ERIC KIM

How to floor bench off the power rack and safety pins:

Certainly there are lots of downsides of America, however, at the end of the day, I love and care for America, because it seems it is the best place in the world to live unorthodox.

In order to be more productive, just work outdoors more.

The point of life isn’t to “look cool“, or do things “properly. Rather, the point of life is to win, however you determine that. It doesn’t matter if your approach is ugly, strange, or “cheating”.

For example, I just did a bench press of four plates on each side, super easy, when I was able to do it from the power rack, off the floor, with the white on top of the safety pins. Doing a “nano rep”.

How to win in life:

The future of economics is rich, not the middle class or the poor.

video

Some fun thoughts:

The first thought is in regards to clothing. I truly believe that if you have the right clothes, you can do anything and everything.

Especially during the winter months, what is it that holds us back? Our fear of the cold, and the pain from the cold. It seems that the best way to overcome and conquer this is to just wear the right clothes. Merino wool, down, layers, anything which can allow you to spend more time outside, outside of the house, is good.

I say that instead of spending a lot of money on your car, just have a really really cheap and free car, for example I got my mom‘s old 2009 Hyundai Sonata for free, and spent only about $2000 USD to flush out all of the transmission fluids, oil change, fix some superficial parts, etc., and now essentially it drives like a brand new car. I got a really really good family sedan, low-key, a good beater, for only $2000 USD!

My really proud point:

In my entire adult life, ever since I was 15 years old, up until age 35, I have never spent more than $2500 USD on a car.

My list of cars:

1. Age 15: $1200 USD on a 1991 Central XE, four-door, white sedan, five speed manual transmission car, no tachometer
2. Age 17: $1500 USD on a 1991 Sentra SER, two-door coupe, SR 20DE engine, white, 5 speed manual
3. Age 20:1990 Mazda Miata, red, convertible droptop, five speed manual transmission, no power steering, no air conditioning, no power anything: $2500 USD.
4. Age 34: 2003 Subaru outback wagon, five speed manual transmission, 200,000 miles on the dash, $800 USD.
5. Age 35, 2009 Hyundai sonata, $0.00

Even moving forward, I think my new record now is to not spend any money on the car. That if for some reason I get a new car, it will either be given to me for free from some car company, or some car company lets me borrow it for free. The upside of being a “influencer“.

Photo Feed

I have this notion of photo feed; that your blog, assuming that somebody books marks it, and accesses it 50 times a day, every time they reload your blog in chrome, there will always be something new for them to witness.

Something I’ve realized is this:

The most important thing for a website or blog is to always have new things to witness and experience.

I think this is also why it is a wise idea to allow yourself to diversify your interests, and simply publish anything and everything, with less thought and consideration. For example, I would love if Kanye West restarted his blog, and instead of just posting things to Twitter, posting it to his own blog instead. Why? The blog allows for more fidelity, and also, you can hide all of those pesky social media metrics.

Stream on

Another thought I have is that it is so interesting that all of these digital technologies have some sort of water metaphor. For example, the pirate bay and “torrenting”, streaming, live stream, making waves, etc. These are all water metaphors.

This is the reason why I really enjoyed going to the Santa Monica pier with Seneca, watching the water. When surrounded by water, or even on a cruise ship, it is insanely inspiring to see the water. Why? The power of the ocean is limitless, and the waves from the wind are also limitless. A thought:

What if you could become like the ocean? Never stop flowing.

You never step in to the same river twice

Probably one of the wisest things from Heraclitus; the basic idea is that you can go back to the same place, but it will never be the same. Why? Because you have changed.

For example, every day you are changing biologically. The 35-year-old Eric Kim is very different from the 25 year old Eric Kim, and also very different from the 15-year-old Eric Kim.

The foolish thing that a lot of people do is trying to be their old selves. Why would you want to be your old self? I think it is better to be your new self than your old self.

For example, it is far better to be a Tesla model S Plaid, then some old Porsche 911 car. A lot of people think it is cool to be classic, however my personal thought is that being future is better. For example, would you rather have fiber optic Internet, or 56K? Would you rather live in the old ass house, or a brand new skyrise condominium, with floor to ceiling windows?

Why do we romanticize the old and the past?

