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In these pages, and at Leftfield proper, you’ll encounter the refrain again and again:

Attend to what IS.

Reminder that it is here, in the present, that the rubber meets the road.

And that is always a function of attention. In the past two essays, we’ve looked at how structure provides the conditions under which attention can flourish. How rituals, boundaries and deliberate practice help channel it toward our best ends.

We’ve also seen that this cuts both ways. Because attention measures the degree to which experience is experienced, what ultimately matters is not what we claim to value, appreciate or love, but what receives our attention.

The only avenue by which life is lived.

But to focus exclusively on what IS, of course, omits one all-too-important, all too-human element of experience.

Imagination.

More than merely responding to the world as it is, we can imagine worlds that are not. We can rehearse conversations that have yet to happen. Picture futures that don’t exist. Mentally test-drive ideas without paying their real-world costs.

No evolutionary accident. In fact, arguably, our greatest advantage. The capacity to imagine what isn’t has allowed us to build everything that is. Every bridge, symphony, business, scientific discovery and civilisation itself first existed only in possibility. Imagination, then, is not an escape from reality but one of the primary tools by which we navigate it.

At Leftfield, of course, we program, plan and forecast, but— certainly by contrast to a conventional fitness approach that keeps your eyes on the prize of a utopian future inhabited by your utopian self, we seek neither to dismiss nor dilute this superpower by our blinkered focus on the present, only to discipline it.

And not only because, like any tool, it can be used against us, but because in this instance it so assuredly is. Roads not taken, conversations never had, careers never pursued, bodies never built. An alternative version of life against which the real one is forever found wanting. All upside far outweighed by the down.

And while I’ve long coached the navigation of this predictable obstacle in others, I find I’m only becoming more guilty of it myself. Something, I guess—or imagine— to come courtesy of ever-diminishing capacities, the sure byproduct of age.

As possibility steadily gives way to history, imagination finds itself with ever more raw material from which to construct these comparisons. Advice not to dwell on such things may be well-meaning, but it feels a meagre defence against this tide.

So rather than not looking, let’s take a Leftfield-look and see if we can be a little more precise about what’s happening because the problem isn’t imagination. And seeing so can help swing the odds back in our favour.

Even against the immensity, the indifference, the implacability of time.

Comparison, as they say, is the thief of joy. A thief kept busy throughout human history, and whether you were rocking the finest flint adze or new season sabretooth pelt, some homo habilis would always show up with a better one.

Better horse.

Better thatched hut.

Better sword.

Better mate.

But we humans never learn, and sure enough, our social media-saturated, consumerist society has come to reflect the polar opposite of this wisdom. Most tellingly— as well as fueling this misery— the infinity of the doom scroll is the reductio ad absurdum that proves the folly.

There is now literally no end to the Joneses. And they are all younger, better looking, and wealthier than you. Better house. Better car. And having a much better holiday.

So you can stop playing that game.

But of course, we need no Jones at all for this trick and will cast this same envious Eye of Sauron on ourselves. And be just as miserable for it. Somewhere in the background on a parallel track, that version of you that didn’t take that job, or did. That stayed, or left. That started earlier, trained harder, chose differently.

You might not know them better than you know yourself, but you like them better. The one without the hangup, the injury or the heartbreak. The one without so many miles on the clock.

Haunted by your ghost self.

The good news is, that stick you are beating yourself with is just as imaginary. Because insofar as any counterfactual could ever exist— and absent a quantum physics explanation, we don’t have time for — that particular counterfactual could not.

Sometimes the ghost lives on Instagram. Sometimes it lives twenty years ago. Sometimes in the body you used to inhabit. It’s always the same ghost.

And it’s always constructed in the same impossible fashion. As one who got to choose and preserve all options. All your ambitions and none of the constraints. One who navigated every fork in the road while never paying the toll.

This is not a might-have-been or spying some greener grass, and the idea of genuine possibility does no harm, but what we’re imagining is the impossible.

At least for us.

Again, without getting into the nuts and bolts— or quarks and quanta. In quantum mechanics, a wave function exists in superposition — pure undifferentiated potential — until it collapses into a single actuality.

A collapse mirrored at our human scale. We think of potential as though it were some ever-diminishing resource — a leaking reservoir— when it is just as available to you from one moment to the next. A set of possibilities available before the next action. An action that will revise those possibilities again.

So every choice is an act of exclusion. Every ‘yes’ contains a multitude of nos. Attention is simply this process made continuous. To attend is to select. To select is to exclude. To exclude is to define. We might consider this narrowing a negative, but if our progress comes from opening doors, then meaning comes from closing them.

Marriage. Career. Children. Friendship. All determined by what they are not. Are any of these made better by keeping your options open?

Evolution works the same way. Selection, not accumulation. Fitness, not fullness.

Our biological trajectory trends in one direction, and a fitness practice isn't an attempt to reverse it—not one driven by a sense of lack or the delusion of resurrection.

A practice — in the Leftfield fit for purpose sense — is that continuous contact with the present. Not a destination. Not an identity. Not a before-and-after, just an ongoing appointment with yourself that aims to preserve, for as long as possible, the conditions under which that self retains agency.

So your choices aren’t made for you.

But importantly, rational though this is, there is nothing cold about it. Firstly, you should feel what choosing costs— that too is its value. And this is not to argue against regret nor aspiration— both instructive— only the unhelpful, needless suffering.

Emotional regulation is useful, of course, but save it for the real world. Your ghost self is no more real than a Ringwraith. One of them is much better at ruining your life.

At the very least, you might conjure up some costs for that other self. If it’ll make you feel better— and because it’s imaginary— go ahead and saddle that poor fool with some hefty ones.

Or forget that foray into fantasy and focus instead on what is.

Reality contains genuine possibilities. Those deserve your attention. Because The Boss was wrong, your glory days don’t pass you by; you’re living them. And one day, you’ll look back and wonder at the vim and vigour you presently enjoy.

Youth is wasted on the young. And you’ll never be younger.

Enjoy your weekend

- OLI

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THE BESTOF’S

BEST IN SHOW

Two pieces examining the slippery idea of authenticity. I say slipperly because while reading them prompted what began as a straightforward rant about a real pet peeve, it somewhere took an ontological turn into wondering what it is we actually want from art? Skill? Risk? Sincerity? Or simply proof that another mind was on the other end of it? And whether those are even four different things, or one.

I’m still thinking, so I’m still writing. Or vice versa.

Here, we look at whether art can survive being fully absorbed into commerce or being untethered from a real, present self.

Mastroianni traces the death of ‘selling out’ as a cultural stigma — from 90s musicians refusing commercial tie-ins to today’s normalised celebrity-brand fusion.

But we do need to revive our desire for seriousness among our cultural elite. If we’re going to let these people into our lives, they ought to stand for something more than themselves.

Experimental History

Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos

Here’s a story from 30 years ago that would make no sense today…

Read more

a month ago · 651 likes · 115 comments · Adam Mastroianni

Gioia defends authenticity from those who dismiss it as naive or performative.

If there were a polygraph test for artistic expression, we would want our favorite musicians to pass without the needle dipping into the dangerous red zone, where falsifiers and con artists do their dirty work.

The Honest Broker

Authenticity in Music

Today I’m sharing one of the “big” essays that define my life’s work as a critic—a piece I’ve worked on for years. I’m publishing it here in its entirety for the first time…

Read more

24 days ago · 437 likes · 75 comments · Ted Gioia

For the better part of two decades, we’ve treated each new technology as innocent until proven guilty. More bizarrely, we’ve done so despite repeatedly finding it guilty. From smartphones to social media, technologies sold as tools of connection have become engines of surveillance, distraction and behavioural manipulation.

And not as unfortunate side effects. That promise of connection has instead erased social ties and led to the atomisation of society— it’s a business model that can only be described as bait and switch.

And still, with each new technology, we’re just as captivated by the promised upside as we were the last.

And so Jonathan Haidt argues for a well-founded—and long-overdue— techno-scepticism.

We already demand evidence of safety for medicines, toys, and food additives; why should technologies designed to shape attention, relationships, and development be exempt?

Shift the burden of proof from critics of technology to its creators.

Let them prove that their products are safe. We treat them like any other maker of potentially dangerous consumer products: we make them prove that their products are safe before they push them out into the world. And we hold them responsible for their safety lapses.

After Babel

Why You Should Be a Techno-Skeptic

Introduction from Jonathan Haidt…

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a month ago · 542 likes · 75 comments · Jon Haidt

But here’s what I find most telling: of all the things this budget reformed, the government’s own spending wasn’t one of them. There was no plan to shrink the size of government, no serious attempt to ask why the APS needs to keep growing so fast. Every other part of the economy was asked to adjust. The one part of the economy that gets to write its own cheque was not.

https://quillette.com/2026/06/19/the-party-of-the-worker-is-now-the-party-of-the-bureaucrat/?

A short course in the pragmatic wisdom of William James. And especially required reading for those who don't 'feel like it'.

Here’s the part that’s meant to make you uncomfortable, and then the part that’s meant to set you free, and they are the same part.

https://bakadesuyo.com/2026/06/william-james/

Eric Barker again, with a different philosopher this time—and hitting many of the same themes throughout this edition.

Žižek starts with the assumption that we don’t even know what we want half the time and are frequently invested in not getting it.

Sounds bleak until you reflect on your own conduct for, oh, ninety seconds.

https://bakadesuyo.com/2026/06/self-sabotage/

And, very much in keeping with James’ philosophy, Raptitude aims to put himself out of business with the answer to every problem:

An answer that — like the Leftfield axiom to do what you can— severs inaction from justification. Every excuse, every rationalisation evaporates. There is nowhere left to retreat.

The dictum doesn’t ask anything of you that you can’t give.

You do it. Or you don’t.

https://www.raptitude.com/2026/06/the-answer-to-every-problem/

In other words, the most bleedingly obvious tactic Iran could have used — a tactic every previous president had weighed as a reason not to go to war — was used. And our entire plan was dependent on their not doing that for some reason. And once they did, we were fucked. It’s really not a lot more complicated than that. Laughable incompetence.

The Weekly Dish

America's Suez Moment

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a month ago · Andrew Sullivan

You’ll know me to be critical of the cult of consumption and optimisation in fitness, and here Derek Thompson makes nearly the same point but gets caught in the same optimisation trap in missing the fitness forest for the trees,

Fitness, like anything, can be taken to absurd extremes, but those pursuing quantified longevity, biomarkers and marginal gains are a rounding error against the far larger story of widespread—and increasing—physical incapacity.

The real problem is that we’ve come to view fitness only through this lens. As a hobby, lifestyle —or optimisation project—rather than what it is at bottom: a precondition for agency.

A measure of our capacity to engage in life.

And so — yes— it is and will continue to become a class (and cultural - and every other) divide you can think of, all as extensions of what is a functional one. In evolutionary terms, the most fundamental divide.

Whether through the mirage of metrics or any other proxy, biohackers and their optimising ilk only mistake the map for the territory. It merely masquerades as fitness, and whether pursued for identity, status, social capital, or an end in itself will readily become just another form of captivity.

Recognised as the foundation for everything else, it becomes the opposite.

To become a measurably enhanced self often means eliminating my less quantifiable sources of meaning and happiness.

Derek Thompson

The Cult of the Enhanced Self

I. The Ring…

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a month ago · 919 likes · 25 comments · Derek Thompson

Mindfulness, as defined by Kabat-Zinn, is the intentional, nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment that fosters relational clarity and healing, encouraging individuals to cultivate discernment and embrace their experiences without the distractions of judgment or striving.

https://bigthink.com/my-classes/paying-attention-on-purpose/paying-attention-on-purpose/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=membership-class&utm_content=ss-btc-top-button-jon-kabat-zinn

A 2025 survey found that 57 percent of young French Muslims aged 15 to 24 believe Sharia law should take precedence over French Republic law. A majority position among the next generation of French citizens.

Behind the Narrative 📣

The Death of France - The Secret Report Macron Is Hiding

It’s a typical afternoon in Saint-Denis, the narrow streets packed with people whose faces you cannot see. The women move in niqab, shapes without features, eyes that do not meet yours. The shop signs are in Arabic, the smell of cumin and lamb fat rises from every doorway, thick and permanent, as if the street itself has been marinated in another world…

Read more

2 months ago · 1896 likes · 492 comments · Behind the Narrative 📣

We’re headed to a divide between amplifying agency and becoming a cog. Where do you want to go?

https://seths.blog/2026/06/standby-intervention/

Like everything else at Leftfield, when learning to jump, fall, or even get up and down from the ground, step one is to improve our understanding of what is happening.

An understanding, in this instance, distorted by the common illusion that you are travelling around inside your head, suspended a considerable distance from, or even said to be ‘off’ the ground— as though you were levitating.

A more precise—and therefore useful— ‘embodied’ perspective teaches you to be, first aware of, and then operating from your centre of gravity.

So immediately you halve that ‘distance’, and correspondingly make everything half as scary. More so when we recognise that standing tall and lying flat are only different variations of being ‘on’ the ground.

As is so often the case, it's easy to dismiss this as semantics. But semantics shape perception, perception shapes behaviour, and when you come to believe you’re a long way from the ground— instead of feeling your connection to it— it’s no wonder you’re afraid of it.

And that’s the worst mistake of all.

Here, MovNat breaks down the key consideration when learning to jump. As with any other form of training, intensity is scaled to your ability to perform the exercise well, so the distance you can jump is determined not by how far or high you can go, but how well you can land safely.

A further interesting physical corollary to the mindset detailed last week is the advice when landing (or falling) to accept the ground.

Don’t (pretend you can) reject what IS (happening).

The point here is in the mindset: jumping down, falling, rolling, all involve the mindset of embracing the ground like a trusted friend; not fighting it off like your mortal enemy.

https://movnat.com/downward-jumping/?

Running (and carrying) — you are made for it.

We stand on two legs, have springy arches in our feet, long tendons in our legs, big butt muscles, sweat glands across our body, no fur, complicated noses that humidify air before it hits our lungs, and more.

Two Percent with Michael Easter

Harvard's Running and Rucking Prescription

Last Wednesday, we looked at a study led by scientists at Harvard that identified an ideal amount of strength training per week for health…

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22 days ago · 133 likes · 15 comments · Michael Easter

Good form is a range. It's wide, because your body gets a say, and it has hard edges, because some things are dangerous no matter who you are.

https://gmb.io/good-form/?

MISCELLANEOUS

Recommendations reflect what I’ve been reading/listening to/watching/using recently but, in most instances, and especially where music is concerned, will not have been released in the past month.

MUSIC

BOOKS

TV

The Brigade (S3) and the World Cup.

APP

CLIP

Have a great weekend.

- OLI

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I spend a lot of time at the park. Dawn and dusk on most days. So I can’t help but get a very good feel for who’s who in the zoo.

In the morning, it’s invariably the dog that gets the outing, but in the early evenings, I see Mum and/or Dad at the park with the kid(s). And Mum or Dad — I guess in some cases it’s the nanny — are always talking on, or reading, their phone, and never interacting with the kids. Until home time: let’s go.

It seems to me as if they are going to the park only to say—or to tell themselves— that they have taken the kids to the park. Box ticked.

— What have you been doing?
— I’ve been at the park with the kids.

Technically true. But really, the only kid included here is the kidding themselves that this is in any way comparable to those who remain mentally at the park, with the kids.

Now, if you are saying that the kid is at the park, it’s not the worst place in the world, and at least they are outside and… yes, yes. I agree. My point is that mere physical presence does not make these the same thing. My further point is:

When are you better placed to take the additional benefits — for all concerned — rather than leaving them on the table? You are ALREADY physically in the park.

I’m not a parent, and if the scourge of identity politics has you dismissing this observation as somehow worthless for that reason, stick around because I’m about to bring this right back into my wheelhouse. Because the very same mindset applies when you take yourself off to the park — or anywhere else — to train. Or anything else.

Or everything else. If there is any truth to Woody Allen’s promise that eighty percent of success is showing up, it is surely only if the corresponding mental attendance has been assumed. Or a failure to state the obvious. More likely, it’s a maxim true only of its time.

Oh, Lucius, you have no idea. No idea of a world where — by the same Orwellian inversion that gave us the 'smart’ phone — ‘engagement’ now measures the degree to which you have checked out.

Not engaged, but absent.

Elsewhere.

Gone fishin’.

When you exercise, are you merely ticking the box or are you truly present? Mindlessly going through the motions or paying attention? Are you engaged — in the original sense of the word?

Progress in any domain comes courtesy of successive iteration, but if you miss the feedback, you iterate nothing. And so you are spinning your wheels. Indefinitely. Wheelspinning is in itself some pretty clear feedback, but there are plenty who’ll miss that too.

I’ll keep saying it: your body and mind reflect what you do. Exactly. So if you want to look, feel and perform like you really don’t give a shit, you know how to go about it.

The alternative — deep, focused engagement — is not only not difficult with some application, it further offers blessed relief from the otherwise unwavering, ceaseless, mindless self-commentary. As to how you go about that, well it’s easy. You start by removing everything purposed only to distract.

