call it stuffing it under the mattress.

Over the course of the last 73 years, for every dollar he made off of the New York steak he sold in the restaurant's early days, he would have suffered a 95% decline in his purchasing power.

How is this possible?

Due to inflation, prices for goods, services and assets rose all around him.

But the number of dollars he has in the bank isn’t growing — he’s getting poorer.

Essentially, the government stole 95% of the value he provided to society and redistributed it to the beneficiaries of the newly printed money.

The most sickening aspect of it: it's almost like he never even contributed in the first place.

But he wasn’t the only person to lose value:

• every employee he ever gave a livelihood to

• every supplier he ever paid for goods

• every customer who he could have ever served

They would have all had their wealth stolen in the same fashion.

Now let’s work with real numbers:

Let’s assume you had $10,000 saved in a bank earning 0% interest for 20 years.

We’ll also assume that the inflation rate over that period of time is 2% every year (the government’s yearly inflation target).

At this rate of currency debasement, at the end of the 20 years, your $10,000 savings account would only be worth what approximately $6,729.71 is worth today.

Your purchasing power would decline by an astonishing 32.7% over the span of 20 years.

But sadly, this steep loss in purchasing power doesn’t even come close to portraying the reality of the world.

Economists that don’t subscribe to the government’s inflation measure, like Saifedean Ammous, have concluded that the real inflation rate for scarce and highly desirable assets averages at 7% per year.

This means that over 20 years, your $10,000 would only be worth what $2,584.19 is worth today.

A staggering 74.1% decrease in purchasing power.

In just 10 years, your purchasing power would be cut in half.

Don't believe me?

In January of 2004, the S&P 500 stock index was 1,131.

At time on writing, the index is 5,350.

If you chose to wait until today to buy this basket of stocks, you can now buy 78% less than you could have 20 years ago.

Keep in mind: there may be cases where the prices of certain goods actually falls falling DESPITE inflation due to technological innovation or other factors.

Even still, the effects of inflation over the last 70 years of innovation have been so pernicious that even some of the highest earners in our society are unable to keep up.

Just 7% of US households make $250k per year.

Yet, the cost of living is so high that a third of these households are living paycheck to paycheck!

In other words, they aren't saving ANY money for their future retirement.

Here's what's even more shocking: they probably wouldn't even be able to retire through saving if they tried.

Over 7 in 10 investors believe that the required savings for Gen Z and Millennials to retire comfortably is now in the ballpark of $3 million to $5 million due to inflation.

Let's assume you're earning $250k per year — setting aside that this alone is a dream for most.

After you pay your 50% in taxes, your true take-home is about $125k a year.

As far as their budgeting of that money goes, we'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

We'll assume the person is at least semi-responsible with their money and following the popular 50/30/20 rule:

• 50% of your income on obligations — rent, car payment, groceries, etc. ($62.5k)

• 30% of your income on discretionary spending — what you want, but don't need ($37.5k)

• 20% of your income on savings — emergency fund, debt repayment ($25k)

At the end of the day, this budgeting strategy would leave you with $25k a year to save.

But at this rate of savings, it would take you 120 years to hit your $3 million dollar retirement target.

Screw it.

Let's assume you live as frugally as humanly possible, reduce your discretionary spending to ZERO, and save $62.5k per year (half your after-tax income):

It would still take you roughly 48 years of nonstop saving to achieve retirement.

And just to be clear, the average personal savings rate is nowhere near 50%.

Or even 20%.

At time of writing, the average personal savings rate is just 3.2%.

But yes, there is a caveat to this.

Inflation will also cause your wages to increase over time.

But there's a problem.

Historically, wage increases haven't kept up with inflation.

Unfortunately, most labor isn't as scarce as the assets you seek to buy with the fruits of your labor.

As a result, your wage increases will likely never keep up with the increase in the price of the assets you are seeking to buy.

We can see how the disparity between wages and assets has only increased over time in the following charts:

The first chart shown above presents the average sales price of a house in the US alongside the average personal income, while the second chart converts this data into ratios depicting how long it took to save up for the average house on an average salary by decade.

Regardless of the format, the data paints the same sullen reality.

Since about 1971 (a significant date that deserves an entire post to discuss on it's own), the cost of the average house in comparison to the average salary has gone up exponentially.

Unfortunately, we see the same disparity when analyzing stock prices from the lens of wages as well, with the average number of working hours to afford a share of the S&P 500 stock index skyrocketing in recent history.