Perhaps it is because we lack imagination?

For example, it doesn’t require imagination to think about the past. The past is already set in stone, it is easily studyable, and interpretable. The future is much more fuzzy, and impossible to decipher.

Thinking about the future, and paving the future requires a lot more imagination, guts, and chutzpah. Also, audacity, and a little bit of insanity.

Name one genius that isn’t crazy

Let us consider our best friend Elon Musk; if he wasn’t so “crazy“, could he have pioneered a rocket ship that is reusable and can reset itself? Or, create a car that goes from 0 to 60 in 1.99 seconds, and costs a 10th of a comparable supercar?

I’m starting to realize more and more, in order to think about the future, create the future, or live differently, you must afford yourself a little bit of insanity. Why? No insanity, no future.

Permit yourself to be a little bit more audacious

I think in order to see the future, we must allow ourselves to become a little bit more crazy and audacious. My personal thought is it is better to attempt an insanely audacious goal, and fall short of it, rather than setting some sort of realistic goal, and obtaining it.

ATTEMPT ON!

EK

DID YOU KNOW?

Thinking Bill Nye the science guy; did you know that the word essay comes from the French assay, which just means attempt?

Therefore, when you write an essay, it is not a definitive source of proof or knowledge, but rather, an attempt towards proving a certain point or proposing a certain idea.

Also, the word philosophy. Philosophy literally means love of wisdom, or the striving towards wisdom.

A simple power approach to financial investments and speculation:

Better to commit 10% of your life savings on a speculative investment that can at least 10x, than put money into a medium risk investment.

For example, I believe that chainlink can at least 10X in value, maybe in the course of 10 years. I think Tesla stock can maybe 2X or 3X, but not 10X or even 50X.

Also thinking bitcoin; I believe in the next 30 years it could maybe 1000X. For myself personally, if you were speculating 30 to 40 years into the future, I would rather put my money into bitcoin then a Roth IRA or a 401(k).

Decrease costs by increasing the network?

From Chainlink Blog.

Feed—

In the world of crypto, it is not Ethereum, but bitcoin. The instantly recognizable big orange B icon, with the dollar signs around it.

I’ve been spending some time reading blog posts, from the chainlink blog, some thoughts:

1. The best blog posts are the ones in which you can scan them really quickly, and understand the information quickly. Therefore, the use of well described H2 headers is a good idea.
2. Also, embedding YouTube video links is not a good idea. Why? Nobody wants to click that big red button. A better strategy instead is animated GIF images, autoplay. Or even a better idea, or if you use wordpress.org and you have a videopress.com subscription, you can make your videos autoplay in mute.
3. Freshness, frequency publishing and updated: The best blog, or blog posts are the ones which frequently get updated. The worst thing that a blog can do is that when you revisit it, it is not updated. The best blog is always being constantly updated, having new things published to it. For example, can you imagine going on Reddit, and not seeing any new things posted?
4. Images: we humans are visual creatures. I’ve discovered that randomly interspersing images is very good, even if the images themselves have nothing to do with the information around it. In other words, better to have a bad image or an unrelated image than no image.

Why are blogs so important?

I believe that a blog is at least 100,000 times more important than social media. Why? It is the best place to share pertinent information and knowledge.

For example, when I think about the success of myself, and how I became so influential, it was not from social media, not even from YouTube; it was from my blog, this blog.

What I really like about crypto, and crypto technology is that there is so much for me to learn. It seems both practical, philosophically interesting, etc.

For example, the notion of “self custody“.

Also when it comes to crypto technology related things, I really enjoy reading these PDF technical papers.

Game Finance — GameFi

Chain.link — right now might be a good chance to buy.

Why? If you go to the chainlink blog, it looks like they got Eric Schmidt on board, the former CEO of google.

Something interesting Eric Schmidt said in a conversation with Sergey:

When building up Google, what we tried to do was put a little bit of Google in everything.

It seems that this similar line of thinking applies to chainlink; put a little bit of chainlink in everything.

Why do I like crypto? It is sexy.

Becoming an influencer is pretty straight forward:

The first thing is pursue something that you are so insanely passionate about that you’re willing to outhustle anybody else by a factor of 1000X.