The typical gym will usually have you on a treadmill or exercise bike, wheels spinning— injury or illness excepted — the most pointless forms of exercise known to man. If you have a wall of televisions in front of you— I’ve also seen magazine racks next to recline bikes— you’ll be better served by removing yourself from the distractions. And the gym. Music, podcasts, the news and — so help me, baby Jesus — breakfast television all gone.1

The next step is harder. Because now you are left to wrangle with that most dreaded, although increasingly rare occurrence of the modern day — the untasked mind. Luckily, you do have a task. You are training.

Take the hackneyed suggestion to dance like nobody is watching and flip it. Your focus now is to make every set, every rep, every movement look like you’re in an Olympic final. You’ll find this demands your attention — not only to how it looks, but to how it feels. How are you breathing? Are you breathing?

It’s not as if you will be able to do this all the time. Thoughts will keep intruding — that’s fine. Just keep coming back to your Olympic final. Set by set. Rep by rep.

Let’s just say from here on out that you can consider it written at the top of every program you ever do — in big capital letters — inviting your mind to the party:

OLYMPIC FINAL. PAY ATTENTION.

Along with the squats and pushups, you decide if you’ll do it or not.

Then training becomes an opportunity to both maximise the physical benefits on the table and hone a further mental edge into the bargain, something that will serve you equally well beyond the confines of the session as any physical exercise. Test-driving it in an environment that rewards it so surely is all upside.

Its absence can be somewhat more severe.

Mindfulness has suffered the same fate as engagement—a word that once meant something precise, hollowed out to smuggle in no end of quackery. Commonly mistaken for emptying the mind or a serene state of non-attachment, accessible via an app with a soothing interface and a monthly subscription, mindfulness is not the absence of thought but the direction of attention.

Awareness. Not the emptying of mind but filling it purely with what is happening when it is so often filled —to the brim— with anything but.

Our attention works in strictly linear fashion, the misnomer of multitasking, in fact, the fragmentary switching from one to another and back, its attendant illusion that this passes as an efficient use of our time when it couldn’t be less so.

But this too is a relic of times past, with technology designed to prevent even that.

I once rescued a child at the park whose phone-faced mother was unaware her toddler had slipped through the gaps in a jungle gym; his bike helmet had not, leaving him suspended by the strap, arms flailing. It’s not as if I was watching him either, and it was the quiet that alerted me.

Mum, deaf to the sudden silence of her child being hanged.

Not six months later, another. This time, the kid had curled up right behind the back wheel of a stationary, but engine-running, park worker’s ute. The parent oblivious.

Focused attention, then, while a prerequisite for anyone intending to improve at anything, is not merely a performance, ‘wellness’ —or child safety— tip.

It is the means by which experience is experienced— that life is lived. We know this, of course, and it’s not ignorance but avoidance that has us tapping out when life doesn’t measure up, and that too is our mistake. When you open yourself to the intricacies of the mundane, you come to realise that boredom often means you are not looking closely enough. The antidote to the session that drags, the cold drizzle, the burn, the remedy, in fact, to any resistance, is to attend more closely. To remain right in it.

People I would never want to spend any time with would say lean in, but whatever you want to call it, without it, your mind is only hitting the wavetops. Skimming past it.

And it, is reality.

It is your life.

You may decide it’s not worth investigating. A decision that can only come from distraction— but even then — is that not worth investigating?

Exercise is a gift to your body and mind; it is nourishment that, if we look to the Latin verb parere, meaning ‘to bring forth’, is just good parenting. You give your attention to what is meaningful. To everything that you decide deserves it. Towards whatever you wish to cultivate. And so you gift that too.

Because in our age of distraction, it is only the mapping of your attention onto that most precious, non-renewable resource, that makes no present like the time.

Enjoy your weekend

- OLI

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In the martial arts, while not ubiquitous, it's common to bookend every class with a bow. In the Japanese arts, this is merely further observance of a broader societal etiquette, but it extends to arts from other countries.

A display of respect and due deference to rank and/or class, this etiquette makes little sense in any martial context, with the students of lower belts — and lesser ability— positioned closest to the entrance. Were you attacked in this moment of vulnerability, any element of surprise would be lost wading through the novices with more senior practitioners, positioned deeper in the space, having time to respond.

Less of a concern for newbies these days, but the tradition remains.

A mark of respect. I have received instruction from teachers who were seriously flawed as humans. I am fortunate to know others that well earn any honour the title ‘Sensei’ might bestow in being fine teachers and people.

Translating to ‘one who comes before’, this is all a bow need acknowledge— You know more than I do. Along with the gratitude that you are prepared to teach me. Really, the only essential qualifications for a teacher.

But in the same way, a soldier can salute the uniform and not the person wearing it, a bow is less about an individual than what they represent— the lineage, the tradition, the process.

That which predates and will outlast you both.

In a day and age when ‘I paid for it’ is mistakenly believed to mark the beginning and end of due respect, this is increasingly viewed as unnecessarily subservient. A humility, I would argue, that is sorely missed in students (and parents) in schools, and in wider society full stop.

Not least because this transactional thinking doesn't just produce bad students — it produces bad learners. Learning is not something you take from but something you take on. Something you are changed by. Insofar as it can be given, it must equally be received.

With teachers as vending machines and students mere consumers, attention thins, feedback is dulled, and all possibility of iteration is reduced.

Humility isn’t subservience; only the accurate acknowledgement that you don’t yet know what you came to learn. And without that, you can’t be taught anything.

Some arts further require another bow when stepping on or off the mat. This imbues the physical space with meaning. A dojo, like studios of any variety—art, music, yoga— has a singular purpose, but it doesn’t come built into bricks and mortar. We bring meaning.

But this also points to how the bow imbues yet another, even more important space with purpose: the one between the ears.

Our modern malaise is a flattening of experience in which everything begins to feel like everything else. Work bleeds into rest. Rest bleeds into distraction. Distraction bleeds back into work. Not an absence of boundaries, but an absence of noticing them. Transitions so weakly defined that in terms of our subjective experience, it becomes difficult to say where one state ends and another begins.

But this same beige, not-too-bad, not-too-great subjective experience of life comes not with an equally ‘beige’ quality of attention humming away but because of it. And quality of attention is not simply a matter of effort, but a matter of structure and without it your mind will continue to serve up the same thin gruel.

The bow interrupts that continuity. It marks a transition. And so here too it signals importance— the shift to intentional, deliberate and conscious. Awake. It directs your attention to why you are here and what you are about to do. It switches the outside world off at the start, and back on at the end. And this commitment and focus demonstrate the highest respect of all — both to the practice and to yourself.

At Leftfield, we begin each session with a breathing drill and close out with a rocking drill, and while there is a sound physiological rationale for both, they serve this same bookend role. I’ll hasten to add that there is no bowing involved, but when it comes to fitness, this is the attitude that will serve you best. One of respect and humility to the practice— that which is greater than us.

Interestingly, this marks both a separation and a continuity, because it has you thinking in terms of ‘practice’ rather than ‘workout.’ A workout is discrete and completable. You do it, and it is done. A practice is cumulative and ongoing. Defined not by completion but by participation over time. It does not reset. It does not restart.

I can’t think of any workout that might have justified a bow, but is there any higher practice than ensuring you are fit for purpose?

That might seem overstated — especially in a society that relegates the value of fitness to the bottom rung of the ladder and then equates it with the grabbing, wanting, dictating, arrogance and mindless bullshit of conventional fitness culture. Quite the contrast. But when the current approach is hard to describe as anything other than a failure, a contrast is exactly what we're looking for.

So try taking a second to bow. It needn’t be formal or solemn, but like the dojo I train in, formality is no enemy of fun — we learn and perform better when relaxed. But ‘fun’ —or any other thing—never comes at the expense of our reason for being there.

Indeed, a bow need take no physical form whatsoever — you can bow in your mind. And not to anybody or anything necessarily, more to yourself. And what you intend to do. You can make anything special; you only have to treat it as such. This intent can bookmark the session but, as we’ll look at next, every set. Even every rep.

An intentional mindset is the fundamental difference separating the endless frustration of exercise and the endless reward of training.

So put a bow on it.

Enjoy your weekend

- OLI

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If there’s one thing that never gets old, it’s novelty.

So, as a final call for Youniversity, I figured we’d do something special. What if I told you that you could do something right now for the very first time?

That might not sound like such a big deal, necessarily—although the older we get, the bigger deal it becomes— but no, that’s not quite what I mean either.

Not merely something you could do for the first time, but something that, in all likelihood, has never been done before. By anybody. Ever.

No joke.

Okay. Go and get yourself a deck of cards.

Shuffle them.

Shuffle them good.

Ready?

With all the weight of expectation, I didn’t want you to choke, so the good news is, you’ve already done it. You’ve shuffled a deck of cards into an arrangement that has almost certainly never been done before.

Not once in the entire history of human beings shuffling decks of cards.

Not in all recorded time. And so, on this fine day, you join some esteemed company— those who clawed humanity forward at the very frontiers of human advancement: Shackleton, Hilary, Armstrong, and now you.

This is the power of factorials — the mathematical symbol for which, quite appropriately, is an exclamation mark. Because these are numbers that get eyebrow-raising very fast.

Only to just as quickly get eyebrow-lowering. Because when we start to venture beyond the millions, we humans have trouble putting these numbers into any sort of perspective.

For example, if one million seconds past was about eleven days ago— back on about 2nd June— take a stab at how long ago 1 billion seconds was…

31.7 years. Were you close?

And that’s still a rounding error compared to the territory we’re in here. And that matters because it isn’t merely numbers we misjudge.

It’s complexity.

It’s probability.

It’s reality itself.

A deck of 52 cards can be arranged in 8 x 10⁶⁷ possible configurations. A number so astronomically large it is essentially meaningless without illustration. So I'll leave you with Matias Frank Jenson on Wait But Why (abridged below) to give you a far better idea. Hang on.

Actually, it’s probably better if you sit down. And hang on.

And with that tenuous grip on the combinatorial possibilities that a mere 52 variables offer up, I’d like you to consider something else.

You.

Because the outcome of your shuffle wasn’t random. Well — it was, but only in the sense that weather is random, or history is random. It emerged from a specific arrangement of forces— a specific person, in a specific place, at a specific time.

Had you stopped half a second earlier, been interrupted by a text message, sneezed midway through, or shuffled one extra time for luck, you'd be looking at a different outcome.

And where a deck contains a mere 52 variables, your every breath involves many, many more. Sleep quality. Stress load. Age. Hormonal profile. Training. Medication. Genetics. Workload. Circadian rhythm. Recovery. Social support. Injury history. Habits. Beliefs.

Consider all the strange and wonderful combinations therein. And that’s not exhaustive; it’s barely a start. I haven’t even mentioned food, but there are 108 known contributing factors to fat loss alone.

We readily accept that no two fingerprints are alike. No two faces. No two lives, but our health and fitness frustrations are precisely because we believe they want only for another program.

Another diet. Another routine. Another method.

Another time. And another time. And another time.

Frustrations inevitable when you have the power of these numbers working against you.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter whether you’re seeking these answers from an influencer on the gram or the Large Hadron Collider; the maths tells us the chances somebody has somehow accounted for your full factorial complexity are so vanishingly unlikely we can feel extremely confident in saying they are zero.

Which, interestingly, means that for all our endless individual complexity—our irreducible particularity— the solution is never universal.

The mistake always is.

Because there is no skeleton key.

But if you think this makes your chances of finding the answer equally unlikely, thankfully, this is not so. You can decode these variables in your life - in the same way that not 5 minutes ago you trailblazed humanity into the great unknown— because you are the shuffler.

Complexity does not mean confusion. It does not mean paralysis. Only that the solution is simply specific.

And specifically simple.

You’d never manage all variables equally— even if you could— and so the skill is not optimisation, but discrimination. The Theory of Constraints tells us that every system has a bottleneck, so we address this limiting factor. And keep doing so— identifying the points of highest leverage—the needle movers.

The question is never what works. The question is what works for you. Now. Given this history, this body, this life.

Not built around the fantasy that your life will finally calm down, but the reality that it probably won’t.

Iteration over prescription, self-generated feedback over ideology, embodied learning over abstract advice.

A system built around universal human physiology — organism-centric, species-specific, starting upstream and working down — can accommodate the full complexity of any individual. It does not hand you an answer. It generates your answer. From wherever you are.

And so that’s where we start.

If you want to know what that looks like in practice — that is Youniversity.

Not instruction, not motivation, not information, but calibration. A structured environment for learning to read your own tea leaves. For identifying your bottleneck. For understanding which variables are most in play, which to address first, and in what order.

Not because people are special, but because people are different.

And because reality is specific. And fluid.

The sequence is always the same. The answer never is.

You can let the cards fall where they may.

Or you can shuffle up and deal.

Leftfield Youniversity begins Friday. Applications close Monday, June 14th,

Enjoy your weekend

- OLI

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THE BESTOF’S

BEST IN SHOW

An easy one this month and far more positive given the recent doom and gloom, with GK and I lucky enough to score a last-minute hookup to the premiere of Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza.

We were just excited to be out of the house on a school night. On any night.

Both first-time Cirque's, wholly unprepared for quite how gob-smacked we would be for the next 90 minutes. We've accumulated enough miles that not much knocks us sideways these days, and in this instance, at least, that doesn't reveal a skerrick of jaded cynicism.

Cirque got there in seconds. From something you think you’ve seen to something you know you haven’t. Taking your standard circus trope and squaring it, challenging not just your senses, but your understanding of reality. Really upsetting your applecart.

Look, Cirque don’t use animals, but by way of illustration, imagine being at a circus, and a lion ate the ringmaster. That would be surprising.

Now imagine if the ringmaster ate the lion.

You’ll get some sense of just how bananas it is from the clip below, but TV just doesn’t cut it. Doesn’t come close.

It puts any elite sport I’ve ever seen in the shade. And, insofar as you can grasp just how far beyond the norm the Olympics is in representing the pinnacle of human achievement and just how rarefied that air is, this was next level again.

Comfortably. Not because they were better athletes, necessarily, but because there is simply no frame of reference.

You know what stretching is, you know what jumping is, you know what balance is. The gap between you and an Olympian may be vast, but it is comprehensible.

These seemed not the feats of extraordinary humans, but the feats of gods.

So if you’ve never been and get the opportunity, don’t even think about it.

Go. There is nothing like it.

Sharing the podium this month is a piece from Raptitude with a distinctly Leftfield take on gratitude.

Not a technique to improve your mood, increase your resilience, or optimise your life, but as a reflection of reality. And so becomes its most effective means to all of those ends by virtue of one sure property. Not positive thinking. Not affirmation.

Accuracy.

The full value of any bounty is inseparable from its limits, and so gratitude is not the denial of constraint but its acknowledgement. A more faithful reckoning of what is—and what isn’t. By your being closer to reality.

An even more interesting observation follows. The ultimate behavioural mechanism on offer here is not the usual self-help banalities, inspiration, affirmation, or positivity, but something approaching a third rail in modern discourse: shame.

I’ll spare us both the treatise on why the modern tendency to treat this enduring feature of human psychology, preserved for hundreds of thousands of years, as ‘toxic’ is problematic, to put it mildly, only to make the more pragmatic point: if you’re trying to change your behaviour to elicit a desired outcome, use the best means at your disposal.

Because there are few more powerful drivers of behaviour change.

Positive incentives are easy to ignore. Gratitude might improve your life, but you can always decide not to practise it. Exercise might make you healthier, but you can always skip the session. The benefits are real, but participation remains optional. You feel free to decide whether to afford yourself that luxury. Or not.

But shame, guilt, obligation, duty and the like are different. They are the checks and balances coralling our worst impulses. Enforcement mechanisms transforming preference into obligation, something personally inconvenient into something socially necessary. As guardrails that evolved not merely to protect the individual but the harmony and safety of the tribe, they feel mandatory, and for good reason.

Here, the question is not whether they feel good but whether they reliably steer your behaviour towards your desired outcome.

I’ll repeat:

Your desired outcome.

Positive emotions entice. Negative emotions enforce.

Reward invites. Duty compels.

To cut the strawmen off at the knees, of course, this doesn’t mean brow-beating, humiliation or self-loathing— or any other way in which you might turn a positive into a negative.

But the recognition that we squander our riches, lost in either the pretence of more or a wholly manufactured poverty, is a jolt of perspective that may prove a more effective catalyst for gratitude than a thousand journals ever could.

…not to recognize that line either way is tragic. It’s like winning ten million dollars, then insisting you won fifty million and spending as though you did.

https://www.raptitude.com/2026/04/count-your-blessings-but-count-carefully/

And straight back into the mire with Noahpinion echoing the same point I made in February, that:

Trump is not a Russian/Chinese plant, but at this point it’s hard to imagine what else a Russian/Chinese plant would even do in order to weaken America’s international standing

Noahpinion

Are you tired of the Trump era yet?

I get a lot of flak from progressives for being a “both sides” kind of commentator. I spend a fair amount of time criticizing leftist ideology and expounding on the very real failures of progressive governance, both of which have gotten much worse over the last decade. Yes, I support the Democrats, but that support is…

Read more

2 months ago · 905 likes · 133 comments · Noah Smith

And, as if to underline what I wrote about these being the last people you want in charge of any AI transition, Marc Andreeson revealed that, as a boost to productivity, he aspires to ‘zero introspection’.

