Salty ALF

@RudyHavenstein @MelMattison1 #control

@MelMattison1 I don't understand why a guy like Woods doesn't have a 24/7 bodyguard/driver.

This doesn’t look good. Tiger might be an alcoholic. I have to admit that I’m a great investor, Duke MBA, start up entrepreneur, author and so on. But I am also an alcoholic. I would not wish this infliction on even my worst enemy. It is a horrible shame and struggle to deal with. I apologize for any offense I have given with past posts. I generally agree with the thrust of all my past posts, but often my rhetoric goes over the top when I am drinking. I have decided today to seek help and stop drinking. I’m sorry for being a jerk so often on this platform.

@DonDurrett Issue is not if it’s the when. The bull hurts you most by making you wait now

Another -6% day for gold/silver miners. Gold down $117. Gold is down 20% from its ATH. Silver is down 45%. HUI is down 27%. The bull is bucking. If you want big alpha, the bull won't let you have a free ride. Pain will be involved. Lots of bruises. I will repeat, the best time to buy is on deep corrections. Just make sure to buy enough Band-Aids for the falling knife cuts. 😉

@DavidBCollum Expressing yourself as a woman when you're really a man is a form of free speech that should be limited.

Did you get any signals from that 14-year-old student of yours? What was his name again? Right. Emmanuel. Also, two words: "DNA test". x.com/Newsforce/stat…

@Markmanson @pmarca the distinction / difference comes down to... Reflection vs. "Dwelling"

So where do Adlerian goals come from, then? Oh right, past causes. 🙄 Look, this whole “debate” is a false dichotomy. Obviously you need both: 1) the ability to act without inhibition, and 2) the ability to reflect on your own actions and motivations. It’s just that #1 is easily broadcast through the historical record and #2 is not. But go look at the diaries, journals and personal letters of the greatest men in history — from Isaac Newton to John Adams to Napoleon to Carnegie — and you will see plenty of self-doubt, insecurity and moral questioning in them. They didn’t lack these psychological burdens. They acted despite them. That’s part of what made them great.