The second thing is use the Internet. Publish your thoughts, your videos, your photos, your ideas, your audio, your artwork, etc. online. Do not use Instagram or Facebook or Twitter; spend 90% of your effort building up your own blog, self hosted on wordpress.org, and 10% of your effort on YouTube.

The third thing is think independently, and create independently. This means don’t create and make things based on what everyone else is doing. For example, the hilarity is that I publish a lot to YouTube, upload a lot of videos to YouTube, upload a lot of vlogs to YouTube, I upload a lot of stuff to YouTube, yet I never look at YouTube. A simple thought to success:

Spend 99% of your time and effort creating and producing and publishing, and only 1% of your time and effort consuming.

The fourth thing is time. I started blogging, uploading stuff to YouTube ever since I was 21 years old. As I write this I am currently 35 years old, I was born in 1988, and I suppose if I do the math, I have been in the game for over 14 years. It took me 14 years to get about 10,000 subscribers to my email newsletter, and I’m still going strong.

The fifth thing is the email newsletter. Even though email is a pretty bad technology, it seems to be the most effective way to propagate your thoughts. For example, I think the average person probably checks their email every two minutes. The penetration rate of email is probably 10,000X of that of social media. Another example, having about 90,000 fans on my Facebook fan page, if I post something organically, only maybe 200 people will see it organically. That rate is atrocious. However if I send out an email newsletter, my open rate seems to be around 30%. Much better.

Create, share and publish that which you’re personally curious about

A really big thing is in regards to things, create share and publish things you’re personally curious about.

Concept — to seize an idea. *-kehp

To seize, to hold.

It seems that people lack the ability to think independently.

The best car color for a SoCal car — matte white?

1,000,000,000

One million dollars:

$1,000,000

One million dollars is a one, and two commas.

One hundred million dollars is —

$100,000,000

A hundred M— a one and zero zero and two commas.

A billion dollars —

$1,000,000,000

A one, and three commas.

If your bank account — let us say your basic Chase checking account looked like that … how would you approach rent, money, expenses differently?

A real billionaire wants to be left alone

If indeed you were a true billionaire, you actually would not want to be known. Can you imagine how insanely annoying it would be everyone telling you for money? Or “donations“?

For example, if you were a real bona fide billionaire, I don’t think you would actually want to drive around in a Rolls-Royce, or a Lamborghini. Why? Too much unwanted attention. Perhaps a better approach would be to just drive an uber luxury low-key car, let’s say a Hyundai Genesis instead. Like the G90.

Something funny I’m starting to realize; money is just a concept.

A thought:

Does Elon Musk think about retirement, contributing towards his Roth IRA, and his 401(k)?

Certainly not.

Interest rates from banks?

Apparently currently speaking, there are all-time highs from banks, offering up to 4 to 5% and even a basic savings account, or checking deposit. The idea:

You can take a large chunk of money, let’s say $500,000, or $1 million, and just put it into a standard savings account, and the bank will magically have your money increase 4-5%.

Where did this money come from? It kind of makes no sense to me; the more I think about it, this whole banking system, fiat currency is starting to feel like a scam.

The real use of money?

Some other thoughts in regards to money: what is the real use of money?

The first obvious one is you need a place to live. A lot of people spend a very very large chunk of money either paying rent, buying a house or a condo, paying their monthly mortgage fees, etc. A really funny thought I had:

Rent should not cost more than $500 USD a month.

For example, one of the outsides of life sharing with Cindy and Cindy‘s mom’s family and her mom is that we don’t pay more than $500 a month in rent, sharing a huge suburban home in orange county California. There are lots of downsides of living in a mega complex house with lots of different people and family members, yet, I still think it may be a net positive. Why? You could save inordinate amount of money on rent, for example, I’ve seen that in Santa Monica at this new apartment condo called the park… a studio is $4,800 USD a month, a 1 bedroom is $5,800 USD a month, a 2 bedroom is $8,900 USD a month, and a 3-bedroom is $10,900 USD a month.

So the question is, where did this money magically come from?

Nerds at the computer pushing buttons, and ones and zeros?

My personal thought is in regards to money, the best way to approach things is to create real value and real wealth through real products, real services, real humans.