As a final example, take the government's most recent expansion of the money supply in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The government flooded the economy with stimulus checks and other supportive measures that served to debase the currency by about 30% over the span of 18 months.

Real estate in highly coveted areas increased in price by 30%.

The stock market ripped higher by 30%.

Did you get a 30% raise over this period of time to compensate you?

You didn't?

Tough luck.

All of this leaves us with a single question:

If I can't save my way to financial freedom, what other options do I have?

The Risk Takers Guide To Beating Inflation

In an economy where the government has destroyed the ability of savers to retain their wealth, individuals have turned to the only other viable option: investment.

As author and economist Saifedean Ammous explains in his book The Fiat Standard, saving and investment are distinct and should ideally serve different economic functions.

According to Ammous, saving refers to stockpiling "cash balances to hedge against future uncertainty" — a strategy we already know no longer works in the modern economy.

The fundamental difference that investment brings to the table is risk.

When you invest, you do so to capitalize on the opportunity to yield a return on your money.

While some investments are more risky than others, there is no such thing as a risk-free investment.

This means that in order to preserve your purchasing power, you need to risk losing the money you have already earned.

In a healthy economy, people shouldn't need to choose between saving and investment.

But our government's constant debasement of the currency has forced all of our hands.

We've all been forced to become gamblers at the casino.

There are three primary ways to make investments that will secure and even increase your purchasing power — none are fully safe, but they're the only chance you've got:

• Invest in yourself (increase your earning potential)

• Invest into growth assets (multiply your value)

• Invest into scarce, desirable assets (retain your purchasing power)

The first two sections will be discussing how to use investments to beat inflation, while the last section shows you how match it.

Let’s dive in.

Self Investment

Alex Hormozi nails it here.

The best way to beat inflation (not just keep up with it) is to CREATE value in excess of the value it steals from you.

The main way to do this is by investing in yourself.

Invest your time and money into the acquisition of new skills and experiences that increase your earning potential.

As your skillset continues to compound over time, you'll be able to move further and further up the wealth bracket.

Here's how this could look for someone who is just starting their journey:

• Learn the skills necessary to land a job in a high paying field

• Increase your skill-stack further to either secure promotions or navigate into an even more highly compensated area of expertise

• Once you're skilled enough to competitively bring a product or service to market, start a business

Obviously, it's more complex than I've laid it out here.

Your progression up this very basic ladder doesn't have to linear, and it will look different for every person.

But there is one thing that is constant at every stage in this progression: risk.

With every additional step up, the amount of risk you assume grows.

But this added risk should be weighed in relation to the benefits of increased compensation should you succeed.

In other words, your continued advancement up the ladder depends entirely on your preferences in life.

You can stop whenever you feel like the reward isn't worth the risk.

There will be those who find success in the earlier steps and become comfortable with their way of life.

But there will also be others who won't stop until their quality of life matches the highest standards available.

The level of wealth you choose to generate from your contributions to society is up to you and you alone.

However, this approach can only take you so far.

The reality is no matter what level of success you're able to achieve through self investment, you'll eventually hit a wall and be stuck with the same $900 trillion dollar problem as everyone else.

A problem that spans across every economic actor on every scale: the individual, the small business, the large corporation, and even governments themselves.

How can you protect the value you've created from being inflated away?

You have two options:

1. Aggressive Investments: Invest in higher-risk assets that have huge potential for growth

2. Conservative Investments: Invest in lower-risk assets that have less potential for growth

Your portfolio may include both of these types of assets, curated to your risk tolerance.

Here's how you can think about them:

Aggressive Investments

If your goal is for your investment returns to beat the inflation rate, your portfolio should be more skewed toward assets that have high-risk associated with their performance, but have higher potential for returns.

These types of assets include:

• Venture Capital & Startup Investments

• Small-Cap & Emerging Market Stocks

• High-Yield Bonds

• Cryptocurrencies

If you choose to invest in these high-growth, high-risk assets as a vehicle to grow you wealth, here's the investing philosophy I'd recommend to you:

When it comes to generating excess returns, some of the best investors in the world all share the same belief — wealth is created with concentrated bets.

Humorously, Stanley Druckenmiller once said the best way to beat the market (and inflation) isn't being a bull or a bear: it's being a pig.

Warren Buffet has said diversification (the opposite of concentrated bets) "makes very little sense for anyone that knows what they’re doing...it is a protection against ignorance."

Lastly, Michael Saylor described diversification in a negative light as well, emphasizing that you're essentially "selling the winners to buy the losers."

The lesson here?