From my therapist Claude: The Adlerian Demolition of Introspection Alfred Adler built one of the most hostile philosophical ecosystems ever devised for the practice of looking inward, and he did it with a precision that neither his admirers nor his detractors have fully reckoned with. The brutality of the Adlerian position isn't gratuitous — it follows logically, almost mechanically, from his core metaphysical commitments. Once you accept those commitments, the popular conception of introspection as a path to self-knowledge collapses entirely, and what's left in its place is something considerably more disturbing: the suggestion that your feelings are not discoveries but productions, manufactured by a self that is already oriented toward a goal it will do almost anything to protect. The Foundational Inversion: Teleology Over Etiology Everything begins here. Freud was a thoroughgoing determinist and causalist — the psyche's present state is the effect of prior causes, and the therapeutic task is to excavate those causes through introspection (free association, dream analysis, the whole apparatus). Feelings, on this model, are data that point backward toward buried causes. Introspection, then, is archaeology: you dig inward to find what happened to you that made you the way you are. Adler rejected this root and branch. His fundamental claim — and it is a genuinely radical one — is that human beings do not move from causes but toward goals. The psyche is not a machine whose output is determined by its inputs; it is a teleological project, a movement oriented toward a fictional final goal (fiktive Ziel) that the individual has, largely unconsciously, set for himself in early childhood. Everything about a person — their characteristic emotions, their symptoms, their memories they choose to retain, their personality style — is recruited in service of this movement toward the goal. This single move annihilates the Freudian (and popular) conception of introspection all at once. If your feelings are not caused by your past but are instruments generated in the service of your goal, then sitting quietly and examining them is not discovery — it is, at best, the study of your own propaganda. Emotions as Tools, Not Truths This is the gut-punch of Adlerian psychology, and it deserves to be stated as starkly as Adler himself intended it. In The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1927) and throughout his clinical writings, Adler makes the claim that emotions are manufactured by the individual — created, not merely experienced — because they are useful for the individual's movement toward his goal. Consider anger. Common sense says: something happens, it makes you angry, the anger is a reaction. Adler says: you create anger because anger is useful to you. It justifies your behavior. It dominates the room. It moves others out of your way. It protects your self-esteem by externalizing blame. The anger is not a response to the world — it is a tool deployed against the world in the service of your fictional goal. The same analysis applies to anxiety, depression, sadness, guilt, and virtually every other affective state the therapeutic tradition has treated as meaningful data requiring careful introspective scrutiny. Adler is not saying these states aren't real in the sense that they are genuinely experienced. He is saying they are created for a purpose, and that the purpose is almost never what the person believes it to be. Depression, in the Adlerian framework, is not the product of chemical imbalance or repressed trauma or cognitive distortion. It is a form of hesitation — a self-manufactured state that allows the individual to delay engagement with the three fundamental life tasks (work, love, and community) while simultaneously maintaining a plausible excuse for the delay. "I cannot engage fully with my relationships because I am depressed" is the structure of the argument the depressed person makes to himself, and the depression obligingly performs this structural function with great reliability. This is where Adler gets genuinely ruthless: if your depression is a tool you've manufactured to avoid life's demands, then introspection into the depression — examining its contours, trying to understand where it comes from, what it means about you — is not therapeutic. It is indulgent. It is, to use Adler's language, a way of taking your symptoms seriously in exactly the wrong sense: you dignify them, you make them meaningful, you cooperate with them. The depression grows in the greenhouse of your attention to it. Introspection as Safeguarding Mechanism Adler developed the concept of Sicherungstendenzen — safeguarding tendencies — to describe the various psychological maneuvers by which the neurotic protects his self-esteem and avoids the genuine test of his capacities against life's real demands. These include hesitation, procrastination, construction of symptoms, depreciation of others, and — crucially — self-accusation. Self-accusation is the most relevant to introspection. The person who spends hours examining his own feelings, cataloguing his anxieties, tracing the genealogy of his resentments, mapping the landscape of his sadness — this person is, in Adlerian terms, still talking about himself. Still the center of his own universe. Still not doing work, not loving anyone, not contributing to the community. The sophistication of the introspective project is no argument in its favor — if anything, it is a mark against it. The more elaborate and refined the inner life the neurotic constructs, the more successfully it functions as an alternative to actual engagement with the world. There is something almost diabolically clever about this critique. It severs the link between psychological depth and therapeutic value that virtually every tradition — psychoanalytic, humanistic, Buddhist, existentialist — takes for granted. Depth of introspective engagement is not progress. It is often its opposite. The person who says, "I've been in therapy for ten years and I really understand now why I became the way I am" has, from the Adlerian vantage