For example, Kanye West became a billionaire after you started designing and selling inordinate amounts of Yeezy sneakers in partnership with Adidas. Elon musk became the goat after creating physical cars, the Tesla cars, and selling millions of them. Jeff Bezos did it by creating the most epic Netwerk, the insane innovation of having almost any single product delivered to you within two days, one day, or even same day, or even within an hour or a few hours.

One of the most useful things I have learned and discovered is working out and lifting insanely heavy weights barefoot. I was first inspired by Hafþór, deadlifting 501 kg barefoot. My curiosity:

Why did he do the world deadlift record attempt barefoot?

This is what I think and I understood: when it comes down to it, let us say attempting a new world record, and giving it your all, an individual will strategize and do things in order to gain every possible maximum advantage. Therefore, the simple thought of attempting New world records, personal records, or just lifting an insanely heavy weight is that when you do it barefoot, you have maximum connection with the ground, maximum grip, maximum leverage.

This is applicable when you are doing almost any type of weight lifting. This includes rock pool, squat hold, atlas lift, the lift, farmers walk, squat, etc.

Even for other lists, I think it would be beneficial for bench press, shoulder press, military press, even Olympic weightlifting.

Why don’t more people lift weights barefoot? My theory is that because there is this low-key marketing desire to sell more weightlifting style shoes, it is a huge industry. Also part of it is a safety thing, a lot of commercial gyms don’t want to be sued by people accidentally having weights dropped on their foot. Also I think part of it is a hygiene thing, just walking around barefoot and the gym seems unhygienic.

This is the hilarious irony is that when it comes to traversing the gym barefoot, ironically enough it may be safer, because you are on maximum alert, trying to avoid some other idiots from dropping weights on your foot.

After having spent considerable time golds gym Venice beach, working out and warming up in the sun, being outdoors etc., and now going back to my traditional gym which is dark and indoors, I’m starting to hate being indoors more and more. The lesson and moral of the story:

Get a quick pump inside the gym, and get your ass outside the gym.

Try to avoid talking to people in the gym, they regardless of how interesting they may be.

Being indoors is bad for your health and strength!

I feel this is quintessential advice, especially during the winter months.

Also, maybe when choosing an apartment or a house or a home, the ultimate optimization is for natural light.

This should be the marketing language for the Hyundai N line; as a way for people to remember what “N“ stands for.

Just ignore and walk away. The best method.

No such thing as a “cowardly” woman.

Get dem gainzzz:

If you want to rack pull more, or move heavier weight, the secret is in your legs. Use your legs more.

The gym is a good place to work out, and also a good to work?

We are currently in the year 2023. Why are we still producing and driving gasoline cars?, it is insane.

Getting fit is relatively straightforward. It is all via negativa things — simply get rid of the things which weaken you.

My simple prescriptions include stop drinking soda, sweetened beverages, stop consuming anything with fake and artificial sweeteners, stop eating bread, carbs, starches, vegetables and fruit, pasta, rice, beer, wine, spirits and alcohol, weed, drugs etc.

Also, don’t sit.

For positive exercises, do anything which promotes you standing.

One thing I have observed is ultimately, when it comes down to it, people are more fascinated by feats of strength, instead of bodily muscles and physique.

Girls like strong guys.

Also, men are more impressed and flabbergasted by insane strength.

For example, apparently I went viral after doing a seven plate atlas lift, but that is nothing compared to my plate and beyond Atlas lift.

For example, a lot of people have randomly started talking to me, after witnessing me lift heavy weights, or attempting to lift very heavy weights. For example, pretty girls at the gym telling me, “that’s a lot of weight“. Also guys telling me the same.

Or, guys at the gym aceeding to me. When I am about to attempt a new personal record in my atlas lift, and I am insanely hyped up, and I am frantically looking for a 5 pound plate, or 2 1/2 pound plate, guys will randomly tell me, “feel free to take whatever you want.”

Also, at golds gym Venice, when hunting for the 200 pound dumbbell, a random guy saying “let us get out of your way, take whatever way you want.”

It seems that everyone wants to become more productive, yet, why doesn’t anybody give thought to human physiology?

Weight lifting is an “essay”, an “assay”— an attempt.