David Benefield

PSA - someone is scamming as me via text message from a variety of local phone numbers. I’ll never ask you for money or favors. If anyone has thoughts on what I can do about this please share, thanks!

Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability. The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code. But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along. So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions. TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.

The only winning move is not to play.

@ramahluwalia aotd

Isn't Congress supposed to approve when the Pentagon chooses to wipe out a civilization? Or, is that not defined as war?

@AahanPrometheus Pony Room’s great

Might never come back

service to self whispers “take what you’re owed.” service to others asks “what can i become?” one builds walls around the self; the other opens a door and finds it leads back home.

@ramahluwalia 'We're going to hit them extremely hard over the next 2-3 weeks and bring them back to the stone ages where they belong.' Bit of a different message than the optimistic 'we can just leave' that seemed to inspire bullishness Monday. Bringing up WW1, 2, Vietnam etc also not great.

Futures down. Incidentally, Trump did not say anything new to what he said yesterday if you are following what he says closely. If anything, he outlined a desire to coerce Iran into a deal and if that is not successful there is further escalation. The last two days was a mechanical bid driven by quarter end vol compression. Big irony is this speech was given almost exactly one year after ‘Liberation Day’ speech last year… What’s also notable? What was not said. No mention of ground forces. I continue to expect an inflation impulse ahead and that’s not good for US consumers.

@AviFelman What are next steps to reach the end from here?

Polarity isn’t a war—it’s a dance. Light only sees itself fully when it meets shadow, and shadow only exists to remind light how to move. The trick isn’t to win; it’s to honor both steps of the rhythm.

People fantasize about hitting the freedom money and then disappearing to live life, but the ones who would actually have disappeared to live life will almost never make it. Why? Because you don’t wake up one day with 8 figs because you “balanced work and life” perfectly. You get there because you’re a little broken in the head and actually like the game more than the prize. In the same way, bodybuilders don’t quit the gym the day they look shredded. People with real money all still work in some form. Investing, building, trading, whatever. When I talk to friends with safe office jobs, they’ll say something like: “If I were pulling what you make, I’d just be on holiday all year.” That’s exactly why they never get there. The second money appears in their head, they’re already planning how to burn it on vacations and luxury items, and end up right back where they started. It feels a bit controversial to say this, especially from me, Route2FI lol, as you know what the initials stand for, but yeah, I used to think the same way: dreaming of financial independence so I could basically do nothing. Looking back, the problem wasn’t that I hated work. It was that I hadn’t chosen my work. Once you find something you think is fun and you feel good at, you don’t fantasize about quitting. You just want to keep playing.

@Kunal_K_Patel @strassa2 @TomDwan It was the best of times

@strassa2 @TomDwan @DWBenefield More jealous you got to hoop with Raptor. Miss running pick and rolls with the legend

Now that we are apparently sharing @TomDwan stories… I’m playing bball with @DWBenefield in NYC. He says hey Tom is in town — want to get lunch after? Sure. We go to Ramen spot. Tom rolls in with… a random dude and his girlfriend… Emily Ratajkowski. So yes I once had ramen with Durrr and Emily Ratajkowski.

@strassa2 @TomDwan I was most impressed that she slammed 3 pork buns then the entire bowl of tonkotsu.

Every night human beings go to sleep, lose all sense of their known reality, plunge into an abstract hyper-dimensional realm of infinite experience where time collapses, all moments instantly manifest, and then they wake up and just go about their day.

Credibility of our leadership rapidly diminishing.

Dostoevsky; “People don't want truth, they want comfort dressed as truth.” Franz Kafka; “Reality is too heavy for most people to carry. So they borrow illusions, soft dreams, sweet lies, and call it happiness.”

“He who had recognised himself came to the Supreme Good, while he who had prized the body, born from the illusion of desire, remained wandering in the dark, suffering through the senses the things of death.”

@bryan_johnson Become the vibration. Experience unity. Surrender.

Livestreaming 5-MeO-DMT this weekend… what should I expect?

@bryan_johnson What if the mushrooms make it so the weaker sperm can't make it through, effectively pruning the less evolutionarily advantageous sperm, while making aggregate numbers look less appealing?

Two doses of magic mushrooms degraded my sperm count from the 99.6th percentile to the 77.7th. This may be a first-in-human observation. Context: we ran the most quantified magic mushroom (psilocybin) experiment ever conducted. We were asking if psilocybin is a longevity therapy. After seeing the data, we think it is (see reply post for the experiment summary). Also, like most things biology: the results are complicated. My data suggests that the magic mushrooms (psilocybin) negatively impacted my fertility markers. Before the first psilocybin dose my motile sperm count was at 99.6th percentile for men under 25 years of age, it dropped to 77.7% and partially recovered to 89.3% following the first dose, and second doses, compared to the same age cohort (numbers compare similarly to my age cohort as well). 3 days following my second dose (first dose 25 mg, second dose 28 mg) . Motility: dropped 51% . Total count: almost unchanged, dropped by 2% . Total motile count: dropped 52% . Normal morphology: dropped by 50% 20 days post 2nd dose, the pattern continued, with typical latent effects on total sperm counts Motility: recovered back to -2% of pre-psilocybin baseline: . Total count: dropped by 38%, latent effect. . Total motile count: remained inhibited at -39% of pre-psilocybin baseline, (despite motility normalizing, due to the total count drop) . Morphology normalized to -10% of baseline levels. Reduction in free testosterone might have contributed to the effect. While total serum testosterone increased by 30% 3 days following the 2nd dose (neither FSH or LH were meaningfully affected either), and continued to be at 11% above baseline, SHBG increased by 37%, SHBG binds testosterone and reduces its bioavailability and activity. My free testosterone (direct) showed 24% and 23% drops at 3 and 20 days post 2nd dose. In light of the neuroplastic, well-being, brain reset, and systemic metabolic and anti-inflammatory benefits, the trade-off is probably worth it. Especially considering that the magnitude of inhibition has no meaningful effect on actual fertility (total motile counts above 50 million are still on the safe side). This is a first-in-human observation, to our knowledge there is no published human clinical study demonstrating that psilocybin diminishes male fertility markers. General mechanistic evidence exists for recreational and psychoactive drugs possibly inhibiting fertility markers due to their effects on the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis and general hormonal reset.  Yet no direct evidence for psilocybin or other similar psychedelics inhibiting fertility markers exist. A potential mechanism for the immediate inhibition of motility could involve direct serotonergic signaling in sperm. Human sperm express multiple serotonin receptors, including 5-HT2A, and one recent study found that a 5-HT2A antagonist reduced sperm motility, suggesting that 5-HT2A may regulate motility. Psilocybin is known to bind 5-HT2A with high affinity.

"The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father."

*BESSENT: US MAY UNSANCTION IRANIAN OIL THAT’S ON WATER Sanctions are virtue signals. As soon as it becomes properly inconvenient, we'll roll them back.