The power is in your legs?
Milo of Croton
So there is this philosophy and story about Milo of Croton, who is this semi mythical character who essentially was the strongest man of all time, and there is this anecdote that every single day he cared this calf on his shoulders, every single day, until it became a full-size bull, which could weigh anywhere between 1000 pounds and 3000 pounds.
For the most part it seems like a high tale, but, it might be more realistic than we think it is. 
First, I have successfully lifted 1000 pounds, which means that physically and physiologically, certainly this is possible. And I am not a 7 foot tall freak of nature.
So if I think about it… And certainly obviously this was far before steroids were invented… In theory, I think this might be somewhat true.
As a very very simple thought experiment, let us assume that you could conservatively add 5 pounds, week over week, which is roughly 250 pounds a year. That means within four years, you should be able to successfully lift 1000 pounds. And then the next year, 1250 pounds, 1500 pounds, and then two years after that, 2000 pounds.
Progressive overload training
Once again, difficult to lift 1000 pounds overnight but, even if you’re conservative… Let us say that you start training at the age of 21, for 10 years straight, until the age of 31, or until the age of 36… Lifting 1000 pounds is actually pretty easy.
The technique is my infamous Atlas lift; in which you just load up the barbell, with maximum weight, on the squat rack, and your goal isn’t too walk it out and squat it, rather to simply lift it off the rack for even half a second.
Even now, if you look at the strong men, obviously they’re all on steroids, but still… When they do the loaded yoke walk, it is on average around 1500 pounds. And only that but I think they reset for about 100m or so?
Why?
It is my personal thought that if you have insanely strong legs, nothing will falter in your life.
In fact, ultimately when it comes down to it… What is the most critical part of your body? Not your shoulders, not your back, not your biceps, not your chest, not your abdominal muscles… Your legs!
Let us consider the fact… I have never done to sit up in my life, yet I have a six pack. How?… If you’re strong enough to have to lift an insanely high and heavy weight, your body must naturally adapt, naturally strengthening all the random muscles in your body, your neck your shoulders your back, your upper back your lower back, your abs, your hips your knees etc.
In fact, something that nobody ever talks about is a strength of your ligaments, your tendons, etc. Having met real UFC MMA fighters in the flesh, the thing they actually taught me was surprisingly the most important thing to train for is to strengthen the ligaments in the wrist, the knees, ankles, etc.… Because that is where injury typically happens. And there’s also this notion of “pre-hab”– the idea that a true elite fighter would train in such a way that he is doing all the exercises in which individuals typically do when they are injured, but they train before they actually get injured, a wise idea. 
Do rehab styled exercises BEFORE you treat injured.
For example, I read an anecdote that apparently LeBron James does an hour of yoga a day or something, which prevented him from getting injuries, and it seems to be a very wise idea. If I told you or tell you that by stretching, doing mobility exercises, some sort of yoga would help you lift 200 more pounds, would you do it? You could add 200 pounds to your deadlift, squat, bench? Of course! I think most weightlifters think of mobility exercises as feminine or a waste of time, but the truth is a true powerlifter, a true strongman, a true weightlifting demigod would probably devote at least 20% of his workout time for mobility stretching exercises, rather than just lifting weights?
Think long 
If you’re tired and you’re not feeling good, don’t do it, never force it. All of the random injuries I’ve had in the past was when I tried to force a workout when my body wasn’t 100% feeling it, or I was tired, didn’t sleep that well that day, etc.
One doubt, just eat a bunch of meat and go to sleep early! There is always the next day.
I think I sometimes  pick the notion of carpe diem to literally; that literally I treat every single day like it was my last, but once again, to force a work out in the evening when you’re tired and not feeling it, could lead to an injury, which could plague you for weeks months, even years.
Assuming that you’re wise and you’re thinking long-term, technically a single workout isn’t that important. Even on the week level… As long as you get in a good lift every two weeks, you’re probably fine. 