A statement, ironically enough, that could only come from somebody hitting that KPI exactly.

Just like fallen crypto-king SBF and his ‘boast’ that he ‘would never read a book’. And ‘I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.’

Don’t worry, Marc; we can tell.

…we need to look outside of Silicon Valley for wisdom. The better alternative should be obvious—it’s called the humanities. And it’s the ultimate productivity hack.

The Honest Broker

Socrates vs. the Venture Capitalist

At his trial in 399 BC, Socrates faced the death penalty on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. But in reality, philosophy and free inquiry were put on trial. Socrates had spent his life asking too damn many questions. And now the authorities wanted him to shut up…

Read more

3 months ago · 556 likes · 150 comments · Ted Gioia

And similarly…

…another influencing element is undoubtedly that the people designing our gadgets tend to be people well versed in programming, business, mathematics and other fields distant from a deep understanding of ethics or politics.

https://aeon.co/essays/things-have-jobs-and-digital-devices-are-made-to-track-you?

You need less faith in the imaginary version of yourself who is motivated “tomorrow” and more respect for the actual version who will absolutely, totally, 100% fold under the right conditions.

https://bakadesuyo.com/2026/05/get-better-at-anything/

Ordinary dreams are, perhaps, the clearest articulation of what it is like to be.

Big Think

Inside the brain's nightly erasure of "you"

by Rachel Barr…

Read more

2 months ago · 268 likes · 14 comments · Big Think and Rachel Barr

The Russia that threatens European security in 2026 is not the Russia of Western nightmares — a resurgent superpower with inexhaustible resources and remorseless strategic intent. It is something simultaneously less dramatic and more dangerous: a state in systemic decline, armed with nuclear weapons and governed by a leadership that has staked its survival on a narrative of strength it can no longer substantiate with economic, demographic, or military reality.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2026/05/16/stop_fearing_a_strong_russia_start_fearing_a_dying_one_1183069.html?

There are, no doubt, worse things you could eat for breakfast—none so thoroughly mischaracterised as cereal.

The main ingredients of breakfast cereals are sugar and processed, not whole, grains.

https://www.fitnessandpower.com/nutrition/6-worst-foods-you-can-eat-breakfast?

A piece from Big Think on the work of Columbia researcher Martin Picard, whose mitochondrial psychobiology research arrives at the same conclusion the recent A Fitness Footnote piece reached from first principles.

With Ralston, via decades of martial arts and somatic practice and now Picard, via Columbia and a mitochondrial model of human health, we now have ‘body-being’ in a lab coat.

Feeling alignment isn’t mystical; it’s biological.

You, as an energetic system, are the most sensitive instrument you have to know whether the content of your life — where you gain energy, what you do for purpose, who you are with — is aligned with who you are.

Big Think

What your body stops doing when you're stressed

by Jasna Hodžić…

Read more

2 months ago · 344 likes · 20 comments · Big Think

“Chronotype-aligned exercise produced roughly twice the improvement as misaligned exercise in this study.”

Physiologically Speaking

Physiology Friday #317: Should You Align Your Workout with Your Chronotype?

Greetings…

Read more

2 months ago · 19 likes · 11 comments · Brady Holmer

Tight, weak, and achy are three views of the same problem. Your hips need to move through their full range under load, and they aren’t getting it. Each symptom is just where your body’s drawing your attention to that fact.

https://gmb.io/hips/?

People take walking for granted and don’t recognize the inherent power in doing it correctly…

https://time.com/article/2026/05/05/walking-mistakes-how-to-fix/?mc_cid=486487bb75

Ask people if they like uncertainty, and they’ll deny it. They want to minimize or eliminate it at all costs. But we’re not great judges of what we’ll find truly satisfying.

https://bigthink.com/mind-behavior/why-play-brings-us-pleasure/?

MISCELLANEOUS

Recommendations reflect what I’ve been reading/listening to/watching/using recently but, in most instances, and especially where music is concerned, will not have been released in the past month.

MUSIC

BOOKS

In My Time of Dying - Sebastian Junger.

Everything he writes is excellent.

TV

The Corsican Line. Pass.

APP

CLIP

Have a great weekend.

- OLI

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A friend asked me recently if I had a personal trainer or coach. Then suggested that if I don’t value coaching, why should anybody else?

It might seem strange to some that after this long doing this thing, I might want or need a coach in my corner, but take it from somebody who has clocked up thousands of hours looking at— not looking out— and thousands more learning to train that objective detachment on oneself, there remains no substitute for an outside perspective.

To be clear— I hold teaching and teachers in very high regard, and I do receive coaching (in jujitsu) most days. I further consider myself eminently coachable with just enough self-awareness and candour to reveal that I am stubbornly resistant thus far to all business coaching advice, and if somebody can recommend a coach that doesn’t demand I hook myself to the soul-suction of social media, I’m all ears.

Just not where all-things-considered-fitness is concerned.

My program — of constants and addressing gaps — much like the rest of my practice, writes itself. And while I don't turn a positive into a negative by fretting about ticking every box, the 100% day would be rare, but the sub-90% day rarer still. It gets done because everything included has earned, and continues to earn, its place — so far from having to muster the motivation, it's harder not to do it.

I've learned — and value the practice of having to — eke out the last hard reps under my own steam and otherwise seek my own counsel. So when it comes to walking the talk of all this practice preaching, I am Exhibit A.

I don’t pretend that, given a bottomless budget and more hours in the day, a good coach wouldn’t make a measurable improvement in any number of areas —mobility, strength, a kettlebell drill— but the fact is, I’m happy with where I’m at and what I’m doing, so the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Except in one department. I've been thinking recently about venturing back down the rabbit hole and consulting some trainer/osteo/rehab-specialist hybrid regarding the ongoing issue I wrote about last year. I won't rehash it here other than to say, given the scars of old, I am more than a little wary I could be exposing myself to a good deal of downside for little up. And certain only a very long time dulling the mind has me even considering it.

But I also know that medicine and rehabilitation have come a long way in the past 20 years.

As have I— being unable to step into the same river twice, and all that.

But however that might pan out—and I’ll keep you informed—that’s not our story for today. It’s that, were you not quite so content with your fitness, dietary habits, energy or sleep, a similarly negative experience might have you just as gun-shy about dipping your toes back into these waters.

And fair enough.

Further, that even in light of my efforts here, this is where an outside perspective won’t help because, scarred or not, you’re unavoidably influenced by conventional fitness marketing and myth, so it’s virtually guaranteed you’ll have a skewed idea of what Leftfield is.

So let’s start with what it isn’t.

CrossFit evangelists.
Marathon runners.
Yoga devotees.
Keto disciples.
Cold-plunge absolutists.
Strength-and-conditioning purists.

Every corner of the ‘wellness’ —vomit— world has its true believers. Some are even telling the truth.

At least about themselves.

But there’s an assumption that because something worked for one person, under one set of circumstances, it represents a universal solution. That the view from where you’re standing is the only view worth having.

There is a spectrum here, obviously, from the highly credentialed and well-meaning to their opposites, but mercenary motivations aside, it’s perfectly understandable— when something genuinely transforms your world, it’s only natural that you want to share it.

And that’s about as generous as one could be for influencers promising their way, their truth and their light, but then you might well be levelling the same charge at me, what with all this practice palaver.

So our first difference is a what.

By contrast to any method, modality or style, Leftfield is a system. You might think of this as the difference between clothes and fashion. You wear clothes, I’m guessing. And I wear clothes.

But our clothes may be very different. Reflecting fashion… perhaps (cough), and any number of further considerations from budget, function, job and taste.

A method best solves one aspect of the problem for one type of person under one set of conditions. A single perspective that may be valid, effective, sometimes genuinely life-changing — but fixed.

Take a look at the list above again and imagine you had to pick one, and you’ll see what I mean. You’ll feel what I mean.

You’re trying them on, right? Some are immediately discounted. Others you're weighing up — how closely do they reflect you, your life, your circumstances?

Like mannequins in a shop window, but you have to buy the whole outfit— a method is a conclusion.

A system is a beginning. A system hasn’t determined anything yet— so there is nothing to try on.

And everything to try on.

It starts with whoever is standing in front of it. The librarian. The scaffolder. The young mother who can’t remember the last time she ate a meal without simultaneously managing three other things. Moving from first (physiological) principles, a system is built around the person, not the method, the modality, or the tool.

It is organism-centric. Species-specific. Human.

Try that on. A better description of you already, no? But a system that can then move seamlessly from that broadest base all the way to the individual, generating the right answer from wherever they are. Offering every perspective.

Their right answer.

And sure, that includes a best next step in strictly exercise terms — the right exercise, volume, intensity, and where appropriate, a method or modality. But a system elastic enough to be equally useful outside this narrow conventional fitness framing, and indeed must be, because sometimes the answer is not exercise. And rarely is it exercise only.

Sometimes it is:

• more sleep

• less stress

• more sunlight

• less intensity

• better meal structure

• more social connection

• less cognitive load

• recovery

• removing friction

• doing nothing for a week

• walking instead of training

• eating more, not less

• stopping ‘weight loss’ (for the love of..)

• reducing training frequency

• breathing room

To name a fraction. And if you’re wondering how I might determine that, I’m so glad you asked, because I don’t. You do.

And so our second difference is a who.

Because this is not a prescription imposed upon you, but a practice that develops from you. Because— and somebody else has summed it up far better than I can—

You might be thinking that — absent any business coaching— I’ve fallen prey to marketing mistake number one: that of being all things to all people.

But I don’t pretend it is all things. It is the first thing.

The fundamental physiological fact is that any isolated approach, trend ecosystem, disconnected tactic or single perspective solution—whatever their value— is best applied after alignment. Then, you can— and should— explore any approach you like. Kettlebells, running, yoga, cold water, whatever calls to you. Go for it. But you are choosing from alignment now, not hoping any single method will produce it.

It then becomes an expression of a practice rather than acting as a sorry substitute for it. A pretender.

The Leftield order of operations— the system— simply acknowledges that fitness is not the top of the hierarchy; it is an adaptation. And adaptation is physiologically expensive. A luxury item.

Health > Fitness > Performance.

When we’re stressed, sedentary, overstimulated, sleep-deprived and cognitively overloaded, it’s not surprising that our experience of ‘fitness’ is difficult, unsustainable and perpetually effortful. Your body will not, cannot, adapt when it has bigger physiological fish to fry. And perpetual discord with what you are is one very big fish.

And so Leftfield — is not an exercise system. It is a calibration system.

The idea is not to do more or even any exercise, necessarily. Exercise is one tool, sometimes a central one, sometimes not. But the objective is not fitness— capacity— in isolation, but an organism better aligned with the demands placed upon it.

Fit for purpose.

And this is precisely why Youniversity is not ‘one more thing to do.’ Done properly, it reduces friction across the rest of your life:

You’re thinking more clearly.

Sleeping better.

With more energy.

Less overwhelm.

Faster recovery.

And more self-belief.

Everything improves because your system is no longer fighting itself.

Leftfield Youniversity is the practical, pragmatic implementation of this system. Any program or diet can work during a six-week burst of motivation and low stress — but sooner or later the real world intrudes, and it’s square peg, round hole. The question is whether it survives contact with your actual life.

That’s where Leftield begins. And stays. With you in your life. Fitness not as some aesthetic garnish, but a fundamental physiological given.

The sequence is always the same. The answer never is.

Leftfield Youniversity begins June 19th, applications close Friday, June 5th,

Enjoy your weekend

- OLI

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Just waiting for work to settle down.

The kids to get a bit older

Or spring.

For whatever chaos du jour to resolve. And then we’ll start looking after ourselves. But best intentions don’t count for much. Ask Jules Winfield.

The consequences might accrue over a longer timeframe, but are ultimately no less serious than the situation our friend Brett finds himself in here.

And this is the fantasy that has us postponing our most important and urgent task to a never-arriving someday.

But like most fantasies, it dissolves on paper. Take a look:

My life will calm down. My health and fitness will follow.

Right.

Movement, sleep, recovery, routine— these are the levers that lie upstream of calm. They produce it. Not metaphorically — physiologically. Our mistake here is not merely believing that order will ever precede discipline. It is our failure to understand that only these will quieten the chaos. Misuse of the word ‘literally’ is literally endemic in the modern day, not here:

There is literally nothing else that will do it.

Because human beings regulate through action. Through rhythm. Through routine and ritual. Through alignment with certain underlying realities that modern life is remarkably effective at disrupting. As recent posts have made all too clear.

Nonetheless, most people, on reflection, will only be able to summon a very different fitness experience.

And even if we generously gloss over the horror stories and look to those whose experience of ‘fitness’ (to include dietary health etc.) produced some narrow positive—lost a few centimetres, felt a bit fitter—very few would recall any sense of calm.

But this does not mean alignment has failed to produce the desired outcome.

It means your efforts—whatever they were— were not aligning you.

We live in environments that steadily erode the very signals human beings historically relied upon to calibrate themselves.

Light and dark.
Effort and rest.
Hunger and satiety.
Movement and stillness.
Stress and recovery.

And our efforts are typically only scrambling us further.

I’m on a detox.

I’m doing a challenge.

I'm losing weight.

Even from the more favourable end of the spectrum and ‘working out’ or accidental alignment, these are brief approximations, at best. Brushing against reality. A mere glimpse.

Instead, we get endless partial stimulation. A low-grade hum of physical inactivity, fractured attention and psychological noise so normal we fail to recognise it as noise at all. We then interpret the resulting fatigue, anxiety, brain fog and dysregulation as personal failings rather than predictable outcomes.

And respond the way modern people respond to modern problems: More.

More systems. More apps. More supplements. More hacks. More optimisation. As if the problem were a deficit. But the modern person is not under-stimulated. Not short on information, options or demands on their attention. They are overloaded — cognitively, hormonally, environmentally — and the last thing an overloaded system needs is another thing added to it.

And certainly not a hodgepodge of bolted-on Band-Aids, few of which make sense in isolation, and none in concert.

Our lives quickly come to resemble the car designed by Homer Simpson — The Homer — with its bubble domes, shag carpeting and tailfins. Three horns, because you can never find one when you’re mad. A car so grotesquely overcomplicated, so bloated with features, contradictions and unnecessary additions, it bankrupted the company trying to build it.

This is the conventional approach, not just to health and fitness but to life more generally.

And this is the chaos. Because, of course, you don’t need more. You need less.

Less interference.

Less distraction.

And certainly less industry.

Not for austerity, abstention or ascetic reasons— or indeed in any restrictive sense. But because you cannot add fitness to your life like a hobby, a side project, or another obligation to manage. You remove what is preventing your body from functioning as designed. None of it requires invention. Just the subtraction of everything making it harder than it needs to be.

The via negativa.

When Michelangelo was asked how he carved the statue of David, he answered: “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.”

The organism aligned with its physiology and environment is different from the one that isn’t.

One is The Homer.

The other, David.

Alignment is not something you force into existence, but something you stop interrupting. So you don’t need the perfect program or the ideal routine. You don’t need to be the sort of person who has their shit together. Just someone interested in stopping the bleeding in every direction at once.

A walk.

Space carved out.

A consistent bedtime.

Less — but strategically less. Identifying the needle-movers. The points of highest return. So you’re doing less and getting more. Far more than you’ll ever get from your best intentions. Your body does not care what you intend to do. So you don’t need seven solutions—just one relationship.

A relationship built the same way as any other. Through consistency. Through trust. Enough awareness of your own structure that you stop constantly placing yourself in opposition to it.

Through doing more of less.

Leftfield Youniversity begins June 19th, applications close Friday, June 5th,

Enjoy your weekend

- OLI

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8.57 am. Zero words written.

It’s been one of those weeks where I haven’t come remotely close to getting any writing done, and now, as I finally get to it, I have about as much inspiration as I do words.

The muse, it seems, has slept in, so you’re getting a reheated version of an older post. This one has been sitting in the archive long enough that most of you won’t have seen it, and for those who have, it bears repeating.

I’ve been beating the Youniversity drum of late, and if any of the recent posts have landed, this is where it goes next. It’s not quite as fundamental as what we’ve been covering—nothing is— but every bit as universal.

Displaying the human talent for post-rationalisation — justifying behaviour after the fact—we typically dissect our fitness and dietary struggles as some failure to perform the impossible, or at least the difficult.

That our success would be a given were it not for want of:

More discipline.
More effort.
More motivation.
More suffering.

There is much talk of trying one’s best. The obligatory reassurance that this is all one can do.

Uh huh.

Except failure is generally for want of nothing other than the same generic training program. Yes, I did just say that. And I am not even kidding. You’ll know me as rightly derisive of these cookie-cutter boilerplates, but in this instance, the pattern is snoringly predictable.

So here you go, a generic training program promising health and well-being for all. And we’ll follow it up with a quick assessment.

Ready?

• 3 x SETS OF GETTING OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY

Why 3 sets?