Learn as much as you can about the investment landscape as you can.

Strive to reach the point where you know more about a particular investment's prospects than almost anyone else.

Invest in the opportunities you've formed the highest conviction in.

If you're right, you'll massively outperform inflation and create much more wealth than you started with.

But what if you don't possess the required risk-tolerance for this strategy?

What if you're content with your returns simply matching the inflation rate?

Conservative Investments

Once you have the ability to generate substantial value, you'll find that, in a sense, you've unlocked the ability to preserve your wealth as well.

Many of the assets that actually match the true rate of monetary inflation are inaccessible to the average person.

Example: your average house in Kansas isn't as scarce or desirable as a house in the Hamptons, so the rate of its appreciation will not keep up with the latter.

Now that you've acquired an abundance of financial resources, you've unlocked an entirely new tier of assets you can invest in to shield your wealth from inflation, including:

• Coveted Real Estate (Commercial real estate, beachfront property)

• Business Equity (Ownership in private & public companies)

• Luxury Goods & Collectibles (High-end vehicles, jewelry, art, rare baseball cards)

Normally, in a world without rampant inflation, the value of these assets would be determined solely by supply and demand, market conditions, and their utility to the holder.

But the relentless expansion of the money supply has added a MASSIVE value premium to these assets because of their unique ability to keep pace with the inflation rate due to their scarcity and desirability.

This has given rise to these assets being used as a Frankenstein investment vehicle where the assets preserve traits from both a savings account and an investment at the same time.

These assets can retain your purchasing power into the future like a savings account ideally should, albeit imperfectly, as they also suffer from the inherent risk that comes with any form of investment.

As the value of the currency plummets, we've seen countless wealthy investors subscribe to this investing philosophy, resulting in nothing short of a stampede into hard assets within the categories listed above.

As a result, the ownership of hard assets is HIGHLY skewed toward the rich.

The wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of all stocks.

Presidential candidate RFK Jr. warns that by 2030, major corporations could own 60% of all homes.

In the following chart, you can see exactly how this investment thesis has played out:

Using the M2 metric as our proxy for the total amount of money circulating in the economy, we can see that the wealth of the 0.1% has perfectly tracked the expansion of the money supply.

Needless to say, the wealth of the bottom 50% of the population hasn't kept pace at all.

This stark contrast in outcomes is rooted in a simple reality:

The rich own the scarce and desirable assets that the poor do not.

But all hope isn’t lost.

"Two hundred years ago, before the advent of capitalism, a man's social status was fixed from the beginning to the end of his life; he inherited it from his ancestors, and it never changed." — Ludwig von Mises

Despite the situation of the poor and middle class becoming more bleak by the day, the system of capitalism provides a way out.

While class mobility in the United States has been declining in recent years because of inflation, there is still an abundance of opportunity to build the life you want to lead.

I’ll leave you with this advice:

• Take the risks you need to take to build the life you want

• Store the wealth you acquire in assets that will hold their value across time

• Pass those assets down to your children, and educate them to repeat the process

Until next time.

— Landon

I’ll tell you the kind of math I use every day, every hour of the day. If you don’t have this, you’re never going to be successful in business, politics or life.

— Michael Saylor

Everyone wants to lead a better life.

One full of health and well-being, financial stability, and meaningful relationships.

Yet the vast majority of people fail to live up to their aspirations.

The average person fails to solve their own problems, reliving them in perpetuity.

They fester in their discontent, neglecting the mental framework needed to break free.

Most people think of data and statistics as just a career path — not a way of thinking.

The data landscape is rife with educators focused solely on technical instruction and job interview advice.

They fail to communicate the value of a statistician’s frame of mind.

Data is a philosophy.

Data literacy provides a mental model applicable to EVERY facet of life.

I know from experience this is true.

I’ve always understood the usefulness of data from a high-level.

But it wasn’t until I studied the subject in graduate school that my worldview changed.

I realized the principles inside the textbooks could lead me to the life that I wanted.

I've since experienced a personal renaissance throughout my:

• Health and fitness

• Financial literacy & business acumen

• Personal relationships

• Mental health

• Societal views

I'm unrecognizable from my high school and college self.

But you don't need an advanced degree to yield these results.

The data-driven philosophy of Track > Synthesize > Iterate allows anyone to do the same.

Principle #1: Track

Data Modeling

Imagine if the map at your favorite amusement park lacked the “You Are Here” label.

Unless you're a seasoned pro, you’d have trouble figuring out your current location amongst the huge number of attractions.