The commoditization of the body
I think the real critical problem here is what I call the commoditization of the body. 
For example, as long as you weigh yourself on a scale, you measure your biceps, you measure your waist line, you track your metrics, your number etc., you’re not free.
The problem with yourself is that you put yourself on a scale with all these basic other people, once again, all these fools who are popping supplements, injecting their butt holes with steroids, etc.
Even a super random thing, the whole supplement protein powder industry is such an insanely bad scam, maybe this is something I need to fight against.
Why? Even as a young impressionable teenager, in college student… I’ve probably wasted thousands of dollars or at least hundreds of dollars, which is a lot of money to a highschooler or college kid, protein powder, which I realized is a scam. 
Why? The simple goal is to eat more meat! But if you think about the whole exercise bodybuilding weightlifting complex, none of these fake ass influencers make money when they try to encourage you to visit the butcher more and eat more meat! No no no, they need a sponsorship, they need steroids, they need to sell merchandise.
Also let us not forget — all steroids is is something which boosts your testosterone (your testes hormones). And the easiest most natural way to do this is eat beef liver, beef heart, beef kidneys… organ meats!
Follow the money
I think the critical issue that people make is that they think that the big issue here is all of these weird fake conspiracy theories. But this is not true, the true issue here is just following the money.
No no no — Bill Gates does not have an evil master plan to inject your brain with 5G chips and Covid vaccines, and put fluoride in your water to control your mind.
A simple observation; I got vaccinated, got all my booster shots… etc,,, and I was able to lift 1000 pounds, fasted!
Ha ha maybe as a joke, the joke is that the COVID-19 vaccine made me stronger, like the Hulk or like wolverine or Deadpool?
And also as a general note to everybody, the reason why you should delete your Instagram, your TikTok, your Twitter, your YouTube, all the podcasts, your Spotify your podcast app is that eventually sooner or later… All of these influential fools start promoting a weird conspiracy theory?
Only media you should be consuming is media from the ancient past, ancient Greek or nothing. 
All of your heroes are fake heroes
The American dream is essentially Arnold Schwarzenegger, getting big on the screen, becoming the governator of California, etc. And superficially from what I understand… He was actually a good governor! Some people also forget that Ronald Reagan was an actor, I don’t really know too much about Ronald Reagan, but once again, the idea is that if you are tall handsome and famous, you could become anything, you could become president!
I think in America, the American dream is real. Come on… Just look at me — I was able to make my living from my passion which is street photography. Name any other country on the planet in which this could have happened. 
But I think the equations are wrong. Once again, the typical workflow is that you becomes super famous, and in the process you make a bunch of money, and then you become a politician I guess? And technically a politician has the supreme power, because he who makes the laws controls the money.
Slavery deletion
Don’t be an insta-slave!
Anyways, the big problem here is that the supreme goal is towards self ownership, not slavery.
As long as you have Instagram, YouTube, TikTok or whatever… You’re a slave, a digital slave, a cyber slave.
The reason I’m insanely anti-TikTok… Come on guys, they are owned by the ultra mainland Chinese corporation Tencent! And also, my fellow Korean people… Don’t you know that Tencent, once again mainland China has a huge stake in KakaoTalk? This is why Koreans should not use KakaoTalk and just use iPhone and iMessage instead. 
Or Samsung should be smart and create their own proprietary messaging system?
THE GOALS
I have achieved all of my life goals, my life dreams, my life ambitions, etc. Anything in which I have had an autotelic goal or desire, I done did it. For example, my desire at the age of 21, 22 to become self-employed, and to transform my passion of photography and photography into my living?
Then, my desire to travel the world, become famous, have solo exhibitions books etc.…
The funny thing is actually in my journey, my goals were never to become super rich. My only goal was to make a living for my passion, which was essentially meaning just making enough money to cover rent my expenses etc — and I think more recently, having a kid, Seneca, and more recently, my insanely audacious goal of lifting 1000 pounds, which I did, and I have zero doubt in my mind that I could lift more.