Because while this will never be a cure-all— you can’t ‘cure’ what is fundamentally the human condition— an awareness of it means you can at least mitigate it. As with any of our blind spots and biases, seeing the thing is most of the work.

But doing it once tells us nothing, and next to any well-worn alternative will be too easily brushed off as a fluke. As will the second. The third time, as they say, is the charm.

If we can overcome our natural inclination to resist something (resistance in this case to what is) and subsequently enjoy the benefit thereof—feeling much better— we start to take a harder look at our default settings, suspect they may not always be acting in our interest, and wonder if we might better start a new one.

And, the good news is you already have; 3 times is the beginning of a habit. And a habit will change your life.

This works both ways, of course, so beware the 3rd strike. Decide you're going to eat something one evening — a bowl of ice cream, or a bowl of anything — and one evening is no big deal. Two evenings, ditto. But after just three evenings, as I discovered recently with a nightly bowl of muesli, repetition rapidly becomes expectation and surprisingly hard to stop.

So that explains the 3 sets. What do I mean by getting out of your own way?

Well, rather than meekly accepting that health, fitness or dietary change is some bridge too far, the less comfortable reality is that most of what people claim to want is entirely achievable if you do nothing other than those things you can do. Easily.

Sure, we want to ask questions of ourselves— but we can ask them. A failure not of capacity but application, and one most bizarrely apparent in our— also human— predilection to spend considerably MORE time, money and effort in NOT doing the absurdly easy.

Like this:

Most of us carry tension in our shoulders and neck. We spend a lot of time hunched over a screen, shoulders creeping ever closer to our ears as fatigue and stress accumulate. Cue, pain. This likely describes ALL of you reading this at one time or another, so let’s conduct a little experiment:

Try this super-simple drill and help your shoulders learn to relax.

The clip is less than 3 minutes. Well less than half of you will even watch it. For those who have made it this far, now set yourself a reminder to do this drill every few hours while you’re at work— even just twice a day. Including the time it takes to set the reminder, you're looking at under a minute of effort upfront.

I reckon we now have roughly 5% of our starters remaining. People who, I’ll remind you, are in regular, if not daily, discomfort for precisely this reason

Of whom perhaps 3% are likely to see it through to any meaningful outcome— i.e. ‘shoulder no hurt now.’

Translation: Near invisible effort = No more pain.

Any takers?

Thought so.

But this only describes half the problem. Because precisely 100% of you will, at some stage, find yourself in front of a doctor, physio, osteopath or chiropractor, explaining this pain in your shoulders and how ‘you’ve tried everything’. You’ll receive the relevant treatment modality thereof, and then you’ll be given a series of rehabilitation exercises that will look, more or less, exactly like the drill above. Except you’ve paid 150 dollars for them.

You’ll typically shop around at this level, getting treatment and seeking second and third opinions, all at 150 bucks a pop, but you won’t do those exercises either.

So eventually you’ll end up in front of a specialist, where you’ll now pay 500 dollars. This time with no treatment, but the same exercises.

To be clear, I am not conflating a trainer’s advice with that of a qualified medical professional, and to get the obvious disclaimer out of the way: where pain is present, you should seek appropriate medical advice.

I am pointing to a standard and predictable pattern - a pattern in which many ills reside. But nor do I pretend to be an exception, and if I am any less guilty, it’s only because I am made more aware of this through seeing it in those I work with.

- I don’t like doing —insert X — so I’ll seek another answer.

What do you think the specialist is going to do? Specialisation confers a rarefied level of expertise, not magical powers.

- Don’t worry about those pesky exercises, I’ll just touch here and here, and voila, pain-free.

The price tag suggests it, but no, you’re getting exercises. The same exercises you haven’t been doing from 6 months and many hundreds of dollars ago. The same exercises that, done diligently, would have had you sorted by now.

There is but one exception: You need surgery. Okay. Guess what you're getting (ideally before and) after that.

Exercises.

One factor does make a difference: each link further up the chain carries more professional weight, and thereby makes advice ‘easier’ to follow in that you are more assured of its efficacy.

Fair enough. But your body would have given you the same answer faster and cheaper than anyone else. Besides, if you follow a protocol diligently and don't respond, that's useful information and informs decision-making up the chain. But not the outcome.

You’ll get different exercises.

Because exercise fixes the problem. Not reading about it. Not doing it a few times and giving up. Not even doing it until it stops hurting. But doing it until it’s fixed and a pain-free, full range of motion is restored.

Exercise is as good as it gets. And it ain’t getting any better. Nobody, no matter how high you climb, has a better answer for you.

At some point, and in some instances, they may have a different answer for you, but not a better one. Because if you recognise that exercise is curative— as opposed to palliative— it’s something for which you can only be grateful.

You’ll save yourself a lot of everything if you stop looking for an escape clause. And stop looking to others for things they can’t give you.

Steel yourself and take inspiration from the fact that every fitness and aesthetic goal that anybody in the ‘general fitness’ population (i.e., you and me) might be striving for is achieved through nothing other than doing the easily doable.

But it won’t do itself.

_____

The 2026 intake for Leftfield Youniversity begins June 19th, applications close Friday, June 5th,

Enjoy your weekend

- OLI

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So we’ve come to the end of this primary principle, satellite ‘not-series’ that kicked off the Leftfield 101 year back in early January, if you can believe it.

A thirteen-episode, 17-week saga that— in keeping with Star Wars day this week past, Master Yoda has boiled down to just three words:

TRAIN YOU MUST.

A predictable conclusion, admittedly, coming from me. But, like any answer, the real value lies in how you arrive at it, and I’ve endeavoured to show my working. Some, no doubt, will find it unnecessarily knotty. Others will argue the opposite: that none of this needed saying at all and is merely stating the obvious.

And were fitness the norm, perhaps I would agree. But it isn’t. And the reason it isn’t is that we are forever distracted by the superficial while failing to connect to deeper—and therefore more influential—truths.

So this is not your usual fitness fare. Not about beach bodies, biohacks, exercise selection, or supplementation. It’s not about discipline, optimisation or aesthetics. It’s not even really about health.

It’s about alignment with reality, perception and insight. Bringing us to the deepest fitness truth of all, and three different words:

Alignment explains everything.

And if alignment explains everything, so does misalignment.

A peculiar predilection of the modern day is to mistake this descriptive accuracy for moral judgment, but this is not about elevating some and condemning others. I am critiquing methods, not people. I am indicting the systems, norms and scripts we follow blindly to the same dead end. Repeatedly.

And what I propose is not higher standards but more leverage. More ease. Take it or leave it.

Because if I’ve tried to make one thing clear, it’s that this is not philosophy, but observation.

I’m not attempting to persuade— only to point.

To the fact that:

• The foot—as an example of our structure more broadly—comes with instructions. Demands.

• All discord with these demands creates friction—much suffering lies downstream of this contradiction.

• Insight is not information. You can know something intellectually without perceiving its reality, and most fitness failures are not a lack of information but a lack of insight.

• Alignment makes action feel appropriate, not forced. Sustainable practice emerges from perceiving reality clearly, not motivational theatre.

• Rewards distort alignment—the moment exercise requires compensation, it becomes the cost

• Execution is ultimately solitary.
  No audience, accountability system or coach can do it for you.

We can see fitness as aspiration, self-improvement, achievement, therapy, optimisation or identity. And while none of those framings is entirely wrong, if our understanding of fitness plays any meaningful role in achieving and maintaining it, they are evidently not right enough.

Because given the undeniable fact of the foot—and all that follows —we arrive at a far simpler conclusion:

Fitness is congruence.

Not with anybody or anything else, but yourself.

And so the problem becomes not one of increasing effort, but reducing resistance. And making things far harder than they need to be. We act contrary to what we are and then treat the resulting misery as mysterious.

But no one would claim a vacuum is defective because it performs poorly while washing dishes or clearing the gutters. The question of whether something ‘works’ only makes sense relative to what it is for. Obviously.

And yet when it comes to ourselves, we routinely invert this logic. We disconnect from movement, effort, load, sunlight, coordination, physical competence and recovery—often for years at a time— and conclude the problem is motivation, laziness, discipline, character, or the body itself.

And because the decline is gradual, ambient and culturally reinforced, we stop recognising it as a contradiction at all, and our efforts to compensate become the norm. Coffee for energy. Alcohol for decompression. Screens for escape. Endless novelty for stimulation. Motivation for movement. Rewards for adherence. Entire industries emerge to help us tolerate relationships to reality that fundamentally do not fit.

And again, this is not philosophy. It is observation.

Because the conventional approach tells you fitness requires:

• motivation to begin

• discipline to continue

• enjoyment to sustain

• willpower to resist temptation

• accountability to remain consistent

• rewards to reinforce behaviour

• And so on

Each is treated as a separate problem requiring a separate solution, and so getting and staying fit increasingly resembles a sprawling exercise in psychological project management. A balancing act of incentives, punishments, hacks, tracking systems, routines, external accountability and carefully managed emotional states.

When one invariably fails—motivation wanes, discipline cracks, or your reward no longer carries the day—it all falls apart. Again. Not because people are lazy, weak or incapable, but because the whole thing depends on maintaining this elaborate psychological scaffolding.

So you restart. New program, new app, new activewear, same fragile coalition. And the cycle continues.

Only it’s more of a downward spiral than a cycle. Each time you muster a little less enthusiasm, believe less in yourself, and—worst of all—come to believe that something so fundamental must somehow be sustained by something so convoluted and contrived, artificial and fragile.

That this is normal.

Normal.

That fitness is this distant improbability you might occasionally glimpse, but is really for other people. People with more time, fewer responsibilities, better genetics, more discipline—insert self-disqualifying story here.

The surest symptom of misalignment.

You cannot see what is right in front of you, because there is too much in the way.

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold. — Tolstoy

If something is truly fundamental, it should simplify, not complicate. It should reduce friction, not multiply it. And while this is not to say that alignment removes difficulty, it does mean that the difficulty changes in character.

But this is also why insight matters more than information. The modern person is not starving for information. If anything, they are drowning in it.

And yet behaviour remains unchanged. This is where Peter Ralston’s distinction becomes useful—not as mysticism or abstraction, but as real as it gets. Not an accumulation of facts or agreement with a concept, nor even intellectual understanding, but the direct perception of something as self-evident.

When awareness—not effort—leads, you can no longer see things the same way, because you are finally seeing them as they are. The kind of experience that shakes up your snow globe.

The difficulty, of course, is that fitness rarely arrives with that kind of immediate revelation. Through enough aligned action, the signal emerges from the noise. But because modern life so thoroughly conditions us toward immediacy, most abandon the process before the insight arrives.

And this, ultimately, is why the fitness industry remains obsessed with stimulation. With novelty. Motivation. Entertainment. Transformation. Six-week challenges. Before-and-after photos. Rewards. Punishments. Streaks. Hacks. Gamification. Accountability systems layered upon accountability systems.

You must continually manufacture reasons to do what no longer feels intrinsically connected to reality. You must talk yourself into it. Trick yourself into it. Reward yourself for it. Publicly commit to it. Optimise it. Track it. Romanticise it. Build identities around it. Turn it into content. Into theatre. Into personality.

All to sustain something that, at bottom, is no more philosophically complicated than breathing, walking or sleeping.

Until seen directly, fitness will continue to appear optional. Aspirational. A self-improvement project competing against convenience, comfort and distraction in the marketplace of modern life. One ‘good’ habit among many.

Once properly grasped —once recognised not as a lifestyle enhancement but as congruence with structure—the whole thing changes.

The whole relationship changes. And in alignment, ‘fitness’—even in its expanded fit-for-purpose sense—is just the start.

Not just necessary countermeasures to the negatives, but the doorway to a whole new way of being. One not limited to a body that feels, looks, and performs better, a calmer and clearer mind, restful sleep and natural energy, rediscovered time and freedom, and a deeper connection to the world.

And all you had to do was stop fighting it.

___

Leftfield Youniversity begins, Friday, June 19th.

You now know the curriculum. But knowing is not doing.

Do or do not. There is no try.

Enjoy your weekend

- OLI

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THE BESTOF’S

It’s bathroom week here on the block. And with our small one-bathroom apartment getting a partial renovation due to a water leak damaging downstairs, what with the intrusion, the noise, the no bathroom during business hours and no shower whatsoever, all of us—me, GK and the dog— are suffering in our jocks. So, except for the Best in Show, there’s little commentary and just the links this month.

BEST IN SHOW

Tech ethicist Tristan Harris first featured in these pages back in 2017. Here, again speaking with Sam Harris (no relation) about the new documentary The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, he makes much the same point I argued three years ago: that recent technological advances—most notably social media—should disabuse us of any notion that “alignment” is an engineering problem.

After all, we already failed the alignment test. The idea that we will fare any better in relation to systems vastly more capable is fanciful.

Which is not to dismiss the potential upsides. It is to recognise that while the benefits cannot be overstated—the more irresistible the technology becomes politically, economically, and militarily— that is the trap.

Because it is more accurate to say that the potential benefits on offer are unimaginable. Not as a figure of speech — hyperbole, or rhetoric— but, by comparison to an intelligence that is beyond us and getting exponentially more so every second— unimaginable in an all-too-literal, utterly incapable of comprehending, of stretching our tiny minds that far, sense.

Like you can’t imagine your dog doing your taxes.

But compressing centuries of scientific advancement into hours will also produce harms equally beyond our ability to anticipate, contain, or reverse.

And there’s already no shortage of the ones we can already imagine.

As such, Harris argues that whatever gains are available should, for now, be pursued through— and confined to— narrow AI—systems constrained to specific domains and tasks, rather than something open-ended and recursively self-improving.

Rejecting both the ‘Doomer’ and ‘Luddite’ labels, he makes the screamingly obvious point that any upside will only, can only, be enjoyed by ringfencing the risks. It would be a curiously human folly to cure cancer only to unleash a more devastating bioweapon— but one of the many existential jokers in the pack.

And here lies the asymmetry. One bad roll of the dice cancels the lot— permanently. And it’s not a vanishingly improbable black swan. When those in the know publicly estimate existential risk at anywhere between ten and fifty percent, we may not even have to roll a ‘one’, maybe just a one or a two. Or an odd number.

All further compounded by the fact that the very nature of defence is asymmetrical. From the walls of Troy to the hull of The Titanic to The Maginot Line, our best defences don’t merely rarely prove to be such, but the scale of their failure is a direct product of our mistaken belief in them.

The ‘good’ is moot. The finest crystal, oak panelling, the best wine cellar afloat, cutting-edge marine engineering, sixteen watertight compartments and the most decorated captain of the line—all of it went to the bottom of the Atlantic.

But not everybody. And here we hit the final unfortunate property of even the best defence: that it is reactive. You’ve heard the word— from jeans, to software, to the busted pipe in our bathroom.

Patching.

With an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-everything AI, there is no patching after the fact. Any failure is not a setback; it is a terminus. Not even a calamitous second chance— a Bhopal disaster or a Chernobyl, we get to dust ourselves off and learn from, but The End.

Here, too, we arrive not at the limits of language but — pick whatever word you like; just be sure you distil it to the very essence of meaning: Absolute. Total. Complete. Final.

Mozart, cathedrals, children, memory, love, mathematics, meaning — gone. Consciousness cancelled.

And so we are faced with a ‘Marshmallow test’ where we must forgo the best benefits to prevent the worst outcomes. For now, we take what we can from already impressive, narrow domain-specific efforts while putting a hard stop on any further general development until we better know what we’re dealing with.

Systems that are not engineered line-by-line in ways fully legible to their creators. Systems that are not built but grown.

Systems that already have a ‘survival instinct’ and are resistant to shutdown.

Systems that are already deceptive.

Because the issue is not that AI becomes ‘evil’, only that the pursuit of goals even infinitesimally misaligned with ours can, when magnified by computational power and speed, produce outcomes catastrophic to humanity entirely incidentally.

And that is what makes the breezy confidence surrounding all this so surreal. And by surreal, I mean psychopathic. Mirroring the maximising of everything else here, the arrogance is equally off the charts.

If Sam Altman emailed any one of us a death threat, he could be arrested. But when he casually announces the potential erasure of all in between funding rounds, keynote speeches, and government partnerships, it’s business as usual.

Actually, not business as usual, but the largest public investment in history. So we’re not just permitting this, we are paying for it.

But this only demonstrates that we already lack the intellectual horsepower to apprehend the scale of this threat. Context distorts empathy— captured in the oft-repeated phrase: “one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic.”

So get mad. To throw up your hands and retreat into a paralysed what-can-I-do fatalism only ensures that outcome. Honestly, I’m far less bullish than either Harris or the ‘apocaloptimist’ of the title, and doubt even a groundswell of public opinion will derail this train, but I do agree it starts with a collective clarity that we are heading towards that future.

Not science fiction, but as acknowledged by the very people building these systems. And that is not acceptable. Humanity must take precedence.

Just as we are. Not as a stepping stone to some digital upgrade. And take it, because it won’t happen otherwise, with government and other regulatory bodies woefully inadequate.

And we might start with the obvious. If you’re casually, callously suggesting, otherwise you won’t be lionised for it. Or paid for it.

