Vern Gambetta

The story behind The Eagles’ “Hotel California” is one of the most fascinating and mysterious in classic rock. It all began in the summer of 1974. Don Felder, the guitarist who had recently joined the band, was at a rented beachfront house in Malibu, California. Fresh out of the ocean, still in his swimsuit and sitting on the couch, he picked up his 12-string acoustic guitar and began to play. Suddenly, that iconic flamenco-reggae arpeggio emerged (which they originally tentatively called “Mexican Reggae”). He recorded it on a 4-track recorder with a bass, a drum machine, and a simulated guitar solo. He felt he had something special and sent the demo to Don Henley and Glenn Frey. Henley and Frey fell in love with the song. Frey contributed the general idea for the story (a weary traveler arriving at a strange place in the desert) and together they wrote the lyrics. The song is a metaphor for the dark side of the American Dream, hedonism, excess, drugs, and the decadence of high society in 1970s Los Angeles. It speaks of a “golden prison” that you “can walk right in, but you can never walk out.” Henley has described it as “a journey from innocence to experience” and also as a sociopolitical commentary on America. It is not about a literal hotel (though there are urban legends about a real hotel in Baja California, Mexico, or the Chateau Marmont), but rather an allegory. The recording of the album Hotel California (December 1976) was long and complicated: it took months across several studios. They changed the key several times to make it fit Henley’s voice. The legendary climax is the final solo, lasting over two minutes, where Don Felder and Joe Walsh take turns and then play in harmony. Felder insisted on recreating exactly what he had improvised on the demo, and they spent days rehearsing until they achieved that perfection. The song was released as a single in February 1977, reached number 1 in the United States, and became a timeless anthem. The album sold millions and marked the band’s peak (and the beginning of its internal decline).

“Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.” — John Waters

Coaching doesn’t stop. Stay connected. Download the app now. Link in bio. #learning #coaching

@Jason_AW @AthleticsWeekly Perhaps the best part of the book is the elaboration of the concept of "muscle tone" and the role it plays. Very thought provoking and food for further discussion and elaboration

Marius Bakken's brilliant new book on the Norwegian Method not only explains notorious 'double threshold' sessions in detail but concepts like muscle tone, golden zones, X-sessions and more. Review via @athleticsweekly ➡️ athleticsweekly.com/performance/ma…

Athletic Development to Prepare the Complete Athlete open.substack.com/pub/verngambet…

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” ― Albert Einstein

🌊WAVEY WISDOM WEDNESDAY🌊 🏊‍♂️ David Popovici 100m freestyle Romanian Championships 🇷🇴 47.52 (22.92/24.60) Every coach needs to Show this to their Swimmers🏊🏼‍♂️! 📝🔎 Technique 1️⃣Notably higher tempo on first 25m 2️⃣High body position thru all 4 25m sections 3️⃣Tempo largely decreases after 65m 4️⃣ More “gallop” stroke final 25m 5️⃣ Head seems to come very far out of water during breath.

@AKA_WitchDoctor Well articulated

🚨If strength transferred 100% to performance… the strongest athletes would be the best. 😱They’re not. There is no evidence that weight room gains transfer automatically to sport. - Because performance isn’t just force : It’s timing, coordination, and organization. 🤔Strength is potential. Transfer is not guaranteed. @MLB @NCAABaseball #baseball #softball #hitting #pitching @NCAASoftball @theAUSLofficial #motorpreferences @Volodalen @MotorPreference

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” ― Benjamin Franklin

“A home library is a quiet gift to yourself.” -Haruki Murakami-

"Learning is underrated. Grades are overrated."

Different sprint phases have different requirements. Acceleration, max velocity, speed end.. don’t ask the body to solve the same problem. The muscle activity, joint contributions, timing all change. And as volume and intensity accumulate, coordination becomes harder to

Bears rookie safety Dillion Thieneman working out with strength and conditioning coach Pierre Ngo 🐻⬇️