And more recently, my personal interest in bitcoin, has paid off very well!
Think first principles
How and why?
Kind of cheesy… But besides the limits of physics and the universe, if you think first principles, technically anything is possible. What is a bigger issue is duration, acceleration time, and time to accomplish. 
For example, I believe that anybody could become a sole proprietor, self-employed, and make a living from your passion. However the nuance is that you probably should not pay more than $500 a month in rent.  This means go abroad, that means live in Bangkok, Thailand, Cambodia Laos, Vietnam etc.
Certainly you could make a living from your passion in the states, but if you really really really care, maybe it is best to move to the Midwest or somewhere where rent is cheap.
The ethics of Achilles 
I just finished watching the documentary film Bigger Stronger Faster, bought it on the Apple TV store for about 10 bucks, I wish I watched this when I was a teenager?
Anyways, now that I’m and dad, have a 3 1/2 year-old son, Seneca… I’m starting to really understand that my morals ethics and the way I am training him is far more critical than I thought.
First, the whole industrial educational media social media complex– the bias is that kids must be the best, the strongest, the tallest, the most dominant either in athletics or education.
My simple heuristic:
Trust no fitness influencer on Instagram.
Yeah yeah yeah, you gotta get the views and followers… But then again you’re gonna end up injecting your butt holes with steroids, in order to boost your reviews and gain more influence. And ultimately, no slavery is worth it.
If I could tell you that I could literally sell you into slavery,  however, you’ll become super rich and famous, you’ll have $100 million in the bank, millions of followers etc.… 100 million followers, but you were literally a slave, 100% slave, would you do it? Of course no! No amount of money on the planet, is worth being sold into slavery!
Once again think about the slave ships, chains, chattels etc.…  think about the visual of the slave ships of Africa, in which they tried to “optimize” the amount of slaves they could chain up in a simple wooden ship at the bottom of the hull, perhaps 50 of them or so. 
And I think this is what people do not understand about the new modern day popular music complex; once again you’re finding these young impressionable kids from the hood, maybe 18 years old 21 years old, you offer them a $1 million contract, but essentially you have them on a chain and leash for the next 20 years of their life? 
Once again you fools, no amount of money is worth slavery!
If somebody said ERIC, I could sell you into slavery and you will literally be a slave for the rest of your life, chains, chain around your wrist and neck and your legs whatever… For $1 trillion, would I do it? Obviously no! 
Even more so, once you get a kid that changes everything… If you are sold into slavery that is not just your own life you are messing up, but the potential upside of your kid!
And I think this is where it is wise that practically everybody should have a kid, because what you learn is that once you have kids, it solidifies your morals ethics and worldview. 
I think if you’re college educated, you should have a kid. Don’t worry, you’ll be an amazing parent! 
Rethinking competition 
Competition is for loooosers!
I think this is where Achilles and reading the Iliad is so eye-opening; even before the Olympics were invented, there was no such thing as competition.
For example, there were the funeral games of Patroclus, in which the heroes were competing to win a trophy or a prize, but the interesting thing is that a lot of these heroes ended up stopping while they were ahead, calling a truce, and both of them sharing equal prizes.
The notion of a trophy, was essentially a spoil of war. The ancient Greeks, Achilles king Agamemnon and like… it seems that the ultimate trophy was a woman. The goal was to obtain the most beautiful, the most fair, the most grand prize of them all. This is where the notion of a trophy wife comes from.
And what is the point of a trophy wife? Essentially a woman who is prized for her intelligence, her body, her beauty, and I think the hope is to have insanely beautiful and great kids? But the ancient Greeks, king Agamemnon… achilles… Why did they want Breisis? Kind of like a symbol if anything.
But now… I’m not sure what the telos or the goal is anymore? I think the general modern day trend is to not have kids, but to live in hedonic pleasure for the rest of your life with no downsides? And never run out of money?