You would have to collect data in the form of surrounding ride names, food stands, and gift shops to discern this.

Data is the way you model the world around you.

It is a vehicle for becoming objectively aware of your present state.

You want this model to reflect the indisputable realities of the world.

Once you have an unbiased view of where you stand, you can begin to set goals.

You can set a goal for any conceivable metric in your life.

Your intention is to create awareness of the gap between your present state and your goals — where are you now compared to where you want to be?

You want to leverage your data to diminish this gap over time.

But you need your data to be solid as bedrock.

Data is a double-edged sword.

While it can accurately model reality, it can also be responsible for its distortion.

Flaws can mislead you, resulting in wasted time, money, and effort.

Defective data is worse than none at all.

So how can you ensure the data you collect is fit for use?

Create a personal database.

A well-managed database emphasizes:

• Relevance - ensures data is relevant to your desired outcome

• Retention - solves recency & storage capacity constraints

• Organization - creates data integrity through structured & consistent storage practices

Here's an in-depth explanation of each of these standards and how you can align them with your own database usage:

1) Relevance

To garner insights from our data over time, the data you collect must be relevant.

Data is relevant when it has clear correlation to your desired outcome.

Tracking irrelevant data only serves to create clutter, wasting valuable time and storage space.

So how do you determine if the metrics you've collected are relevant to your desired outcome?

When you first start collecting data, the answer is simple.

You'll have to make an educated guess.

At the start, the amount of data you’ve collected (your sample size) will be small.

You won't be able to conclude which factors are significant to your success.

But as time passes, the size of your database will grow.

You'll be able to identify the building blocks of your success and discard the junk.

Statistics teaches us how to do this through empirical evidence.

You'll learn more in Principle #2: Synthesize.

2) Retention

Good things take time.

Often years.

You'll have to track your results throughout this entire duration.

This is impossible without a database.

A database can store context in perpetuity — to a degree that your brain can't.

Sole reliance on your brain to retain information is a losing strategy.

Your memory of events (your data) will decay over time.

Forgotten data is useless data.

Often times, a device or service will document data for you automatically:

• Fitness trackers

• Personal finance applications

• Smart appliances

But when you don't have these conveniences, data entry can be manual and impractical.

You'll have to devote time to inputting your memory of events into the database.

But sometimes life gets in the way — you might not be able to do data entry at the moment.

To avoid forgetting information, you'll need to develop systems for recording data promptly.

Assume you want to improve your social skills.

Nobody wants to be the person typing into a spreadsheet at a bar.

You'll detriment your goal by breaking up conversation instead of extending it.

Despite losing nuance, initially storing feedback as mental notes works best in social settings.

You can then convert your mental notes into data stored in your formal database when you return home that night.

As long as you have systems in place to ensure you record data in a timely manner, you'll be able to prevent loss of data quality.

3) Organization

As you collect data relevant to your goals, you must prioritize organization.

Failure to properly organize the data will hinder future analysis and make your life hell.

So how do you structure the data into schemas to ensure easy interaction later?

The format of your database will depend on the nature of the data you're tracking.

Most people already have experience with the top data models for personal improvement:

• Spreadsheet - tracking your daily macronutrient intake

• Document - daily journal entries

• Checklist - grocery store necessities

Luckily, these simplistic and sustainable models are often more than enough for personal data.

You don't need to be an expert at data modeling to build a quality database.

However, you will often use a data-driven approach to pursue many goals at the same time.

This requires you to manage multiple data models simultaneously, adding complexity.

To solve this, you can store your data models within a all-in-one environment.

Some of the most popular solutions include:

• Notion

• Evernote

• Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, Keep)

• Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, OneNote)

• Apple iWork (Page, Numbers, Reminders)

Regardless of your platform choice, storing the various schemas you create under a single umbrella will streamline your database management system.

Over time, utilizing your database to document your life will become second-nature.

Through a conscious routine of continuous observation, you'll accumulate relevant data that represents your present state.

However, merely possessing data does not translate to an understanding of it.

Without proper interpretation, the data you've worked hard to ensure the quality of is rendered useless.

So how can you interpret the data that you've collected?

Further, where do you go from that interpretation?

How do you know what the first step toward your ideal life should be?

You'll learn these frameworks in the next section: Synthesize.

Principle #2: Synthesize

Regression

The second stage of creating value from data involves the combination of analysis & strategy.

As you create your game plan, you'll want to conduct your analysis and strategic planning in a specific order.

