In my AA we say that alcoholism is a chronic disease. The same as (some forms) of diabetes, you don’t just get rid if it. Its something you can manage but not cure. It lies dormant inside of you the rest of your life.
My mentor (highly successful and 30 years sober) said it nicely: he has an angry tiger inside of him thats trapped inside a cage. One that will surely eat him if it gets out. His job is to keep the tiger in the cage.
Thats what it feels like. Every day. The cravings go down, the thoughts, etc. Self control improves. But the danger lies dormant for us.
As someone who suffered from deep depression, but never alcoholism - the way alcoholism is described by alcoholics always rings true with how I experience (and hear described by others) depression. I am no longer suffering from depression actively; the symptoms of it are essentially gone. But there's life events, certain situations, certain moments of deeper vulnerability, that feel like I might slip back into it.
Surprisingly enough, although there seem to be parallels with how people experience 'life after' both things, I find it curious that alcoholics I talk to often use the "caged animal" metaphor, whereas depressives tend to describe it more as walking "a tight rope" or "at the edge of an abyss" metaphor.
Thanks for mentioning it, sometimes I feel isolated in my experience of walking at the edge of a cliff. It seems like a good portion of my mental energy goes into the daily practice of keeping depression away. But my therapist has kindly explained why it’s chronic and something to manage for life.
Have some experience with NA but assuming functionally the same, and there isnt a set threshold. If you are unable to stop taking a substance in any circumstance that is negatively impacting you then you are considered and an addict. Whether thats just every Friday night or every day. Its the inability to stop that makes you an addict rather than the frequency. Tbh i didnt get on with it at all, waaay to goddy for me but I appreciate the work they do for people.
The clinical American definition is 14 servings per week for men and 7 for women.
Personally, I was what you call a dipsomaniac. Colloquially that is called a binge drinker. I drank 4 to 9 days at a time from morning to night (and night time) without a break. Luckily I only drank like this 7 times in 4 years but I almost died in my last binge.
We see alcoholics of all kind in AA: frequent and a lot, infrequent and a lot, and frequent and little. The frequent and little are the hardest to crack because they have the hardest time with step 1. Now step one is actually comprised of two components: realizing you have a problem (easy for me) and also admitting you were not in control of your own life anymore (hard for me). Its only through doing the 12 step work really arduously, going to meetings and having a great sponsor that I was able to change enough to where drinking no longer ran my life.
I remember a rule of thumb being "if you cannot remember the last day on which you did not have any alcohol, you're an alcoholic". Probably not what AA goes by, but I like the simplicity of it.
This is weird - my mother very rarely drinks but she’ll be hard pressed telling you exactly when was the last time time . This doesn’t make her an alcoholic.
Or should you start the rule with ‘you’ve been drinking everyday for a while’?
If can't remember the last time she DID NOT take alcohol, it does make her an alcoholic. Or just an old person with severe memory issues, who shouldn't even live alone at that point.
Can you stop tomorrow? If so, then no. If you make excuses why you can’t or shouldn’t, or when you try you have physical or psychological problems, then yes.
You know that that "angry tiger inside you" feeling can go away completely right? That angry tiger is not biological part of who you are, it's a dissociated memory of how you felt when you were a child, which continues to live on in you in the present because you haven't fully processed your childhood feelings. All else being equal, keeping the tiger caged up is better than letting it loose, but you can also heal it so that it goes away completely, which will benefit your life in many ways, most of which are not even related to alcohol. Healing usually requires softening the cage that the tiger lives in bit by bit as you become increasingly able to metabolize him, or cutting the tiger up into pieces and dealing with a piece of him at a time.
Find a way to deadlift and squat and bench: https://www.titan.fitness/
If you can splurge would _strongly_ recommend a belt squat that pulls you from underneath and does not create spinal tension.
Hypertrophy has largely been settled and the main mechanisms and science underneath are well known by now. Call is post-2017.
Source: up 40lb of Dexa scan muscle from 2014-2023, at 15lb greater body weight.
Not rocket science. Strongly recommend Renaissance Periodization (the hundred of hours of lectures on YouTube if that’s your thing, the two main textbooks, the training templates, the meal books, or the meal apps) as a potential vendor if you’re on the simultaneously on the brainier/geekier and more ambitious to reach intermediate or further side of humans.
> Hypertrophy has largely been settled and the main mechanisms and science underneath are well known by now.
If only you would be aware of the different camps of thinking within the (natural) bodybuilding community. Volume vs intensity is the vim vs emacs of their community. Brad Schoenfeld is leading scientist for muscle hypertrophy and if he is changing his mind based on new evidence then would be prudent not to be confident in our thinking.
Yes, that's how science works. The point the comment was making is that it's not enough to be citing a reliable source. That source has said contradictory things, so someone could build an argument on incorrect premises.
> Hypertrophy has largely been settled and the main mechanisms and science underneath are well known by now
No, it's nowhere near this settled. Mechanical tension is universally agreed upon as the main driver, but there are still poorly understood exceptions, like blood flow restriction.