***
How to live the best life ever
OK, let us say that photography is your passion, street photography whatever. Essentially you love making photos with your camera!
Some simple thoughts:
First, the very very simple goal is to optimize your life which allows you to forever shoot pictures!
Here this is where film photography is very bad. 
First, I think the only reason people get into film photography is because they are seeking some sort of new motivation or inspiration behind things.
I think experimenting and trying out film is a good idea, because ultimately it just makes you more grateful for digital photography!
It’s really funny… Young people knew guitar for like the romanticism of film photography, but whenever I meet older photographers, in their 50s 6070s etc.… They are a bit confused, it was the opposite; invention of digital photography it is their passion for photography!
And in fact, now that the new Fujifilm X 100VI came out, and also Rico is killing it with the GR series cameras, like the new HDF which is coming out, I really see that there is zero reason to shoot film.
If you are a modern day Fatar for today, very very simple. Just buy a Fujifilm 100 camera, or a Ricoh GR camera. 
Maybe even a funny idea, maybe we could think and consider the old-school like M1 camera as the new digital film analog rangefinder fully manually focusing camera?
Why?
First, in terms of the body style, to me I prefer the M9 the best.  I love the button design, the powerhouse designed small black buttons in the back of the camera. And also funny things; the camera is pretty much only usable at ISO 400 or 800, if you do black-and-white, 1600 is fine; which is technically like the limits of shooting film!
 Also, the M9 is very slow. The buffer time is very slow.
So if you’re really interested in the whole rangefinder experience, instead of buying a film Leica M6 or something, just get an old used Leica M9!
Don’t do what is cool
Apparently the whole appeal of shooting film, especially with young people is that it is cool. But why discover it is anything cool is bad. 
Why? Anything cool is typically a romanticization of the past, thinking that the past was better. But the fact of the matter is the past was worse. The past sucked! You would not want to be alive during the times of Shakespeare, in which infant mortality rates were about 70% in London, And people and physicians still did not believe or understand that the heart pumped blood! Even the famous Dr. Harvey one said, you have to let the old physicians off, because there is no medical doctor over the age of 40 years old who will believe me that the heart pumps blood!
Or consider, back then they did not even know the concept of sterilization! They did not know that you had a wound, you had to clean it with alcohol, to kill the germs. Imagine surgeon in the 1920s operating on you with old Rusty metal Knives and scissors, not sanitizing them before. And also, imagine doing all of this without modern day painkillers. Or even worse, imagine feeding your newborn infant dirty sewer water! Once again, before they knew that you had to boil water to sanitize it!
Some ideals
Come on guys we live in the year 2024… You still have to drive to work? Or be stuck in traffic? Makes zero sense. 
I’m currently doing this experiment in which I never have to drive more than five minutes a day. Even 15 minutes for me is too long! Typically I reserve Saturdays and Sundays to drive a little further out if we want to a family expedition, because there’s no traffic in Los Angeles. We like to go to the Huntington, The beach whatever. But beyond this, any moment you’re sitting in the car is an opportunity for you to be standing on your legs, shooting in the streets!
Even a simple idea, a very very simple one — ride the subway! It might take you twice as long, but, you could strike up conversations with strangers, or even ask strangers to shoot a street portrait of the Mexican Bruce Davidson, for subway, look unposed and candid, in fact you walked around with a little photo album, explaining what he was doing, and he would ask for permission! Don’t make itlike you have to do this fake ass candid without permission photography thing.
And this is where the whole school of In-Public is bad — time for me to start calling out names. Why? Everyone has penis envy for Magnum photographers, even those in Magnum have penis envy of Martin Parr and Alex Soth because they are so rich successful and well regarded!