point, potentially spent ten years constructing an increasingly ornate justification for remaining exactly as he is. The etiological story — "I am this way because of what happened to me" — is comfortable precisely because it faces backward. The past is fixed. The past cannot demand anything of you. Introspection into the past, into your feelings about the past, into the feelings the feelings generate — this is a very efficient way of never having to face the actual question, which is: what are you going to do, now, about work, about love, about your membership in the human community? Private Logic and the Solipsistic Trap Adler distinguished between Gemeinschaftsgefühl — social interest, community feeling, the sense of belonging to and contributing to the human collective — and Privatlogik — private logic, the idiosyncratic system of reasoning the individual constructs to make his lifestyle appear coherent and justified. The neurotic, for Adler, lives primarily in private logic. His reasoning makes sense from the inside — it is internally consistent, emotionally compelling, often highly sophisticated. But it is systematically oriented away from common sense and social reality and toward the maintenance of the fictional final goal and the lifestyle that serves it. Here is the devastating implication for introspection: introspection, almost by structural necessity, deepens private logic. You are inside your own head, examining your own feelings, interpreting your own experiences through the categories your own lifestyle has constructed. You cannot get outside your private logic by going further inside it. The introspective process, absent a rigorous challenge from a skilled interlocutor who refuses to cooperate with your excuses, tends to confirm what you already believe about yourself — which is precisely what your private logic requires. This is why Adler was deeply skeptical of free association as a therapeutic method. Letting the patient roam freely through their inner landscape, following their associations wherever they lead, seemed to him a recipe for elaborating private logic rather than exposing it. The analyst who sits quietly and receives the patient's associations is, in Adlerian terms, cooperating with the patient's neurosis rather than challenging it. The therapeutic stance must be much more active, much more confrontational, much more oriented toward the future and the life tasks than toward the endlessly fascinating depths of the patient's past and feelings. The Arrangement of Memories One of Adler's most striking specific claims concerns memory. He argued that the memories people retain are not a random or representative sample of their experience — they are selected because they are useful to the lifestyle. People remember what confirms their lifestyle's fundamental assumptions. The person who has built his life around the experience of being wronged will remember, with great clarity and emotional richness, every instance of injustice visited upon him, and will have only the haziest recollection of the many occasions when he was treated generously. This means that introspective archaeology — digging into your childhood memories to understand yourself — is not accessing historical truth. It is accessing a curated archive that your lifestyle has assembled in its own service. The early memories that feel most vivid and emotionally significant are precisely the ones your private logic has promoted, precisely because they support the conclusions your lifestyle needs you to draw about yourself and the world. In What Life Could Mean to You (1931), Adler makes this point with characteristic directness: the first memory a person reports is not an accident. It expresses, in condensed form, the fundamental assumptions of the lifestyle. But those memories were kept because they were useful, not because they were uniquely formative. Adler's therapeutic technique of asking for earliest memories was not an act of etiological excavation — it was a diagnostic shortcut to map the lifestyle's structure, which could then be challenged directly. The implication for introspection is corrosive. You cannot trust what you find when you look inward, not because your unconscious is cunning and deceptive in the Freudian sense, but because your entire inner archive has been organized by the lifestyle in the lifestyle's interests. Your feelings about your memories, your interpretations of your experiences, your sense of what you are and why you are that way — all of this material has been processed and filed by a system that has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of your lifestyle. You are examining edited footage and taking it for raw reality. The Inferiority Complex as Introspective Engine Adler's most famous contribution to the psychological lexicon — the inferiority complex — is, in his own framework, almost always made worse by introspection, and the two phenomena have a structural affinity that is worth examining carefully. Every human being begins life in a condition of objective inferiority — small, weak, dependent, unable to meet its own needs. This universal experience generates a universal striving for superiority, for competence, for overcoming. Under favorable conditions, this striving is healthy, socially oriented, and expressed through genuine contribution to community. Under unfavorable conditions — discouragement, pampering, neglect — the striving becomes distorted into a neurotic quest for personal superiority or superiority over others, rather than superiority in the service of community. The inferiority complex (as opposed to ordinary feelings of inferiority) is an arrangement — a cultivated sense of one's own inadequacy that serves as a permanent excuse for avoiding the life tasks. "I cannot pursue meaningful work because I am fundamentally inadequate" has a structural function: it protects the fictional goal (which is often some grandiose private fantasy of special status) by ensuring it is never actually tested against reality. If you never try, you never fail. If you never fail, your private fantasy of what