At the risk of being trite, do something athletic on a regular basis. Weight lifting is one way to get there for sure, but there are tons of things which will also do. Regular swimmers for example have great physiques even if they don't lift. The key seems to be to do something you enjoy enough that you'll be consistently active over the course of years.
I believe this maybe might be due to YouTube being able to interject 2 advertisements on videos surpassing ~7 minutes in length and “engagement” (not clicking out) being a potential metric related to monetization.
If you can get the headline click with 30 seconds worth of insight, then your payday is related to padding to get to the appropriate length. Imho
roughly, imagine a decision tree where each end node has a set of probabilities and a utility points values per outcome probability. You multiply out the probability of each outcome with it's point value and pick the decision path which maximizes your probability weighted outcome. In most cases utility points equals how much money you make or lose but it doesn't have to be that.
So if one path has a 10% chance of -100000 points (ie something terrible happens) and a 90% chance of get 1000 points (something very good happens) this path has an expected value of (.1 * -100000) + (.9 * 1000) = -9100
whereas some other branch has a 100% chance of an outcome of 10 points. You take the branch where you get the guaranteed 10 points because even though the best case is on the other branch, the average case on that branch is worse than on the 10 point branch.
And what I'm saying is they decided that their highest average payoff as doing some compromised version of self allowed diy whereas they get a really bad payoff in the case where the diy legislation is written externally and actually forces them to allow reasonable diy
Read the text messages (different lawsuit) between musk and prominent (imho) Oxford philosopher William McAskill. Musk is asked repeatedly to meet and take money from this brillian guy called SBF. It’s weird bc I read wills book and really looked up to him, but clearly SBF can be very convincing. Elon seemed to not want to do it but the text messages suggest he did eventually take a call.
So Elon must not have liked how that went since he was publicly encouraging others to roll over.
All three of those people are dumb assholes. Not sure how that couldn't be clearer given all of their behavior. Part of life is being able to suss out people like these characters and never once did I think any of them had anything of value to contribute.
If this episode isn't a giant warning sign for MacAskill and all of the rest of these characters, what would be? Maybe he's not as dumb as he always acts, but SBF seems more like a pawn of the altruism cabal than the other way around.
He’s had (guessing, including multi guest, and the mma pieces) close to 2,000 guests, and probably has spoken about trans a maximum of 5 times? Call it 1%. If you assume a 2 hour podcast length and a 2 minute instagram length clip that’s 0.01%ish? That’s probably at (or maybe significant below) main stream medias coverage of the topic but that’s a wild guess.
I’m guessing (but not willing to check although it’s easily empirically proveavle) that the variance in view count per episode more than outweighs any “trans conversation premium” if that even exists. At acquisition Spotify mentioned Joe was the most searched query in their search bar they don’t have.
The value of his podcast is the massive audience of humans who watch his 2 to 3 hour multiple times a week diatribes, it’s probably not the little clips that anger people. If you’re clicking at a trans clip and foaming of the mouth, you’re probably going to be super disappointed to listen to 10 hours of rogan and find no salacious topic included.
Plus I’m biased once but he swung by my ju jitsu gym once and he seemed like one of the most normal humans every and super humble.
It’s probably either: how he speaks, his takes in general, how others view him, how others reamplify him, or something else, but I really doubt he’s beating the drum on transgender rights since he’s he seems to in favor of all socially liberal topics in general.
I don't watch Rogan a whole lot nowadays (used to regularly before the Spotify purchase), but back when I did he spoke about Trans people (especially atheletes) way more than 5 times. It wasn't constantly, though, although it did seem like he wormed it in a few times where it wasn't really called for (to be fair he does that for several of his interests, hence the "Have you ever tried DMT?" meme[1]). And that was before he started bringing more alt-right guests on the show.
To me it was clear he had an axe to grind in regards to the subject, though, and took out that axe out semi-regularly.
I went to one of his stand-up shows last year. Both him and the guys he had opening all had maybe 30% trans jokes. He's definetely catering to an antitrans crowd these days
I wonder how many in the crowd are reacting to being labelled antitrans and transphobic unfairly. It's definitely what I see the comedians reacting to.
Definitely some of that. I think a person should have the right to do whatever they want with themselves, and it's not mine or the states business. I'm sure others in the crowd felt the same way. I can see why people would have issues with the routine he put on though, it was certainly not a kind one, and saying he just has a few instances of bringing up trans issues seems like a outright lie.
In my AA we say that alcoholism is a chronic disease. The same as (some forms) of diabetes, you don’t just get rid if it. Its something you can manage but not cure. It lies dormant inside of you the rest of your life.
My mentor (highly successful and 30 years sober) said it nicely: he has an angry tiger inside of him thats trapped inside a cage. One that will surely eat him if it gets out. His job is to keep the tiger in the cage.
Thats what it feels like. Every day. The cravings go down, the thoughts, etc. Self control improves. But the danger lies dormant for us.