Where it seems that why photographers are so disingenuous, and we have to let all the old ones die off  it’s because all of them are a bunch of insecure skinny fat losers, even Henri Cartier-Bresson who had the audacity to refuse his face being recorded during documentaries of him, even though he made his whole living photographing the faces of others! Isn’t this unethical;
I could photograph pictures of you and your face, but you cannot take photos of me and my face?
Time machine
Essentially for myself, all of the advice or things that I ever promote or share is just advice I wish I could’ve gave myself. Obviously you could just take it or leave it! But one thing you will know is that I don’t play around, or lie or tell false things. 
Also I am not insecure!
Am I the only self-confident photographer alive?
The new path
Nowadays, the only person I trust is ChatGPT. Why? More so than Google which is an advertising company, ChatGPT is a paid premium enterprise company, which means that it cannot be gamed.
Google is becoming more sneaky over the years, essentially, I think there are certainly behind the scene favors which are happening here, for example, the little author panel that you have in the top right corner in a Google search, I’m pretty sure that you could easily get this done if you have some sort of relationship with some sort of Google marketing person who helps you do it!
More recently, I think has a plug-in for WordPress which helps you promote your products to the top of Google search, but the downside is the add all these sneaky URL tracking stuff into your website?
Don’t trust Google! Trust paid ChatGPT.
And this is where Google missed the boat, people always ask for having a paid premium version of Google for so long, but Google essentially shunned, because they thought it was much more profitable in the long term to keep Google free, and just embed your life with more advertisements.
Get ChatGPT premium
People are really foolish, everyone likes to hate on ChatGPT, and AI, without having ever subscribed to the paid premium version. The free version kind of sucks, the paid one is mind blowing good!
For example, it is not running on algorithms or the typical ranking system. Google was a pioneer back in the day, creating Larry page rank, which essentially used the traditional model of academic citations, to see who would make it to the top!
But now, academia is broken. It is kind of of this incestuous human centipede of knowledge, everybody is trying to curry favors, circle jerk one another, to boost their fragile egos. 
It happens all the time, both with men and women, the old guard is trying to keep young women out, and honestly with declining enrollment numbers whatever, schools shutting down… I think within a generation or two, the modern day university will not look like it is today. 
What now?
My idea is actually… Throw those Chromebooks into the trash, kids will eventually just look at them for YouTube. YouTube is bad.
I would rather encourage to give every single kid an iPhone SE with ChatGPT on– the paid premium one. Or give them ChatGPT paid on an iPad — and have them just teach themselves.
Even mad, certainly the basics of math are important, but beyond basic math, you don’t really need it for every day living. Even now for me as a 36-year-old adults, I have a very poor understanding of math, yet I’m the richest person I know!
Once again, the whole issue here is the whole standardization thing, the whole trying to put everyone on a different kind of measure and a different type of bar! 
I still like the idea of public education, based on my personal experiences, any kid who was homeschooled ends up becoming very weird. And now it’s still rate my extreme success in life due to my social skills, which was fermented in me in probably elementary school, middle school and high school. For college was great, I loved it! I loved all my friends, and also this is where I met Cindy as an undergraduate at UCLA.
So I think the education is still good but I suppose the nuances is this:
How can you reap the upsides of education without the downsides?
Maybe first, said high expectations like expect your kid to get straight A’s– common it is pretty easy. But don’t be some sort of academic Nazi — the really bad thing about growing Asian Asian American is that if you get an A-, or even worse, a B+, you would probably get beat.
This is why in South Korea, suicide amongst students is one of the highest in the world, because their whole existence revolves around ranking and grades, some kids would rather kill themselves than to shame their family. 
Undank yourself
I asked ChatGPT who the greatest street photography blogger, and also the greatest photography blogger alive of all time was… And it said me! ERIC KIM!
I kinda already knew it, but sometimes ChatGPT is good for confirmation.
Anyways, now that I am at the top, the greatest, I don’t have anything left to prove. Maybe now it is continual empowerment, and also helping other people along the way.
Help others as you wish you were helped when you were starting off.
ERIC