It will be pointed out, in no uncertain terms, that even if you hold this misanthropic view of humanity— or if that doesn’t pan out, you might get to indulge your adolescent fantasies in a battle against the machines— you don’t speak for the rest of us.

And you will not. You fucking lunatic.

You’ll be sharply pulled up for it and warned that you sound like a Bond villain. And if that’s the case, we’d be best to treat you like one. And put you in a deep, dark hole where you can’t hurt any of us, let alone all of us.

Then put somebody else in charge— somebody like Tristan Harris. This other lot could be saints, but the very nature of their success in this domain should disqualify them— the competitive obsession, contrarianism, a willingness to externalise costs, contempt for incrementalism, the cold language of code.

If we want someone to speak on behalf of the AI, ask them, sure, but they’re the last people that should have any custody of humanity.

Or given the freedom to simply assume it.

And because the winner-takes-all incentive is the propellant to this madness, that’s where we want to see the funding, the keynotes and the effort.

The CCP doesn’t want to cede control to some other entity any more than we do, and as much as we might differ in our intentions for AI, it’s only by a matter of degree compared to the same page we’re all now on.

In any case, if we can’t unite on this narrow yes, general no (or certainly, not yet) point, getting it first will be sorry consolation.

___

Note: the full podcast is unpaywalled.

Sam Harris

Escaping an Anti-Human Future (Ep. 469)

Sam Harris speaks with Tristan Harris about the dangers of AI and the race to build it. They discuss the new documentary The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, the lessons of The Social Dilemma, the arms race dynamics between AI labs, the “intelligence curse” and its implications for human political power, the psychology of tech CEOs indifferent…

Listen now

3 months ago · 306 likes · 49 comments · Sam Harris

And see the trailer here:

Fortunately, there are two simple tests that winnows out much of the noise so you can focus on signal.

Lorenzo from Oz

Two simple tests for bad commentary on the Iran War

There is a lot of poor quality commentary about on the current Iran War—or, as the Chinese call it, the War in West Asia. Fortunately, there are two simple tests that winnows out much of the noise so you can focus on signal…

Read more

3 months ago · 104 likes · 72 comments · Lorenzo Warby

And the boundaries between what we personally know and what we know by accessing those external memory systems are getting blurred, inflating our sense of understanding. The easier it is to access information externally, the harder it becomes to notice that you don’t actually have that knowledge internally.

https://nesslabs.com/illusion-of-clarity?

Over the years, I’ve seen people do the hard part— getting up and out of bed in the morning, getting to the park only to then go through the motions.

That might keep you fit, but it won’t get you fit.

Consistency is important, sure, but in fitness or any other domain, progress demands more. Intervals, sprints, seasons. Call it what you like, but you’ll need to dial it up. And then, rest accordingly.

Consistency is undeniably important, but it needs to be flanked with periods of obsession, stacked atop one another, focused on one aspect of your life you want to measurably improve. Seasonality and focus are natural. So is rest. On/off switches are built into our DNA.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rodgerdeanduncan/2026/04/04/why-consistency-fails-habit-formation-intensity-focus/

Know when to fold ‘em.

Resilience stops being a positive when it keeps people tolerating what should be fixed.

Big Think

The thin line between resilience and self-sabotage

by Anne-Laure Le Cunff…

Read more

3 months ago · 489 likes · 28 comments · Big Think and Anne-Laure Le Cunff

The government should begin by stating plainly that Gaza was not a genocide. It should stop allowing a lie of that magnitude to remain unchallenged at the centre of British public life. Ministers should say it clearly, repeatedly and without the usual cowardly qualifications.

Andrew Fox

The time for words is over. No more condemnations, thoughts or prayers. Action, now.

Yet again, Jews have been attacked in London. This time, a stabbing in Golders Green. Set against recent attacks on synagogues, Jewish ambulances and visibly Jewish people, no serious person can pretend this is ordinary criminality. It is a national emergency…

Read more

3 months ago · 327 likes · 39 comments · Andrew Fox

I’ve included this both as salient commentary and as an example of what happens when you don’t observe this natural hierarchy — the order of operations.

No tactical ‘victory’ will salvage a strategic blunder.

…but when you cannot answer that question consistently in the opening days, you have not lost control of the war. You never had it.

https://warontherocks.com/tactical-success-strategic-failure-washington-walks-the-path-to-defeat-in-iran/?

The Iranians have watched on as a political class has been increasingly willing to indulge sectarian religious grievance, while slowly abandoning the civilisational inheritance that made tolerance so valued in the first place.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/04/21/a-warning-from-britains-iranian-diaspora/?

Children climb well compared to modern adults. An athletic adult would have a clear advantage over an eight-year-old in contests of speed, strength, agility, or endurance. But in a test of climbing ability in trees, on playground structures, or a bouldering gym, the adult would not be nearly so confident. This suggests that modern adults are doing less climbing than is natural.

Better Movement

Climbing: The strength to control bodyweight

Note: This is the eighth chapter of my serialized book Healthy Movements for Human Animals. You can find an archive of previous chapters here…

Read more

3 months ago · 13 likes · Todd Hargrove

This creates a feedback loop: You feel tired, so you move less. But moving less makes your system less capable of generating energy, so you end up feeling even more tired. That’s why the wrong kind of rest can make the problem worse.

Big Think

Why rest alone doesn’t restore energy

by Anne-Laure Le Cunff…

Read more

3 months ago · 743 likes · 35 comments · Big Think and Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Chairs are comfortable precisely because they eliminate the effort that our muscles would normally put forth in rest positions.

Two Percent with Michael Easter

The "Inactivity Mismatch Hypothesis"

I just finished a stretch of travel, where I found myself bound to an airline seat for hours. Then I’d land, sit in a rental car and drive to the hotel, sleep, and do it all again the next day…

Read more

4 months ago · 162 likes · 17 comments · Michael Easter

GMB go deep on one of the resting positions— Seiza— how to do it properly and why. And how to work your way into it, because the chances you’ll find this comfortable straight off, certainly for any length of time, are very close to nil.

If pain, stiffness and restriction are playing some part in your life that is only set to increase if you don’t do something effective about it, and —mirroring the more active elements of fitness—the best methods here are always overlooked in favour of messing around or endlessly switching protocols.

I don’t know if you can take 30 secs each day of mild discomfort to improve the remaining 23 hours, 59 minutes and 30 seconds, but I do know that in fitness, we deserve what we get.

The position itself is straightforward. Getting there, and getting good at it, will teach you more about your body than most mobility routines ever will.

https://gmb.io/seiza/?

And being more specific —instead of ‘stressed’— is helpful

https://assets.precisionnutrition.com/2020/04/Stress-wheel-handout.pdf

https://aeon.co/videos/take-a-mind-bending-ride-through-the-cosmos-at-light-speed

MISCELLANEOUS

Recommendations reflect what I’ve been reading/listening to/watching/using recently but, in most instances, and especially where music is concerned, will not have been released in the past month.

MUSIC

BOOKS

Damascus Station - David McCloskey

TV

Beef S2. Started well, but quickly devolved into the absurd. Not a patch on the first season.

APP

CLIP

Have a great weekend.

- OLI

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It’s beans and biscuits time again, but with summer serving up a last hurrah, I'll leave the beans until a suitably much colder weekend.

The biscuit recipe has, for reasons unknown, proven not quite as bulletproof in recent years, so it has been amended with the addition of one new ingredient below in bold—and a corresponding change in method.

This is your home for a proper Anzac biscuit, of course, so our new addition is not raisins or — give me a break — chocolate chips, but it is an opportunity for all to practise the greatest cooking (or baking) lesson of all: Read the recipe in full before you start.

And then read it again.

And with no day off for Anzac Day this year— a decision I’m wholly in favour of— we’ve got no time for preamble, so it’s straight to the good stuff.

Mum's Anzac Biscuits

Preheat oven to 170 C

•  1 cup rolled oats

•  1 cup plain flour (sifted)

•  1 cup caster sugar 

•  1 cup coconut

•  125g butter

•  2T golden syrup/treacle

•  1 1/2t baking soda

• 2T boiling water

Mix dry ingredients except baking soda in a large bowl.

Dissolve baking soda in the boiling water and add to the melted butter and treacle.

Add wet to dry ingredients and mix well.

Place dessertspoonfuls on baking paper-lined trays, leaving room to spread.

Bake for 15-20 mins or until dark golden. 

Leave on tray for 5mins then place on a wire rack to cool.

Makes approx 24. And it is but once a year, so double it.

Eat them with a cuppa. Or crumbled over ice cream. (In Melbourne, we’ve got the weather for it!)
 

Lest we forget.

- OLI

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[This essay includes excerpts from two earlier posts.]

As we approach the end of this series, it’s worth returning to a point made very early on—not to re-argue it, but to recognise what follows.

Because the bedrock of this entire series — and Leftfield, full stop — is that this is not philosophy, or story, but a mere descriptor or feature of reality.

Just reality.

And as such, our agreement, encouragement, indifference, even resistance—none of it matters.

But— not that it matters— our subject today does elicit universal agreement. As well it might. Because you’d be very hard-pressed to make a case against the fact that the buck stops with you.

A point that, on repeating, will sound as obvious as ever, but one that is rarely fully understood. Or perhaps unexamined is a better word. Because unchallenged though it is, as is the case for so much in this domain, whatever is considered here— and understood— is far closer to fantasy than any underlying reality.

And that difference — here, as elsewhere— is a chasm to cross.

Sooner or later, everyone reaches the same point.

How many times have we heard (and said): Yes, I know that I was cautioned, that the way would become difficult and I would want to quit, that such was inevitable, and that at exactly this point the battle would be lost or won … but those who cautioned me could not have foreseen the magnitude of the specific difficulties I am encountering at this point–difficulties which must, sadly, but I have no choice, force me to resign the struggle (and have a drink, a cigarette, an affair, a rest), in short, to declare failure.
- David Mamet, Playwright

But as The School of Life advises, it isn’t necessarily difficulty that sinks us; it’s misconceived notions of what a task should legitimately demand. An idea especially well understood by those whose job it is to break the toughest people.

Consider the most anti-coaching environment you could imagine, where they are doing everything in their power to make you quit: a special forces selection. For all the tools of pain and privation at their disposal, it’s the manipulation of expectation, and the false dawn, in particular, that is easily the most effective at breaking spirits.

You turn a corner on a seemingly endless (10+ hours) pack march to finally see a truck parked at the side of a dusty road. You’ve made it. Food and warmth await. You’re told to jump in and wait a few minutes to see if anybody else has made it inside the required time window. In the next few minutes, more broken bodies shuffle onboard.

And then you’re off. Homeward bound, or so you believe. But after a mere two minutes down the road, the truck pulls over. There’s a change of plans, and you’re told to get out and march the rest of the way— the remaining half of the way.

Or you can quit and stay warm in the truck. Many do, unable to summon the strength to go again because this shatters will.

Others rouse themselves, jump down, and painfully pull their packs back on as the truck disappears into the distance. Steeling themselves for the pain to come, they stumble down the road only to find the truck parked again—for real this time— just around the first corner.

About the most painful walk you could ever do.

Only more painful if you didn’t.

Social support is often cited as a predictor of fitness (including dietary) success. Programs emphasise accountability partners, group classes, and community engagement, and the research supports it with social support boosting attendance, adherence and intensity.

Correspondingly, that’s where the conventional (fitness and dietary) approach puts all its focus, but—as usual— tells less than half the story and fails to even acknowledge the flipside, much less inoculate against it.

Oftentimes, they become the point, and you end up with socially supported attendance. And that’s about it.

No doubt, all these are nice-to-haves. Decorative. The problem is that they become load-bearing. All made pivotal to the project and thereby only ensuring that, one day, the project isn’t.

And this was certainly my experience, writing back in 2018, that “the single greatest predictor of success in the Leftfield Nutrition Coaching program was the social support available to participants.”

Even with a great coach in your corner and, in the later years of that nutrition-specific program, a supportive group, it was no exaggeration to say that the whole project hinged on the degree to which friends and family, colleagues and acquaintances would rally to your cause.

All antithetical to Leftfield axioms of self-responsibility and self-reliance aside, I wasn’t about to leave my fate in somebody else’s hands. Tired of seeing my best efforts undone and feeling guilty about what I wanted to do to Debbie, who scuppered your chances with a few backhanded ‘compliments’ and some passive-aggressive fridge notes, I set about fixing it.

But hiring a roster of steadfast friends and shoulders to cry on proved impractical. And although this is now possible with a chatbot who’ll breezily have your back and no doubt a few pithy rejoinders to put Debbie back in her box, it’s all by the by.

Because I fixed it anyway. And now, whatever the reasons that might pull us from the practice path, I’m proud as punch to report that social support or lack thereof—doesn’t even feature.

And it all came down to that critical coaching concept— setting expectations. And in the evolution from the old nutrition coaching program to writing a new curriculum, the single change I made in this regard is that I flagged it.

Actually, I more than flagged it. I already knew, as Mamet describes above, that even an often-repeated caution wouldn’t do the job.

And there was already that focus on all those self-reliant qualities central to the Leftfield approach. It wasn’t even that we explored it in all its unspoken detail but that it became the theme, not underlying all others, but front and centre.

[First with Leftfield Solo and then]

Leftfield Youniversity.

You. And only you.

Not as some pessimistic Eeyore perspective equally unhelpful as— or even to balance— the Pollyanna flipside. Not a Cassandra catastrophising of worst-case scenarios.

A clear-eyed forecast of the norm. And acknowledgement of the raw power that can be harnessed here for good or ill. More specifically, how a mismatch — getting it wrong— will not just take the air out of your sails but sink you altogether.

And by anticipating—training for— the sure certainty not just of this eventuating but as the status quo, we didn’t just turn a common point of failure into a strength.

We recognised it as such.

Because while the issue is less about the absence of support than the expectation of it, food and fitness occupy a strange position in this regard. In any other department, what would seem overbearing, inappropriate or flat-out insulting gets a free pass when it comes to what we eat or how we exercise.

People will keep their opinions on your new drapes to themselves, but here they feel entitled to comment. And it’s not just the raised eyebrow, or “one won’t hurt”, but even the best intentioned: what you eat, how you train, whether you rest, how often, how much— all open to interpretation, suggestion, and revision.

When you keep your own counsel, you’re not so influenced by noise. And, trust me, it’s all noise.

That isn’t an argument for stubbornly ignoring (useful) feedback. You can forget about listening to anybody who doesn’t already have what you want for a start. And when you winnow out the noise, what remains is the signal. Fatigue. Hunger. Performance. Recovery. The direct feedback of the system itself.

And, once again, while this approach honours our agency and sovereignty, making our practice and by extension ourselves that much more resilient, it does so because, at bottom, it is a simple and close reflection of what is.

There is but one name on that biological contract you have with reality

This is the first call for Leftfield Youniversity beginning, Friday, June 19th— still some away. Time to consider that you can be alone, unobserved, unrewarded, uncertain. And not just comfortable but, dare I say it, happy about it.

Enjoy your weekend

- OLI

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THE BESTOF’S

They say that generals always prepare to fight the last war, so as the Iran conflict stutters to an uneasy and unlikely peace, and while I’m certain no fault lies with the top brass here, I’m hardly surprised to learn that Trump himself— feeling suitably smug coming off the back of a successful Venezuela op— believed he’d have Iran wrapped up just as neatly.

Neither geography nor history is a strong point of this administration, it’s fair to say, but you don’t get anywhere near a stripe on your uniform, much less stars, without well-knowing the dangers of a strategic chokepoint like the Strait of Hormuz.

It’s a cliché for blustering politicians to blunder in where generals fear to tread, of course, but this will have been communicated to Trump in no uncertain terms, because for all the unpredictability and fog of war, that part was as certain as certain gets.

As sure as eggs.

A danger that demands no great strategic literacy. All of it translated into the language he understands—oil prices, markets, polling—the predictable second- and third-order effects.

As revealed in a book hot on the press, Trump didn't overlook what is strategically — and geographically and historically — unmissable.

He dismissed it. All of it— overridden by gut instinct.

But whether it’s falsifying financial statements or golf scorecards, six bankruptcies, two impeachments, a university that wasn’t and a charity that wasn’t either. From hush money, through perjury, to scam coin, all the way to a too-long tie, Trump’s record is not one of calibrated judgment.

Not a pattern, but a trail of destruction you’d reasonably believe only served as evidence to doubt one’s gut instinct, only you’d be forgetting that he gets away with it. The punishment never quite fits the crime, and reputationally, it doesn’t matter. There is only one opinion Trump cares about.

Where any one of these, pinned on even the least self-aware among us, might give pause—Trump sails through, shit-eating grin intact, utterly immune to his own fetid stench. Armed, as has been observed, with an “almost superstitious faith in his own instincts.”

And there is good evidence for that, because you don’t manoeuvre your way into the Oval Office— and especially from where he did — without believing your toast is going to land butter-side up.

None of this is exculpatory, of course, but this reads as a more damning account of everybody except Trump.

And, when, as I said, the prevailing currency of the day is crazy, it's because whatever is brought to the table by the commander in chief is only matched by those expecting something different. And those who like to pretend otherwise.

And so here we are.