Your analysis should be performed first, while your strategy should be based off your findings.

The awareness you'll gain from analysis empowers you to form your strategy around the most influential factors.

You'll be able to fixate on the details in your life that empirically drive the results you want.

Regression teaches you the correct mental framework for analysis.

You must question your most deeply rooted assumptions and view your data objectively.

The quality of your analysis is only as good as your ability to properly interpret the data.

When building your database, you created standards to ensure the underlying data was solid.

Now you'll need to ensure that your interpretation of the data is sound.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. — Mark Twain

Data can only maintain its objectivity if you don't introduce preconceived notions and biases.

As you analyze the data, you need to separate personal beliefs from empirical evidence.

Consider an overweight person tracking data related to their weight loss journey.

Their goal is to lose 20 pounds within three months.

They diligently track their daily exercise routine, calorie intake, and weight fluctuations.

But as the weeks progress, this person isn't losing any weight.

Despite "following" their exercise plan and calorie-restricted diet, there's been no progress.

In this scenario, the average person will become biased towards the data they've tracked.

They won't accept that they've remained stagnant despite the effort they've put in.

They'll gravitate toward the days where they perfectly followed their diet and exercise regimen.

Yet ignore their overeating and the workouts they skipped.

They'll try to explain away their lack of progress through water retention, muscle gain, or fluctuations in metabolism.

Most people will tell themselves anything to blunt the truth — most people aren't successful.

Failing to be objective about your present state doesn't do you any good.

Remove the excuses, cop-outs, and biases.

It's only then you unlock the benefits that proper analysis provides:

• Relevance - validation of whether the data you're collecting is relevant to your desired outcome

• Granularity - determine the relative importance of each behavior to your desired outcome

• Trajectory - quantify your improvement and see if you're moving in the right direction

Important:

If you haven't yet taken any action toward your goals, you'll only receive two of these insights.

You'll be able to better understand the relevance/granularity of your behaviors.

But there is no improvement without action — thus no ability to determine your trajectory.

You're now aware of your present state.

But where do you go from there?

How do you actually decide what actions to take toward your goals?

Bayesian Priors

Take a second mental visit to your favorite amusement park.

The map at the kiosk is now too faded to read.

It's impossible to discern the shortest path to your destination.

There are seemingly infinite roads to take — many of which may lead you even further away.

So what should you consider before choosing one?

Start with prior knowledge.

Prior knowledge comes from two data sources:

• The experience of others

• Your own experience

But you shouldn't treat these two data sources with equal weighting.

Step-by-step advice from the experience of others is often appealing.

In the absence of clear direction, people crave the clarity that guidance offers them.

But this luster only exists on the surface.

There is no guarantee this advice will work for you.

The variation in how success is achieved negates the ability to prescribe a cookie-cutter approach.

• Two people eating the same foods may illicit radically different responses.

• Two people seeking the same financial standing may require contradictory wealth management strategies.

• Two people seeking to build a stronger relationship may be advised to spend either more or less time with each other.

This means some advice may be broadly applicable to you, but some may not be.

So how do you avoid being lost in a sea of clashing advice?

How do you separate signal from the noise?

There is only one true way of knowing what actions precede your success — you must experience success and evaluate what got you there.

Personal experiences are inherently applicable and tailored to your unique situation.

This is why adhering to what has worked in the past produces the highest success rate.

You already know it works for YOU.

Nonetheless, you'll often find yourself without prior knowledge.

In life, you'll inevitably develop interest in new pursuits — ones where you are devoid of any prior knowledge at all:

• Learning a new skill

• Traveling outside of your home country

• Your first love

What should you do when you have no prior knowledge to build off of?

Seek it out.

The internet is a vast repository of data available for anyone to leverage.

You can build your knowledge from the ground up using the information that lives there:

• Articles

• Podcasts

• Videos

• eBooks

• Databases

But these are ALL external sources.

As we know, they aren't directly relevant to your own life circumstances.

We need a system to assess the relative validity of their claims.

What is the likelihood what they say will work for me?

Probability & Significance

Almost nothing in life is a guarantee.

There is always a risk things don't play out in your favor.

A probabilistic mindset can help you minimize that risk.

There is a reason intelligent gamblers choose blackjack over slot machines.

They can weigh potential outcomes and their likelihoods to take intelligent action.

A probabilistic mindset allows you to perform scenario analysis when making decisions in life:

• What are the odds a certain event happens?

• What is the outcome if the event happens? What if it doesn't?

• How can I best position myself to succeed across all possible outcomes?