A Hungarian mathematician with terminal cancer spent the last year of his life writing a single short book comparing the human brain to the computer. He died before he could finish it. The unfinished manuscript is the most important book about AI almost no one has read. I started reading it at midnight and could not believe a man on his deathbed had predicted almost everything about modern AI 70 years before it happened. His name was John von Neumann. The book is called The Computer and the Brain. He was widely considered the greatest mind of the 20th century. Eugene Wigner, who won a Nobel Prize in physics, said von Neumann's mind was so fast that the rest of the world, including Einstein, looked like they were thinking in slow motion. He had personally designed the architecture that every computer on Earth still uses today. He had helped build the atomic bomb. He had invented game theory. He had laid the mathematical foundation of quantum mechanics. He was 53 years old. In 1955 he was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer, almost certainly caused by radiation exposure during the Manhattan Project. The doctors gave him months. He kept working. In 1956 Yale University invited him to give the Silliman Lectures, one of the most prestigious lecture series in the world. He started writing the lectures from a wheelchair. Then from a hospital bed. He was racing against his own body. He never finished. He died on February 8, 1957. The manuscript on his bedside table was incomplete. His widow Klára published it a year later under the title he had given it. The Computer and the Brain. The book is short. Under a hundred pages in most editions. It is the smallest important book ever written about artificial intelligence. Here is what a dying man figured out about AI in 1956 that most working researchers are still catching up to. He started by laying the human brain and the digital computer side by side and comparing them like two engineering systems. Neuron speed. Memory capacity. Energy efficiency. Error tolerance. The arithmetic was savage. Computers were millions of times faster than neurons. Neurons were millions of times more energy efficient than vacuum tubes. The brain ran at 20 watts. A computer of equivalent capability would have melted itself. The first insight that hit me was about fault tolerance. Von Neumann pointed out that the brain loses neurons every day. Concussions, strokes, normal aging, alcohol, lack of sleep. The system keeps working. You do not crash when a single brain cell dies. Computers crash if a single bit flips in the wrong place. He argued that any future intelligent machine would have to be biologically tolerant of error, not mechanically perfect. Modern AI engineers are still trying to figure out how to build systems that degrade gracefully the way brains do. He flagged the problem 70 years ago. The second insight is the one I cannot stop thinking about. He said the brain runs on a different kind of math than the computer. Computers run on rigid logic. Step by step. Each step deterministic. The brain, he said, is fundamentally probabilistic. Neurons fire in noisy patterns. The whole system works statistically, not logically. The "answers" the brain gives are not derived. They are sampled. This is exactly what modern deep learning is. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, every neural network in production today is a probabilistic engine, not a logical one. They do not derive answers. They sample them from a distribution. The entire field of AI spent 30 years trying to build intelligent systems on rigid logic before someone figured out that von Neumann had been right since 1956. The brain was never doing logic. The brain was doing statistics. AI only started working when it gave up logic and copied biology. The third insight is the one that reads like prophecy. He warned that the language the brain uses internally is not English, and not anything humans have written down. He called it the brain's "secondary language." A code that the brain uses to talk to itself, far below conscious thought, that no human has ever directly accessed. He predicted that we would build artificial neural networks before we ever decoded that internal language, and that those networks would also develop their own internal codes that no human would understand from the outside. This is exactly the situation we are in right now. We do not actually know what an LLM is "thinking" in any deep sense. The vectors in its hidden layers are not English. They are not any language. They are something the network developed on its own, and modern interpretability research is, in 2026, the field of trying to translate that internal code back into something humans can read. Von Neumann predicted both the problem and the discipline that would have to exist to study it. He did this lying in a hospital bed. The fourth insight is the one nobody quotes but everyone needs. He argued that the brain operates on parallel hardware while the computer of his time was strictly serial. One instruction at a time. He said real intelligence would require massive parallelism. Hundreds of millions of simple operations happening simultaneously, the way billions of neurons fire at once. For 50 years computers stayed serial. They got faster but they did one thing at a time. Then around 2010, AI researchers realized they could repurpose graphics cards, which were already doing parallel math for video games, into massive parallel processors for neural networks. Modern AI is built on GPUs, which are essentially the parallel hardware von Neumann said we would need. Every Nvidia chip running every modern AI model is delivering on a prediction he made before the integrated circuit existed. The strangest thing about reading the book is how calm it is. There is no panic in his sentences. No fear of running out of time. He writes like a man who has already accepted that he will not finish, but the work itself still matters more than his ability to complete it. The last few pages are visibly thinner than the rest. He is fading. The reasoning stays clear until the final sentence. Steve Jobs reportedly gave copies of this book to senior engineers at Apple. It is the kind of book you read once and then carry around for a year, returning to specific pages when you hit a problem in your own thinking. The man who designed the architecture of every computer ever built spent his final months explaining what computers cannot do. He died before finishing the explanation. His widow published the gap. 70 years later, the entire AI industry is still trying to fill it.

@carvperformance Maybe?

A LOT of good things happening here. 1. Developing Lateral Force Production 2. Forceful Crossover Mechanics 3. Core Stability & Anti-Rotation 4. Joint Health and Stability

@TheDavidWeck Let your work speak for itself. You have innovative ideas and an eye for movement. Stop complaining and do what you do best. From one of the first to use the BOSU

Why are his hands and wrists in the positions they are? THINK. I’m the guy who asks, “what if he were to organize the hands to make this natural, biomechanical advantageous action even better.” I’m the guy who found the optimal way to do so. I’m the guy who’s been vilified and dismissed worse than anyone in S&C. Makes zero sense in an honest and accurate industry. Makes perfect sense in an industry that tells you a stiff spine immobilized in neutral is optimal for locomotion — weaponizing science to foist this narrative upon everyone seeking certification. Observation is the first step in the scientific method. Do your homework and you’ll agree with me (even if you don’t like me). Athlete’s best interests come first. At least this should be the case.

@TheDavidWeck The victim complex is off the charts. Instead of playing up the us vs. them just let your ideas and results speak. Lydiard, Pfaff, Tellez, Daniels, and on and on didn’t make their impact because they screamed about being ostracized. They did the work and let results speak.