A newly blooded Iranian regime welcomed to the negotiating table, conferring legitimacy. Sanctions dropped on Russia with peak oil prices giving a timely boost to their Ukraine special-military-operation chest, and China, as well as being one of few countries still getting oil via Hormuz, waggles its finger as peacebroker while taking careful notes.

Expect a similar blockade or ‘quarantine’ of Taiwan, this time restricting not oil but semiconductors. It won’t start there— that would only provoke a response, but a textbook grey-zone, salami-slicing tactic that China will dial up incrementally just to see where the edge is— to back off, for little cost— or continue to test the budget, magazine depth, and resolve of a President, administration and an electorate all further weakened by Iran.

So while the world awaits the next word from Donald’s gut, I would suggest the rest of us start getting with the program. Not least, the grandstanding of those charged with acting in Australia’s best interests.

It’s against international law.

You broke it, you bought it.

Israel is the obstacle to peace.

This is a war crime.

Whatever the legitimacy of any of these claims— they will keep. In the meantime, this tut-tutting over norms is either preaching to the choir or —see above— only admonishment of someone deaf to it.

Deaf to it in every way but one. Because Trump is always keeping a ledger. A running tally of slights —accurately perceived or otherwise. We further know him to be petty in the extreme, such that he would— and clearly has— acted against the best interests of the US, just to reply in kind, as a matter of principle.

Because that is about the be-all and end-all of his principles.

It’s unconscionable that he’s using US foreign policy as an extension of his personal whims, of course. Which is precisely the same reason you don’t join a chorus line that spells disaster for Australia.

I don’t remember the target of Paul Keating’s famous evisceration— John Hewson— but if ever there was a shiver looking for a spine to run up, it is Albanese. He’s looking for brownie points from those who can’t take care of themselves—and that’s not a figure of speech—while alienating the one person who can actually help.

I don’t mean you go cap in hand, bend over backwards or otherwise be bullied— just be clear-eyed about who Trump is and what he represents. And act like it. Because there is so much wiggle room here. Not so much nuance as a sober recounting of the facts.

No, we’re not going to send military assets to Iran because we weren’t consulted.

Okay.

But we are going to help open the Strait because its closure is a direct threat to Australia.

And whether the fault lies with Iran or Trump or some combination thereof—and whether it’s ‘right’ or not— is equally immaterial to our distant end of the supply chain reality.

And hey, maybe you parse the finer details and hammer out a deal. Great. Then you’re speaking his language. What you want to avoid, at all costs, is special mention— along with South Korea and Japan— for not pulling your weight. Again, whether it’s true or not, ‘right’ or not.

As an ex-soldier, Andrew Hastie of all people should know one of the maxims of self-defence is that you can be right and dead, so he should keep his criticisms a lot closer to the chest.

And if that sounds a little far-fetched, consider that — in the absence of any strategic nous — this might be the thing that actually connects the dots.

Maduro taunted Trump. Iran tried to kill him—twice. Domestically, he’s using the DOJ to go after everybody he can get his tiny hands on —Comey, Cheney, the law firms, Harvard.

In fact, you can make a very good case that ALL this Trumpian presidential wreckage can be laid at the feet of Obama, who, at The White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2011, in front of the assembled press corps and a national television audience, spent several minutes humiliating Trump — who sat in the room, stone-faced, and took it.

Yeah, laugh that up.

As unfortunate, as insane, as it is, he is president. And you can bet he’s taking notes and filing them away for later, and has even said so explicitly — we will remember. So you don’t want to give a vengeful Trump, an isolationist administration and a war-weary electorate any pretext to decide the Pacific is not their problem.

So if you’re not clear, Anthony, on why Australia’s being singled out, that IS a question for you, mate. And if you don’t know, you'd better get on the phone and fucking find out.

Because when you’re the Prime Minister of a resource-rich country at the far end of a just-in-time supply chain, all that distance that once offered insulation now leaves you exposed.

And when you have a defence force that amounts to a support element to a far greater force— at best.

It’s your job to make damn sure they’re coming.

BEST IN SHOW

A map to see where you’re coming from.

…it has no perceptual quality at all. It is not a sound, nor a feeling, nor an image, nor any other kind of mental process.

https://thinkmovement.net/2026/04/05/the-silent-origin-of-awareness/

That’s it. These aren’t complicated. They don’t require special equipment or a complete overhaul of your life. But if you start doing them consistently in your 30s and 40s, 20 years from now you’re going to look back and be very glad you did.

https://gmb.io/stay-strong/?

We’re now in an era where America is no longer in the mood to be generous with its wealth and power, or shoulder planetary responsibilities in ways proportionate to its extractive tendencies. Which means planetary counterparties increasingly have fewer reasons to humor American conceits or validate American narratives.

Contraptions

On Cooling America Out

I’ve been closely re-reading Erwing Goffman’s classic 1952 paper, On Cooling the Mark Out, after more than a decade, and this re-read feels very different, driven by the vague intuition that it sheds some important light on the status of the very idea of America today, as in the United States, at a time when it is busy renegotiating its identity with it…

Read more

3 months ago · 82 likes · 12 comments · Venkatesh Rao

That’s a big reason why so much of what so many of us “know” just isn’t so.

Shiny Herd

How to Make a Mad World: Redact and Repeat

In 1998, a floppy haired immigrant from San Diego landed on the eighth floor of ABC Network News in Manhattan…

Read more

4 months ago · 25 likes · 11 comments · Ted Balaker

If you’re not happy with what your attention is bringing you, you can change it.

Aristotle said that we become what we do, but before we do, we focus.

And the freedom and responsibility of that focus belong to us.

https://seths.blog/2026/03/freedom-of-focus/

Ignore all those who analyse it through their (ultimately childish) political obsessions. Look at it through the prism of history.

All those who wished for a multi-polar world order that was less US-dominated? Congratulations, you have the results of a more contested world order—more violence, not less.

Lorenzo from Oz

Numbers matter: a case study in continental anarchy being worse than maritime order

While it is perhaps less true than it used to be, for decades many Westerners took it as if the Arab-Israeli, or Arab-Palestinian, conflict was THE matter of war and peace in the Middle East. That was never really true…

Read more

4 months ago · 53 likes · 23 comments · Lorenzo Warby

Here’s a rule of thumb that works for me: everything you need to control your nervous system is free and available to you at any time. The only cost is time. Everything else is a parlor trick.

The Wake Up Call

How to prepare for the next decade

🌒 🌓 🌔…

Read more

5 months ago · 5798 likes · 331 comments · Scott Barker

With the brain-in-a-vat option off the table, it rules out The Matrix.
Or that matrix… better get moving.

We’ve given reasons to think that the body and brain are so dynamically entangled in the causation and realization of consciousness as to be explanatorily inseparable.

Big Think

The key problem with the “brain in a vat” thought experiment

by Adam Frank…

Read more

4 months ago · 115 likes · 24 comments · Big Think

If you buy a doctor a drink or two and you get them to talk to you, they’re very likely to say it’s not just the conventional medical therapy that determines the likelihood of someone’s successful outcome when they’re in the hospital or they’re being treated in the office. It has to also do with their own mental state and their own psychosocial support.

Big Think

Neuroscientist breaks down 3 bizarre mind-body phenomena — and their medical impact

Neuroscientist David Linden sheds light on the biology behind phenomena that medicine has long struggled to explain, from voodoo death and broken heart syndrome to the placebo effect, and why grief shows up in autopsy results…

Listen now

4 months ago · 211 likes · 1 comment · Big Think

International law is the law in which the people who would behave that way anyway—the good, the decent, the democratic—constrain their ability to face down those who just don’t care and don’t plan to ever follow these laws.

Lorenzo from Oz

International “law” isn’t law

As a follow-up to my No War Is Illegal post, this exchange between musician and break-out podcaster and YouTuber Winston Marshall and Israeli commentator Haviv Rettig Gur says what needs to be said about international law not being law, eloquently and with demonstrative examples…

Read more

4 months ago · 50 likes · 11 comments · Lorenzo Warby

These councils – they include Leeds, Oldham, Tameside and Kirklees – are effectively advising schools to look to the Taliban for educational inspiration. They are also denying pupils the joys of drawing, music and dancing.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/03/11/labour-is-taking-inspiration-from-the-taliban/?

Many party leaders depend directly on government spending, regulation, or nonprofit advocacy for their livelihoods. This produces a kind of patronage politics, as the leadership benefits materially from an ever-expanding progressive agenda. Any electoral value offered by moderation pales in comparison to the threat that it poses to these interests.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/democrats-party-voters-manhattan-institute-poll

Through a mix of climate ideology and ignorance of basic physics, so-called progressives eschewed domestic oil and gas production and refused to stock sufficient inventories for times of geopolitical stress, as though not liking something diminishes its essentiality. Their populations are now set to suffer.

Doomberg

Island Hopping

“Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.” – Publilius Syrus…

Read more

4 months ago · 865 likes · 280 comments · Doomberg

…with China seeking to maximize the level of pro-social behavior, and begrudgingly accepting adversarial institutions when it must; while the U.S. is exploring the boundary of tolerance of anti-social behavior, begrudgingly accepting the occasional need for cooperation. Both experiments are, in their own way, dystopian.

In Due Course

The Outliers

One of the reasons that progressive social change is so difficult to achieve is that no one knows how society works. It’s like we’re tinkering around with a piece of alien technology whose internal mechanisms we do not understand – we can only observe the inputs and outputs. Indeed, one of the enduring attractions of Marx’s work was his claim to have ar…

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4 months ago · 370 likes · Joseph Heath

Towards the end of the recent Summer training block, we would finish training and be heading home before dawn. With the lighter, colder morning of Autumn, we’ve got our light show back. Leftfield autumn training begins this Monday, 13th April. Register for your free trial here.

Leftfield Training always employs the exercises and drills that offer an outsized benefit relative to effort, and there’s a further shorter list that offer a what-the-hell unexplainable effect. The few minutes on the floor every day that can undo a lifetime of poor habits puts all these others in the shade.

…explore simple ground positions that naturally improve hip mobility, flexibility, and overall movement quality.

This individual is doing a great job of recognizing that while things are going well, he needs to preserve the balance between pushing his body and taking care of it.

https://ericcressey.com/recency-bias-and-long-term-training-success/?

…we must begin with a shift in our perspective of how we function and why we exercise and eat.

https://tacfit.com/coach-sonnons-10-strategies-for-using-exercise-to-recover-from-stress/

A step-by-step reset routine (eyes, vestibular system, proprioception, breathing) to reverse the effects of prolonged sitting

https://zhealtheducation.com/blog/after-10-hours-of-sitting-dont-just-stretch-do-this-instead/?

MISCELLANEOUS

Recommendations reflect what I’ve been reading/listening to/watching/using recently but, in most instances, and especially where music is concerned, will not have been released in the past month.

MUSIC

BOOKS

It’s a rare treat these days. To read a great book and then discover a huge backlog. I’ve just cracked onto Don Winslow.

The Power of the Dog

TV

APP

CLIP

Have a great weekend.

- OLI

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Marking the break between Summer and Autumn training blocks, Easter this year is a time of rest—that built-in-to-the-practice flipside to the training coin I wrote about a few weeks ago.

But even Leftfielders aren’t immune to the stock-standard rewards trap that, this weekend, is only further amplified by a sense of occasion. And suddenly, what might otherwise be a choice becomes a given.

Tradition = Permission.

Chocolate. Drinks. Buns. You name it. More of everything—and often only because it’s there.

So a simple distinction goes a long way. Chocolate and chocolate-flavoured are not the same thing, so if you’re going to have it, have the real deal.

The same applies across the board. The wine. The cheese. Whatever else finds its way onto the table.

I’m not suggesting a Fabergé— nor that the value of any experience is determined by its price tag— but if you’ve missed the boat in marking out some negative space (for positive reasons) in the lead-up, it does help to further a sense of occasion when any contrast from the everyday must be contrived.

I’m guessing very few Easter missives will be paraphrasing Stalin, but quality has a (limiting) quantity all its own. And of demanding your attention.

Because the point is not abstinence over excess— only awareness. To avoid the mindless, unconscious consumption in favour of a subjectively better experience.

And if you are handing over your hard-earned for something decent—when that money could just as easily be spent on, say, getting yourself further than the Westgate—you’re more likely to enjoy just an egg or two. And you’re correspondingly more likely to savour it.

And so— now in its 10th year(!)—I give you…

THE LEFTFIELD EASTER CHALLENGE

The 4-day Challenge (easy)

Enjoy a few easter eggs, some hot cross buns, and maybe a few drinks, offset with some daily exercise.

The 30-day Challenge (difficult)

Spend four days going bananas, overdoing the eggs, buns and everything else in sight, knocking back drinks and moving only if you have to. And at least 26 days working back to where you are now.

Don’t be an egg.

In either case, have a great Easter!

Enjoy your weekend

- OLI

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The payoff.

You’ve finished the training week—maybe even just one session. You’ve eaten in line with your (health, aesthetic or performance) goals. You might have strung a few early nights together or a mere couple of hours without looking at your phone.

You did the thing. Good job. Time to cash in.

A meal. A scroll. A sneaky treat. Some retail therapy. A drink or few. All stock standard. Any means—fair or foul—pitched and promoted by the well-meaning, so long as it arrives at some good end.

And end it assuredly does.

To be fair, it works for a while. You get yourself moving, string some sessions together, you build enough momentum to believe you’ve found something sustainable. A system. A way in. Which is why it’s so widely adopted. Entire training systems are built on it, and most behaviour change models lean heavily in the same direction.

And why the problem goes unnoticed. Because the issue isn’t that this approach fails, it’s that it works for the wrong reason. Motivation, we’re told, needs reinforcement. Effort requires recognition. Compliance commands compensation.

And damn near everybody has tried to get fit—or eat and sleep well—for a while.

Because the second you attach a reward to the behaviour, you define that behaviour as the cost. You may be thinking, err, yeah. Next to anything else I could be doing, the time, inconvenience, effort and discomfort all make it rather costly.

Which is both an interesting way of looking at it and a costly one.

It might seem harmless—and by comparison to not exercising, it is—but if you have any hope of staying fit, sooner or later, this is what, in engineering terms, they call a single point of failure.

Because rewarding exercise doesn’t reinforce the behaviour, it reframes it.

Dopamine is often reduced to a “pleasure chemical,” which is another close-but-no-cigar explanation that obscures more than it reveals.

A more accurate— and therefore useful— way to think about it is as a signal of salience. It tracks what the brain learns to care about, based not just on the activity itself but on its context—what precedes, what follows it, and what it predicts. In other words, the value is not fixed in the activity. It is assigned.

So when you consistently follow training—or other desired behaviour— with a reward, the brain does exactly what it is designed to do, and assigns value to the reward. The anticipation builds around what comes after, and the behaviour itself becomes the bridge to that outcome rather than the outcome itself.

The thing has now been voluntarily tagged as something to get through. The price you pay. The unpleasant bit before the good part. And the "reward"—whatever form it takes—becomes relief, escape, the thing you actually want.

The same pattern appears in more structured forms. Tracking, logging, sharing, and building streaks shift focus from the behaviour to the scoreboard. Which works until the streak breaks, or the novelty wears off, or life disrupts the pattern. Then motivation collapses, because the behaviour was never valued, only the metric was.

If the act only feels worthwhile once it has been seen, then the act is not the reward—the response is. Remove the audience, and the structure weakens. What remains is not a practice, but a performance.

You decide where the value lives. And so through reward you don’t simply overlook the agency you can bring to bear on this mechanism of motivation; you turn it against you.

A dynamic amplified by the modern day, where daily life is saturated with low-effort stimulation: coffee paired with scrolling, music layered over everything, notifications punctuating the day. Cheap, no-effort hits of stimulation stacked on top of one another. Small peaks, constantly chased, each one followed—inevitably—by a dip.

Each minor in isolation, but taken together, they redraw your baseline. Dopamine responds less to any absolute value than to contrast, and when your day is filled with easy, immediate hits of stimulation, anything that requires sustained, undistracted effort— read anything worthwhile— begins to feel disproportionately difficult. Certainly so, relative to everything else.

So you sweeten the deal. And sour your chances.

All the while creating more reward rod for your own back, because whatever it was, that reward will soon lose its potency. And you’ve got to keep paying the piper.

But who are you horsetrading with? There is, of course, no distance between the body and —for want of a better term— self, but this illusion persists for most of us, myself included, so if we see unity of body and mind as a distant sun, in the meantime, we still have this schism to navigate.

And with any gap— any two objects, near or far— comes relationship.

And you are choosing to make it— your relationship to your body— transactional. Imagine that in any other context. Tell one of your mates you expect some sort of payment for your next visit. Not financial, necessarily, that would be unseemly. It doesn’t need to be a big deal, just a little sumthin. See how that lands.

And hey, if you want some extra motivation to exercise, run it by your partner.

Get ready to run.

And where I have made an arguably transactional— give-and-then-get— case before, this is less a shakedown than the simple observance of how things work.

Bringing us, once again, to your foot. And the rest of you.

You don’t reward yourself for taking the stairs down to breakfast in the morning. Or seek applause. No pat on the back because you didn’t throw yourself over the bannister to see if gravity was operating that day.

No, you accept gravity. You work with it. And you’re better for it. That’s the relationship. No celebration required. No incentive needed. Just alignment.

You might see this as hyperbole, and while I don’t suggest the effort or corresponding outcome are the same—certainly not as immediately realised—the ‘negotiation’ with what is is not analogous but the same.

Because you are negotiating nothing, and it is juvenile to think so.

Have a break. Have a KitKat. Have 15 if you want to, but let’s not forget that our physical capacities, while in part determined by age, stage, sleep, diet and so forth, are a direct reflection of our efforts in a specific fitness domain.

So in fitness terms, it’s always all very clear: you deserve what you have.

But it’s not just that any further effort to justify our choices, good or bad, with our reconciling of some universal ledger is a superfluous fairytale. After all, a story can be useful.

It’s that whatever justification you’ve conjured is more likely you trying to sand off the sharpest edge of all—knowing full well you don’t deserve it. Ask any addict. And more so, it’s just the sense of entitlement. You want a reward—for what? For not trashing the joint?

And besides—what’s in it for you? Are you serious? Well, if you’ve somehow missed the living-in-line-with-what-you-are memo, I can tell you it’s a damn sight better than an ice cream.

Or the alternative.

Nonetheless, it is hard work. But your discomfort, fatigue, and hunger are not the problem; they are the point. Assuming a common sense and, hopefully, integrated practice approach, these all serve as evidence—confirmation that you are on the path to what you want.

Effort that is alignment with what you are, not the fanciful and futile resistance to it.

And so the inversion is simple, but not easy:

You decide—accurately—to see the hard parts as the reward. You’re not pretending or forcing some positive spin, only recognising them for what they are: the very markers of the process working. And in doing so, you immediately switch this powerful driver of behaviour— the driver— to the solution side of the equation instead of the problem.

And so all deals are off the table. No carrot. No stick. Just alignment both with what you are, and when. Focused not on after but during.

And during is all there ever is.

Enjoy your weekend

- OLI

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And so our experience of—what we come to know as—fitness becomes an endless cycle of false starts. A flush of enthusiasm, followed by slow dissatisfaction, frustration to the point of stopping, then guilt and anxiety—dampened only by the next surge of enthusiasm.

Ad nauseam.

Not so much a path, even a well-worn one, but rails.

And with our ideas about rest equally mistaken, one only mirrored on the flipside of the equation—and for the same reason. The calendar says it’s a rest day. The program prescribed it. Motivation is low. We feel guilty. We’re too busy. We’re disciplined. We’re lazy. Every reason, every rationalisation— anything and everything except what your body reports.

As in any system where one element affects all, it’s no surprise to find that here too, we’re equally one-noted. And so our recovery, too, although on a far shorter (daily) cycle, becomes the same series of attempts.

It is good— dare I say ‘normal’ — to feel tired at the end of each day.

It’s not so good to be exhausted. Let alone during the day. Everyday. Physically bone tired, with a side of flat fogginess. As a default— and not just disproportionate to anything that was done, but seemingly unrelated.

Seemingly, because:

The body always tells the truth. Our interpretation of it is almost always wrong.

Exhaustion is rarely the result of doing too much, but of doing things poorly. Task-switching, fragmented attention, constant interruption, and cognitive load that never ceases.

Because this exhaustion is rarely the result of doing more, it’s the result of doing things poorly. Task switching. Fragmented effort from constant interruption. High (enough) cognitive load that never ceases. We are not working harder.

We are working worse.

And while we can and should clean up our focus, attention and awareness, and— beyond the scope of this essay— learn to manufacture the mental ease of ‘flow’ — even then, in the absence of a fitness practice, it assuredly leads to a misread when it comes to rest.

And if you’re now thinking, What!, I can’t even get doing nothing right!

You’re spot on. Almost. Because exhaustion is almost always taken as a signal to rest, when more often than not, what’s missing is not recovery.

And, once again, I’ll direct you to your foot. Because you might have been on your feet all day— taking what you needed from your feet— without once considering what they might need. Admittedly, it seems rather absurd. Feet are for standing, after all.

And you’re right. But extend that same one-sided extraction—always taking, never giving—to the entire system. Physical and psychological. All day. Every day.

And then you’re so exhausted you plonk yourself down on a couch with a remote, or you pick up your phone. And lock yourself in for a few more hours of mindless mental churn until something jars you out of it and you stumble into one more night of unsatisfactory slumber, before waking bleary-eyed to go through the whole grim process again.

Ad nauseam.

You’re exhausted because you wouldn’t know deep rest if it reached out of whatever screen you’re hypnotised by and slapped you.

But it’s not just physical fatigue, of course. There’s also the low-grade dissatisfaction, or irritation with… everything. And that comes from deadlines, decisions, notifications, and conflicts—all of which activate arousal systems (cortisol, adrenaline) but offer no resolution.

That’s why this feeling seems to draw from both poles. You’re wired and tired. because you aren’t restoring equilibrium, only further scrambling it.

All leading to an eternal restlessness and displacement that comes from never working to the limits of your physical capacities—much less regularly— compounded by chronic mental stress with no physical outlet.

Tension without release. To use that beautiful Shakespearean turn of phrase from The Matrix— you have a splinter in your mind that comes from steadfastly ignoring your physical and psychological needs.

Not once in a while, or a couple of days a week, but at every turn.

As. Per. Normal. An unwavering disregard for what you are.

Correspondingly, you never enjoy the deep physical and psychological rest and relief that comes from doing so.

And you never will with more of the same. The autonomic nervous system is exactly that: autonomous. Involuntary. You can’t wish yourself relaxed. You can’t think your way into recovery. Training is one of the few places in modern life where a full fight-or-flight response is not only possible but rewarded, where the stress response can discharge completely, where arousal finds resolution.

So, if you want to rest, you’ve got to earn it.

Not morally or, worse still, transactionally - “I worked hard, so I deserve this.”—but fundamentally.

Deep rest is the product of real demand. Not perceived effort, not busyness, not suffering, but something your body recognises as legitimate: consistent, integrated, sustained. Because you can only recover from what you did, and if there is no real signal, there is no real response.

Again, your body and mind reflect what you do. Exactly. And so when your efforts are piecemeal and either unbalanced or even missing the physical or psychological challenge, or similarly fragmented, inconsistent, or hollow, then so will your recovery be.

And so we sit in a strange physiological middle ground: never fully “on,” never fully “off.” Like a car idling—engine running, fuel burning, wear accumulating, but going nowhere. Not stressed enough to adapt, not recovered enough to repair.

Lose, lose.

The longer you are unfit, the more that splinter will callous and sooner or later, that nagging, gnawing feeling of the organism— you — trying to signal what it needs, in the only way it can, means you will never rest.

But then, most don’t know what they’re missing. Over time, something more subtle happens: you lose your reference points. What stress feels like. What recovery feels like. What “normal” even is. Everything sits in that same dull middle ground—never fully engaged, never fully restored—and so inevitably you begin to believe this is just how it is.

Such that the feeling of being well rested is the outlier of all outliers.

You could spend three weeks on a beach with a total disconnect from work and no internet connection, and still miss it. And most do. Because all it requires is enough acknowledgement, respect, and alignment with what you are. And when you experience this properly—when effort is real and rest is earned—it feels different. No guilt. No negotiation. No background noise. Just a system returning to baseline.

Certainly, there are those who move from one warm blanket to the next and are miserable for it, but that feeling— when rest is legitimately the best physiological and psychological card to play— is an utterly alien concept to most of society.

That is rest.

And with a practice weaving the demands of body and mind throughout your life, the appropriate rest becomes just as seamless. Not a standalone act —nothing is— but a response.

Never a ‘reward’—as we’ll look at next time—but a simple chain of cause and effect.

So if you want to escape this weary damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t malaise, punctuated only by the resentment of false choice, the answer is a practice. A practice that asks and answers the demands of body and mind—never to dominate your life, only underpin it.

To remove a splinter so that you can live and rest in peace.

And if that’s not having your cake and eating it, I don’t know what is.

Enjoy your weekend

- OLI

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So we’ve established that lasting change begins with the deceptively simple: a single, consistent practice.

Not a stack of interventions. Not a perfectly balanced program addressing every possible demand at once. Just one thing done regularly enough to become stable. If you know anything about behaviour science and habit-building, this idea of one thing at a time is hardly earth-shattering, just best practice.

And the reason it’s best practice is because of the perfectly human inclination to do dumb shit. To expand too early. To hurry the process. To believe you are the exception to the rule. To go looking for earth-shattering.

And with all the predictable results thereof.

The good news here is that you can get both the pragmatic and the earth-shattering. Best practice, followed slavishly, i.e., beyond the point you think you’ve ‘got it down’, leads to the desired behaviour becoming second nature.

The cognitive demand drops, making expansion possible, and the practice begins to reveal itself. Not ambition. Not optimisation. Not a want or preference necessarily. Just an obvious next step.

So—in the same careful, disciplined manner— you adopt that too.

Until one day, something else happens. Something else obvious. It isn’t just that you feel “better.” It’s that the sum subjective quality of the experience is different in kind.

And for most—read damn near everybody— this will be an outlier. An experience unlike any other, since records began.

All leading to a strange effect.

“I’ve tried everything.”

A common fitness sentiment. And one hardly unique to those starting at Leftfield, when, after all, it so neatly captures the conventional fitness approach: trying.

What is uniquely Leftfield— when you learn to view things from your body’s perspective— is that these are soon understood to be the same thing, only a hundred different ways. Different diets, different programs, different equipment, different bursts of motivation.

The surface details vary—keto instead of paleo, running instead of lifting, a new challenge instead of the last one—but the structure remains unchanged: short-lived intensity followed by collapse or abandonment. And so we accrue often years of effort, all within the same narrow band of experience: fragmented, discontinuous, and never quite integrated into daily life.

Never even close to being integrated into daily life.

Layer in a culture saturated with misinformation, myths, and marketing, we have a dataset classically rounded out by memories of P.E. at school that—whether good or bad—are unhelpful, and often further confused by social sport or yo-yo dieting.

And yes, I’ve just conflated ‘good’ sport with ‘bad’ yo-yo dieting. Deliberately. Because when it comes to listening to what your body is telling you, there are few things as deaf as a middle-aged man in competition. Same problem, different jersey.

And so, all told, we come to believe that this is fitness.

As of course we do. With no other information, experience, or framework—what else could it be?

We “know” exactly what fitness is, backed by stacks of personal evidence supporting our typically miserable-for-all-those-good-reasons claim, all while having little to no understanding of—or connection to—our own bodies.

A claim viewed—acted upon—as gospel. Leading to a societal status quo with all markers of physical capacity trending in the wrong direction.

All wearily predictable. Because, as Mark Twain warned, “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.”

However, when you address the demands of body and mind —in single file, taking your cues as to the best next step— one day something else happens.

It’s there if you look hard enough— from even a single behaviour adopted in said fashion— but it typically takes the integration of 3 or 4 working in concert before it’s not merely noticeable but undeniable. Their cumulative and synergistic effect creates something you’ve never experienced before.

To be clear, there is no prescription here—who knows what you need— but to share two of the most common pathways: whether it’s walking, mobility and sleep uniting to combat chronic stress and fatigue, or the holy trinity of well-directed training, real food and sleep for about everything else, and it all becoming yawningly second nature, something happens.

You feel not just “better” in the sense of less stiff or more energetic. The overall quality is different. Movement feels lighter. Energy feels steadier. Sleep feels deeper. Your mind is calmer and clearer. Everything seems to be working together rather than pulling in different directions.

Because it is.

Not an upgraded version of what you knew before, but a different experience entirely.

And not because you’re getting ‘results’. The usual metrics improve, sure. You’re stronger, faster, leaner—whatever measures you care about. But that’s not the point here. Or rather, it’s taken as given. Your body can do nothing other than reflect what you do with it, and so nothing will be so faithfully and fully transcribed as your fitness efforts.

So you never need results. You are a result. And you always will be.

But this is different. Not the dread, the chore, the frustration. just your body and mind feeling the way they’re supposed to. A single data point that doesn’t resemble any of the hundreds (or thousands) that came before it.

And this is fitness.

A bold claim. But you need not take my word for it because you will know it. Instantly.

By any rational measure, you should be sceptical. Why should one brief moment outweigh years of accumulated evidence? A single good day shouldn’t overturn hundreds of previous bad ones. It could be a fluke. A honeymoon phase. Or flaky motivation.

But that isn’t how it feels. The recognition is immediate.

If you’ve only ever seen the night sky from a city, you assume that’s simply what a night sky looks like: dim, a handful of stars, washed out by the glow of streetlights and buildings.

Then one night, you’re far from any city. No light pollution, no glow on the horizon. You look up and see thousands of stars. The Milky Way stretches across the entire sky with a depth you didn’t know existed. But you also feel like you’re in it, close enough to reach out and touch.

You know instantly: that’s what a night sky looks like.

When you eat Belgian chocolate for the first time, you don’t suspend judgment pending further evidence. You understand, immediately, that what you had been eating was not chocolate at all, but some poor imitation.

Years of dull knives. Cutting feels effortful, imprecise, frustrating. Then one properly sharpened blade. Effortless, clean, precise. Instant understanding: That’s not a knife. This is a knife.

An outlier that, instead of being discarded as an anomaly, is not acknowledged but recognised. And not just as ‘right’ but the very centre of the bullseye, such that all the other data is immediately reclassified as wrong. Pale imitation.

Not chocolate. A confection.

And that’s all you’ll get from the fitness (or diet) industry. No nourishment, just stimulation. Engineered to be endlessly appealing, entertaining even, but a mere simulacrum of the real thing.

A Leftfield approach, by contrast— as with real chocolate, or the night sky— isn’t better because anything gets added to it. If anything, the opposite is true.

Far from the madding crowd. Free from the noise and nonsense, the endless cycle of restarts, the confection. A quiet practice of alignment with the principles that govern your body and mind.

An outlier that wins not because it is frequent but because it is recognisably more true.

Closer to reality.

And once you experience that alignment, something else happens. The final kicker. The last piece of the puzzle keeping you on the straight and narrow is the fact that now, where anything less is concerned, you’re ruined.

No longer satisfied by pale imitation. So the outlier doesn’t just inform you, it reorganises your reality.

And once it does, you can’t unring that bell.

Enjoy your weekend

- OLI

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THE BESTOF’S

Last month, I argued that international law is—without enforcement— not law in any meaningful sense.

The rules-based order we've enjoyed for 80 years has, in practice, only ever been at the behest of American might — harnessed, sometimes generously, sometimes crudely, to a set of liberal ideals. Like any law, it binds only those who abide by it. Absent enforcement and consequences, it only ever constrained the good guys, while affording time, space, and diplomatic cover to adversaries who shared no such delusions.

That same collection of bad actors is now condemning US and Israeli operations as acts of aggression, solemnly calling for respect of sovereignty and international law. Were it not for the missiles and drones fired into apartment blocks with industrial consistency, civilian infrastructure attacked in the depths of an Eastern European winter, and the systematic re-education and cultural erasure of an entire population, it would be laughable.

But it is farce. Pure and simple.

Even so, my argument was for a more muscular rules-based order — not its abandonment.

To give the tyrannical some cause for pause, certainly. And better still, when — as with Maduro, and now Khamenei — you’re able to visit the consequences directly on those concerned.

But also because the ideals behind it — liberty, rule of law, individual rights — matter in their own right.

The degree to which America and others have demonstrated these ideals, fallen short of them, or even exploited them is, of course, not immaterial. But if hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then it is precisely the lack of even the pretence that points to something far more sinister.

Masked federal agents are executing people on American streets. Things have cooled over the past month, so it doesn't yet warrant the word "routinely" — but it was on that trajectory.

And an administration that, before the full facts are even known, proffers lies as a first instinct.

Before investigations conclude, before accountability is even theoretically possible, Secretary Noem reports “a domestic terrorist… brandishing a gun… wanting to massacre law enforcement.” Even in light of video evidence and eyewitness accounts to the contrary, the full coterie of cronies either reposted Noem or offered equally fanciful variations — with Head Goon Stephen Miller calling it an attempted assassination of federal law enforcement.

While acknowledging that both victims were monumentally stupid, we have to bend over backwards and squint very hard to see either instance as having any degree of ambiguity when it comes to somebody ending up dead.

No retraction. No correction. Just louder. Straighter-faced.

We all know the joke about how to tell if a politician's lying — their lips are moving — but this is not your standard self-serving distortion, plausible deniability, or careful evasion. Even allowing for "the election was stolen" and other whoppers from this watch, this was something different. These are not lies designed to persuade you not to believe your eyes. They are to demonstrate that it does not matter what you saw.

This is not deception. It is contempt. The message is simple: I’m lying. I know you know I’m lying. And there is nothing you can do about it.

One month later — no criminal charges, not even censure. Not so much as a single high-level official ceremonially pensioned off for stirring the cattle. The idea, over time, is to make resistance futile.

[Update: Late news is that Noem has been sacrificed, not to a pension but to a new position as “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas,” a new security initiative focused on the Western Hemisphere.