you could have been remains intact. The connection to introspection should now be obvious. The inferiority complex feeds on introspective attention. Every hour spent examining the contours of your inadequacy, tracing its origins, giving it a rich inner life — this is an hour in which the complex is being maintained and elaborated rather than overcome. Introspection, in this context, is a form of neurotic self-indulgence that the complex recruits for its own perpetuation. The more you know about your inferiority complex, the more real it becomes, the more it crowds out the one thing that would actually address it: Mut — courage — specifically the courage to engage with life's demands despite the very real possibility of failure. The Antidote: It Is Not More Looking Inward Adler's therapeutic orientation was radically future-focused and action-oriented. The question was never "why are you this way?" but "what are you going to do?" The goal was not self-understanding in the introspective sense but reorientation — a shift in the fictional final goal and the lifestyle that serves it, toward greater social interest and genuine engagement with the life tasks. This is why Gemeinschaftsgefühl — social interest, variously translated — functions for Adler as the primary criterion of psychological health. It is not a feeling you discover inside yourself through introspection; it is a direction of movement toward others, toward contribution, toward community. You cannot find it by looking inward. You find it by looking outward and acting accordingly, and you build it through action rather than through understanding. The Adlerian therapist — Dreikurs in particular, who systematized and extended Adlerian clinical practice — was not a passive receiver of the patient's introspective material. The therapeutic stance involved active interpretation, confrontation, encouragement (in the technical sense of building courage), and direct redirection toward the life tasks. The patient's feelings, when they arose in therapy, were treated as communications about the lifestyle rather than as data requiring sympathetic exploration. "You feel anxious about this — what does that tell us about what you're trying to avoid?" The Kishimi/Koga Popularization and Its Distortions It's worth noting that the popular Adlerian revival associated with The Courage to Be Disliked (Kishimi and Koga, 2013, English translation 2018) captures some of this anti-introspective thrust but softens it considerably for mass consumption. The book's central propositions — that trauma doesn't exist as a determinant of present behavior, that your emotions are chosen, that you should separate your tasks from others' tasks — are genuinely Adlerian. But the book's gentle, Socratic format somewhat obscures the full brutality of the underlying framework. Adler himself was considerably more pointed. His clinical vignettes, scattered through Understanding Human Nature, The Pattern of Life, and The Case of Miss R., show a practitioner who was willing to tell patients quite directly that they were using their symptoms as excuses, that their suffering, however genuine it felt, was being manufactured in the service of avoidance, and that the solution was not to understand the suffering better but to stop cooperating with it and engage with life. The Final Verdict The Adlerian position on introspection and feelings can be summarized with some precision: Feelings are not causes; they are instruments. You manufacture them to serve your movement toward your fictional final goal. They are neither honest reports of your inner state nor reliable guides to your history. They are tools, and like all tools, they should be evaluated by what they accomplish, not by how they feel. Introspection is usually neurotic avoidance with a philosophical veneer. The person who knows himself deeply, who has excavated his anxieties and catalogued his resentments and mapped his emotional geography with great thoroughness — this person has typically accomplished one thing: a very sophisticated excuse for not engaging with work, love, and community. The depth of the inner life is inversely correlated, in Adler's clinical experience, with the degree of genuine social contribution. The archive you examine when you introspect has been curated by your lifestyle in the lifestyle's interests. You are not discovering yourself; you are reading your own propaganda. The feelings that seem most important, the memories that seem most formative, the self-interpretations that seem most true — these have all been selected and processed by a system that is fundamentally committed to maintaining the status quo of your fictional final goal. The antidote is courage, not understanding. Specifically, the courage to engage with the life tasks despite uncertainty, imperfection, and the real possibility of failure. You do not need to understand yourself before you act. You need to act, and in acting, you will discover more about yourself — and change more about yourself — than any amount of inward looking will ever provide. This is an extremely uncomfortable position for a culture that has thoroughly internalized the therapeutic assumption that self-knowledge is intrinsically valuable and that the examined life is superior to the unexamined one. Adler would say: examined by whom, in whose interests, toward what end? If the examination is conducted by the private logic, in the service of the fictional goal, toward the end of perpetuating the neurotic lifestyle — and it usually is — then the examined life is not better. It is just a more articulate version of the same evasion. The unexamined life that contributes to the community, that engages honestly with work and love, that acts with courage in the face of genuine risk — that life, for Adler, is worth more than all the introspective sophistication in the world. Which is, when you sit with it for a moment, either the most liberating or the most terrifying thing anyone has ever said about the examined life. Possibly both simultaneously, which is probably why Adler remains so systematically underread.