Chances are (no pun intended) you're already using probabilistic reasoning without realizing it:

• What are the odds of rain tonight? Should I wear my coat out later?

• Is it likely there is traffic at this hour? Should take a different route?

Implementing a conscious pattern of probabilistic thinking as you pursue your aspirations is a catalyst for better decision-making on the topics that matter to you.

The concept of significance should be equally connected to your decision-making process.

For billionaire Michael Saylor, the real-world benefit of statistics can be boiled down to the capability of “understanding how significant the thing someone is telling you is.”

In statistics, the significance level is a probability threshold — anything below it is rejected.

You can apply this concept to your online search for knowledge on where to start your journey.

How confident are you that the ideas you're sifting through are beneficial to you?

By creating standards for the advice you encounter, you create your own idea filtration system.

Here are the benchmarks that have helped me separate the highest quality ideas from the rest:

• Consensus - high success rate by others, testimonials & research supports validity of advice

• Personal Context & Intuition - advice aligns with personal situation, resonates with you

• Logical Reasoning - the advice makes logical sense to you

It is important to note that these guidelines aren't mutually exclusive.

You don't have to check every box before being allowed to implement advice into your life.

For example, if an argument makes logical sense to you but isn't the consensus view, this doesn't mean you should discard it.

In fact, much of the advice that will lead you to success is NOT part of the consensus view.

Instead, take note of the advice in your database and mull over how it fits into your action plan.

Over time, you'll build up a vast repository of potentially actionable advice.

Alongside analysis of your present state, your repository will form the basis of your strategy.

Principle #3: Iterate

A second Mark Twain quote:

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.

Machine Learning

Up to this point, you've completed the following steps:

• Collected & analyzed your data, giving you an objective view of your present state

• Utilized your knowledge to help you plan the strategic first step toward your goals

You've constructed the best blueprint to achieve your aspirations you know how to create.

Now execute on your plan of action.

Put the behaviors you believe will benefit you into practice.

Continue to track your performance over the following days, weeks, months, and years.

Once your sample size is large enough, there's only one thing left to do.

Iterate.

Evaluate your new present state.

Analyze whether your new behaviors have improved your outcome.

Conduct research to inform your decision-making.

Synthesize your analysis and research to upgrade your strategy.

Implement your findings into your daily life.

Repeat.

Repetition is key — taking a single step in the right direction isn't enough.

It's virtually guaranteed you won't have the optimal model from the get go.

Usually, you'll be laughably far off.

It doesn't matter.

Failure is an essential part of actualizing your aspirations — it's counterintuitive, but it's true.

You'll often implement advice that doesn't benefit you and even slows you down.

Yet, your failures will also reveal insights that will 10x your rate of progress.

You have to risk taking a step backward to take two steps forward.

Create a feedback mechanism fueled by your failures.

The lessons you learn will enhance your knowledge base, and allow you to update your beliefs in light of new empirical evidence.

You can focus on course correction from there.

Once you’ve taken your first step toward your goals, you immediately gain personal experience (the most powerful prior) you can use to iterate further:

• Are the metrics you're tracking able to reliably predict your desired outcome?

  • No? Research which metrics would be more lucrative to track.

• Are you channeling the majority of your energy into the aspects that truly drive results?

  • No? Work on distributing more of your time and effort toward those areas.

• Is your current strategy yielding positive results?

  • No? Ensure your sample size is large enough, reevaluate your interpretation of the data, devote more energy to your research, and determine if you need to pivot toward a new strategy.

Even if the answer to the above questions is yes, you shouldn't stop there.

Finding success on your first try is possible, but isn't likely the highest form you'll experience.

Ask yourself:

• How can I systematize the actions that have led to me to my initial success?

• How can I remove the challenges or obstacles I encountered along the way?

• How can I allocate my resources (time, energy, finances) more efficiently across all my aspirations?

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man. — Heraclitus

Much like a river, the entropy of life ensures the landscape you pursue your goals in will change over time.

These changes are largely out of your control.

Economic downturns, technological advancements, and other black swan events all contribute to the dynamic nature of your environment.

They produce new challenges, opportunities, and uncertainties you must address as you pursue your ideal life.

But the evolution of a person is different.

You can control the degree to which you grow.

You can will your aspirations into fruition by adapting your strategies to the changing context.

Or you can stay stagnant, passively hoping your ideal life will materialize.

At the end of your lifetime you'll remain the same person, except for one realization:

Standing still gets you nowhere.

Until next time.

— Landon