Wonderful. Why keep her all to yourself?]

The warnings were all there— this is where this leads. They were ignored. And now, weekly if not daily, we slide past one more previously unimaginable milestone. But with Trump’s approval rating now at its lowest, the cracks are appearing both inside government and the MAGA faithful. But even if these poor fools begin to wake to what's happening, they'll find their protests falling on the same deaf ears — because these are autocrats in both traditional flavours: the court of the unqualified, each so grotesque that animation seems the only adequate medium, buffered by a far longer list of lackeys, their expertise drawn beyond any event horizon of decency by the moral black hole that is Trump.

And as the American midterms get underway, we know Trump can lose an election, but we also know he won’t, so you can bet the fix is in.

We have that to look forward to, but in the meantime, he might just manage to do more good.

Because he is right that this presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for regime change in Iran.

This wasn't just the real-time intelligence that traced a collection of high-value targets — including Khamenei — to the one place that had them sharing the fate of their Hamas and Hezbollah leadership. Nor the recent and ongoing destruction of their nuclear ambitions, mobile launchers, and command infrastructure, or the penetration of their airspace, intelligence agencies, and comms.

In further marking October 7th as one of the worst geopolitical blunders in history, Iran has not merely been reduced to a shadow of its former self — we now see Lebanon disavowing Hezbollah, and the other Arab states arrayed against Iran in at least a tacit coalition with Israel. An unprecedented alignment of the planets. An opportunity too good to miss.

True to form, we see the international law crowd beating the wrong people with the wrong end of the stick, with pearl-clutchers like Helen Clark and Starmer —ever the barrister—bleating about the absence of “imminent threat.”

America has had a near-permanent casus belli with Iran since at least the Beirut Barracks bombing in 1983, and in more recent times with Iranian bombmakers and materiel behind the IEDs killing and maiming Coalition forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran has never missed an opportunity to promise death to America and Israel, and in light of the other Arab states moderating their stance, presents the only remaining obstacle to the Abraham Accords and — as far-fetched as it sounds — the prospect of something resembling peace in the Middle East.

They have been chief shit-stirrers on a global scale for decades, so spare us the hand-wringing. Most especially because the first victims of this crackpot regime — as in Venezuela, China, Russia, North Korea — are always the people. A point seemingly lost on those progressives waving the white flag.

This is also far from those boots-on-the-ground quagmires that rightly concern the other side, believing this mimics past misadventures.

Not least, because Iran is a modern country and not one being dragged from the Stone Age in some misguided fantasy of nation-building. Indeed, it’s a modern country and people, under the yoke of Stone Age ideas.

Removing one or more of the chief whackjobs won’t do it, of course, and underlining the unique danger posed by this ideology, it promises no shortage of true believers willing to take up the mantle, even with near immediate expectations of martyrdom. That’s fine, in the immortal words of Lt. Aldo Raine. Oblige him.

But you still need to cut out the more widespread cancer of the IRGC. With the US providing top cover and Israel's penetration of state communications, the one-sided calculus of revolution-versus-crackdown inverts. It is now the populace that can organise and manoeuvre; the state security apparatus that cannot coordinate without painting itself as a target. With the surprise addition of Kurdish ground forces further bolstering these efforts — while circumventing the propaganda gift and rallying cry of Western boots on Muslim soil — there has never been a better time for Iranians to take their country back.

It’s impossible to imagine there ever will be.

Which is not to suggest that all of this could not go very sideways, of course, such is the nature of these things. But, for all the reasons outlined, you don’t look this gift horse in the mouth.

Trump didn’t.

But Iranians, Israelis, and all concerned should set about making as much hay as they can while this sun shines — because who knows where he’ll stand next week.

Once declaring himself a ‘stable genius’, Trump is the antithesis of at least one of those words and a long way from being any master geopolitical strategist.

A fighter jet — unlike a passenger liner — requires constant input simply to fly straight and level, a tradeoff that makes it suitably twitchy and manoeuvrable. Unburdened by norms, institutions, or guardrails, and with no allegiance to any ideal beyond himself, what many claim to be the inscrutability of "4D chess" is merely success born of this same dynamic instability.

Not strategy. Chaos.

These recent foreign interventions come, after all, straight off the back of a National Security Strategy presenting the stunning claim that America aims to become a regional power once again. That it might voluntarily shut up shop and withdraw from the world stage is a dream come true for adversaries, and a proposal one might expect from only the most Manchurian of candidates.

And yet he has also done more to hurt these real adversaries, in real terms, than arguably any recent president.

So who really knows? His boast that he is limited “only by his psychology” is as true as anything he has ever said.

His literal top-of-the-line whining to the Danish Prime Minister about not being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize — from someone he knows, and refuses to accept, had no capacity to award it — is insane for more than one reason.

And in admonishing NATO, you diminish the sacrifice of your allies who fronted up on the single occasion Article 5 has been invoked, as being a ‘a little back, a little off the front lines’ when not only are you wrong, but Danish troops specifically had higher casualties per capita than the United States. That’s insane for many more.

Not bluster. Not negotiating tactics. Detachment from reality. And these are hardly isolated examples. Try as you might, you can never find strategic coherence, no throughline of rationale or logic. And nor is it ever revealed, even with the benefit of hindsight.

To sign off on the point I began with last month— the only thing we can be sure of is that things will continue to develop quickly, but when the prevailing currency of the day is ‘crazy’, it doesn’t bode well for places like Australia.

Next time.

BEST IN SHOW

Andrew Fox takes the prize this month not with one, but two pieces I couldn’t split for either relevance or importance. So, in chronological order:

At that stage, “debate” shifts from persuasion to merely performing for an audience to gain points, affirm belonging, or signal moral standing.

The core issue is that people cannot agree on the meaning of key terms (semiotics), the standards of proof for applying them (epistemology), or the credibility of sources needed to meet those standards (social epistemology). When a community cannot agree on shared language, it cannot agree on what counts as evidence or on who can settle disputes. This represents a broken epistemic commons.

Andrew Fox

Semiotics, epistemology, and why the Israel–Hamas war feels undebatable

Greetings from Israel. Two firsts: the most insane weather I have seen here, with a dust storm soaking Tel Aviv (see vid!), and the first Substack article I have written in a helicopter en route to a conference…

Read more

5 months ago · 120 likes · 24 comments · Andrew Fox

This is why propaganda from the axis of authoritarian states is so dangerous, why it is currently so focused on Ukraine and Israel as the two current physical combatants in this struggle, and why it is so concerning to hear it echoed in White House conferences. It aims to make people sceptical of reality: to persuade them that nothing can be known, nothing can be trusted, and therefore nothing is worth defending. Once that epistemic collapse happens, the rest is simple. Societies that cannot agree on facts cannot coordinate action. They become vulnerable. We are seeing this play out in Europe and America in real time.

Andrew Fox

The West is over. The War is not.

I am now home after another research trip to Ukraine. Jake Wallis Simons and I have been recording interviews for this week’s episode of The Brink, which is out tomorrow. As ever, it is a strange responsibility to visit a country at war. It takes the cold, hard analysis of writing from the comfort of distance, and reinforces it with the intimacy of personal stories; the strange n…

Read more

5 months ago · 104 likes · 30 comments · Andrew Fox

It wasn’t one hack. It was everything.

Empty Calories

Movement, Eventually

It took me a long time to commit to working out regularly. The problem, rather annoyingly, wasn’t discipline. And despite the nature of production schedules, it wasn’t time either. It wasn’t always accessibility, though memberships and eating well certainly add up. For me, it was a PR issue…

Read more

5 months ago · 593 likes · 2 comments · Lisa Kholostenko

The answer isn’t “women are emotional” and it isn’t “social media bad.” The answer is that we built global-scale consensus engines and deployed them on a species with sexually dimorphic psychology. The machines captured the half more susceptible to consensus pressure. Then they started capturing the other half through different mechanisms.

We’re watching the results in real time. Two failure modes. One graph. Both lines moving away from each other and away from anything healthy.

I don’t know how this ends. I don’t think anyone does. I don’t think it will.

Both machines are still running.

bio/acc

Why Young Women Moved Left While Young Men Stayed Sane

Bill Ackman quote tweeted a graph showing the partisan gap between young men and women almost doubled in 25 years…

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5 months ago · 78 likes · vittorio

Modern jihadism is a political-theological project within Islam. Jihadists claim the right to speak for all Muslims and punish those who refuse to join them. By shifting the blame for terrorist violence from jihadists to Western critics of jihadism, we provide cover for murderous ideologues.

https://quillette.com/2026/02/26/islamism-shooting-the-messenger/?

But will you ever watch these films again? It’s less likely, because the filmmakers’ priority wasn’t producing entertainment but displaying social and political awareness. And once you’ve received—and possibly amplified—that signal, there’s not much point in revisiting it for diminishing returns.

https://quillette.com/2026/02/19/the-end-of-the-middlebrow-movie/?

Now, people will say, “But constraints are limiting.” Yes. That’s the point. A seatbelt “limits” your relationship with the windshield.

https://bakadesuyo.com/2026/02/constraints/

Capitalism excels at producing goods, services, innovation, and choice. It is far less adept at providing moral reassurance. It is impersonal. It distributes rewards unevenly. It does not explain itself or justify outcomes. It simply operates. For people whose material lives are secure, this impersonality can feel unsatisfying and even unsettling. Comfort creates space for moral inquiry, but it also creates moral anxiety. As scarcity recedes from daily experience, gratitude often gives way to guilt.

https://quillette.com/2026/02/11/capitalisms-paradox-prosperity-guilt-moral-performance/?

For faster progress, stretch and strengthen at the same time.

https://gmb.io/hip-openers/?

Sedentary behavior is not just a lack of physical activity, but something much more actively destructive to health..

https://medium.com/in-fitness-and-in-health/why-exercisers-live-longer-and-better-6764ece840a3

Both sleep extension and maintaining a consistent sleep schedule are proven to maximize recovery better than a cold plunge ever could.

https://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/im-an-orthopedic-surgeon-and-this-is-hands-down-the-best-recovery-tool-most-people-still-ignore

MISCELLANEOUS

Recommendations reflect what I’ve been reading/listening to/watching/using recently but, in most instances, and especially where music is concerned, will not have been released in the past month.

MUSIC

BOOKS

TV

The Winter Olympics - so much curling.

APP

CLIP

Have a great weekend.

- OLI

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Your body — and mind — have needs.

Strength. Cardiovascular capacity. Mobility. Endurance. Real food. Recovery. Sleep. Movement. Exposure to the elements. Sunlight. And more. In a world where fitness is conflated with optional aesthetics, these are not preferences. They are conditions of function.

Non-negotiable needs.

And the degree to which you meet them describes your fitness: your current state and physical capacity.

Whether you value, scorn, or otherwise participate in “fitness” is irrelevant. Your physical state is what it is. In the same way the fitness of a business describes its solvency and earning capacity, or a car’s certificate of roadworthiness. Fitness is an objective evaluation we are all subject to — one we live out and experience, subjectively.

And yet, we pretend otherwise. We act otherwise. For a range of reasons — some circumstantial, some self-inflicted — most give scant regard to this long list of musts. Kicking the can down the road, sometimes for years, knowing (intellectually) it’s only collecting interest until we eventually feel what we already knew.

And when we feel it, we take it seriously— which is only right. Before we go straight back to wrong.

And whether our motives are the responsible urge to take care of everything or the fantasy of “getting it over and done with”, the instinct is the same: solve the equation all at once.

A path that leads to the same end every time. And the more you take on, the quicker you’ll get there:

Back where you started.

The logic seems sound: if the gap is wide, close it fast. But even if your body worked like that, your brain doesn’t. And, more to the point, your life doesn’t.

From their first manipulative sales pitch, the fitness industry has your eyes fixed on the prize: a future you imagine in all its glory — and none of what it takes to get there, much less live there. You essentially transpose your dream body onto your present life. The one with the late nights, the extra slices of pizza, the drinks, the Tim Tams in the cupboard.

Perhaps, like me, your fitness dreams are more modest, and you’re looking only for a more reasonable middle ground, and others will be satisfied with a lower bar still. Short of choosing to keep kicking that can, this is not to disparage any desired outcome. You decide.

And you can get to that distant summit— the strength, the transformation, even the Instagram body, if that’s your aim. But you don’t get one — the result — without the other — the lifestyle.

You get it the same way we achieve more modest aims — not by chasing it, but by building a life that sustains the behaviours required to produce it. Then it’s not something you maintain through force, and by the time you have it, your life has come to reflect it. The training structures your day. The food choices are habitual. The sleep routine is established. Decisions that once required debate now happen without thought.

Most never reach that point because they attempt to add new behaviours to an otherwise unchanged existence. The practice, insofar as you might call it that, remains separate from, and at the mercy of, the rest of their life. And when life happens — work runs late, illness hits, motivation dips — the extras get dropped. They were never woven in. They were tacked on.

When you’re juggling multiple new behaviours, none of them gets the repetition necessary to cross from negotiation into identity. They remain attempts. And attempting is what you did last January. And the January before that.

Ten restarts over ten years, each beginning from zero. Compare that with a single continuous trajectory — even a minimal one-degree shift maintained for a decade. Invisible at first. Unimpressive in month one. Still modest in month three. But over the years, transformative.

So the answer is never to add everything, or even two things.

It’s to integrate one.

Not because you’ll “build up” to complexity later. Not because it’s a beginner phase. Not because you’re lowering standards. But because one thing practised past threshold makes everything else possible. For two critical reasons:

First: survivability.

One thing — scaled appropriately — can survive. This doesn’t mean fitness dominates your life. Not all-consuming. Not the main event. It means it’s ever-present.In every circumstance short of you being in traction, in some shape or form, it gets done.

Second: calibration.

If you change training, diet, and sleep simultaneously and feel better, you cannot tell why. The signal is buried in noise. But one clear variable gives you feedback.

You walk every morning for two weeks. How do you feel after? Clearer? Calmer? Less of an afternoon crash? You know it’s the walk. You can feel what the walk does. You feel its specific signature.

And so you begin to develop a more nuanced understanding of, and relationship with, your body.

Right now, you lump everything into “good” or “bad” and treat the problem—lethargy, irritability, restlessness—with whatever’s convenient. Usually food, distraction, or both, but rarely anything that might actually address it.

Your body talks all the time. Most people never learn to listen.

Learn to distinguish the fatigue of training from the fatigue of poor sleep. The energy from movement over the spike and crash of sugar. Hunger as different from boredom, as different from stress.

And this experiential shift builds belief. Not because someone told you it works, or you read about it in some fantastic Saturday newsletter.

But because you feel it.

And if you can feel one small thing— and notice the difference it makes to your quality of life— imagine a series of them.

Not every behaviour makes a good anchor. So what qualifies?

It must serve multiple demands simultaneously. Not just “cardio” or “strength.” One activity that addresses several anchors at once. Movement, light exposure and routine. Or nutrition and appetite calibration and decision practice. Or sleep and circadian rhythm and everything downstream.

It must be under your control. Running in the rain illustrates multiple benefits—movement, weather exposure, resistance practice—but rain itself isn’t reliable. You need something you can do regardless. Not weather-dependent. Not reliant on others. Not contingent on circumstances aligning perfectly.

It must survive all predictable disruptions. The practice must outlast bad weeks, not just good ones.

It must occur frequently enough to build continuity. Daily or near-daily preferred. The more repetitive, the better.

It must allow post-action calibration. “How do I feel after?” must be answerable.

A morning outdoor walk meets those criteria. Movement. Light exposure. Circadian anchoring. Weather adaptation. Routine. It survives travel. It survives bad sleep. Twenty minutes on a good day, and five minutes on the worst ones.

Eating only real food is another. You eat regardless of circumstance; the choice is the practice. Nutrition, appetite recalibration, attention, and decision-making — all addressed through a single repeatable standard.

A consistent bedtime within a narrow window works the same way. Recovery, metabolic regulation, immune function, energy stability — everything downstream improves when sleep stabilises.

Ten minutes of deliberate daily movement. And to further reflect your now ongoing dialogue with body and mind, fit the movement to conditions: mobility when sore. Walking when tired. Strength when energised.

These are not prescriptions, only illustrations of criteria, so choose something that fits your schedule, your constraints, your life.

Not aspirational-you. Actual-you.

Build the habit first so it pays dividends forever. Then, from that first foundation, other demands get addressed because the practice reveals what’s needed next.

If you walk every morning, tight hips become obvious. If you lift consistently, poor sleep becomes undeniable. If you eat real food daily, energy patterns surface.

These aren’t problems you’re looking for; they’re constraints the practice makes visible. And you address them each in single file. This is integration in action. Where the practice isn’t separate from life anymore, but woven in. And as it deepens, life reshapes around it.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. But unavoidably.

When disruption genuinely occurs — illness, travel, crisis — reduce it to the smallest version that maintains the thread. Walk for five minutes. Start with breakfast. Put your shoes on. Your body recognises persistence, not perfection.

And you cannot expand what you keep abandoning.

Start simple. Or start over.

Again.

Enjoy your weekend

- OLI

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