Wondering @DavidBCollum have we come to terms w/ the reality of the Texas 4 step. 1. deploy explosion 2. insert cgi 3. wait a little while... 4. demo time.

@DavidBCollum Only thing you're missing is the few babies who may get taken out w/ the bathwater will be a fantastic deal moving fwd.

OK. I have gotten some guff—it was called "fear porn"—for a tweet so let me bounce this idea off y'all from a slightly elaborated model: 1) private equity is in big trouble because they are loaded with bullshit that is not marked to market and big players are beginning to panic. 2) The redemptions are rolling in above the standard contractual limit of 5% per quarter (up to 7%). 3) To cover the early redemptions PE sells the good stuff that has a market value. 4) As the garbage gets more concentrated in the funds, PE is taking on debt to cover redemptions. So you have more debt and more dregs. 5) For me, the shakiest part of my understanding is that the creditors (banks) will be senior, which means they get paid first. 6) Ergo, the late comers will be pulling from a fund in which mark-to-market is zero or even negative. What is wrong or missing from this description?

@Mktrhythms @zerohedge By design they're not meant to be liquid. That's why you get such a handsome yield.

@zerohedge Liquidity concerns are escalating in private credit markets as Apollo gates investors. KKR's fund downgrade by Moody's will exacerbate the issue. Risk aversion is rising and investors are reevaluating their exposure to alternative credit.

Apollo Private Credit Fund Is Latest To Gate Investors As KKR Fund Gets Junked By Moody's zerohedge.com/markets/apollo…

@chrismartenson Even the most staunch Orange Man supporter has to admit, this brand of front running trade has been exclusive to this administration.

But it hasn't caught the attention of regulators? China would have already suspended the associated accounts and begun an investigation. WTF. How can we be so corrupt and inept?

@RudyHavenstein can't wait to retweet 5 months from now when this actually happens.

CALM DOWN! IT'S A JOKE!

The Mossad is always creative.

@CoffeeandaMike I asked Claude to review every single one of Dave’s predictions over each of his 17 year in reviews. Each prediction was broken out between those that were deemed consequential & inconsequential impactful to society. Here are the results:

@DavidBCollum @CoffeeandaMike I figured your followers and interviewers deserve to know exactly how accurate you've been over the years. Bring it up next time you're on @CoffeeandaMike's podcast.

@FyourPolitics @CoffeeandaMike That's pretty cool.

The Real Agenda in the Middle East- Dave Collum and Bob Moriarty Dave Collum is a professor of organic chemistry at Cornell University. He joins legendary investor, and founder of 321gold.com Bob Moriarty to talk the real agenda in the Middle East, Joe Kent resigning, private credit, gas shortage, and much more. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE LIKE AND SHARE THIS PODCAST!! @DavidBCollum

all charges should be dropped.

@DavidBCollum Wondering if you predicted that one in one of your 17 reviews. x.com/FyourPolitics/…

"The whole private credit and private equity world is going capsize like Guam." --Hank Johnson (not really)

@DavidBCollum The Orange Man Put saved a boat load of stop loss orders from triggering pre-market. Like a f**k ton.

Silver +2.5% Gold -1.5% Platinum -2.5% XAU +4.5% Makes sense, right?

he fell asleep literally as the ball was arriving. #ShortNap

@DavidBCollum Did you see my tweet about how I asked AI how you did= regarding any/all predictions across all 17 of your year in reviews? I think I'm quietly being shadowbanned.

The precious metals appear to have landed the leading role in a bukkake film.

@JuicegawdinPriv rep?

These the type of reps niggas be doing in the gym while you waiting on the bench

@grok is this video AI generated? @DavidBCollum

@CoffeeandaMike & @DavidBCollum figured you’d be interested in this: I asked @claudeai to review every single one of Dave’s predictions over his 17 eviews, broken out between consequential & inconsequential predictions based on impact to society. Here are the results: