Fight Club – Page 8 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Russian Wrestlers, Pylometrics, and You’re Probably Not Trying All That Hard

“When the game is on the line, a winner wants the ball in his hands.” – The Replacements

A miniature version of The Boy prepares for a match . . . he now weighs 200 pounds.

The other day I was on Amazon. Yes, I know. The fact that I cannot walk into my living room because of all the little boxes shows I might spend too much time there. Anyway, I was looking for hair regrowth tonic that actually works and carbohydrate free sugar cookies options for fitness equipment for Pugsley and The Boy. One of the things that I saw was . . . a box. You can buy it here (LINK).

I don’t get any money if you buy a box. But you do get a box. One box.

The idea of the box is that you . . . jump on it. That’s it.

What led me to the box I was watching a video of Александр Александрович Карелин. Oh, sorry, you don’t speak Russian – that’s Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Karelin spelled out in the strange chickenscratch that Russians use as a secret code that Putin and Trump devised so we can’t decipher their messages. Karelin was an internationally ranked wrestler for a while. Like for five Olympics. In fact, his career record is 887 wins and two losses. His nickname is “The Experiment.” Because he could do 42 pullups. And he weighed 285 pounds. His signature move? Lifting 285 pound people off the mat and tossing them up into the air so they landed on their shoulders.

The Experiment.

Yeah.

A quote from Aleksandr: “They call me The Experiment because they cannot conceive that every day I train harder than they have ever trained in their lives.” He might be just a bit intense.

Aleksandr was being interviewed in the YouTube® video I saw, and they showed the obligatory clip of him working out. One of the exercises he was doing was repeatedly jumping on a box that was 24” or 30” high. I was impressed. 285 pound guy jumping that high? Wow.

Here’s a picture of Aleksandr. Yeah, that’s a 285 pound human he’s going to toss into the air like a ragdoll. Not sure why they need tanks if the Russians have more guys like this around. Oh, and he’s buddies with Putin and has both a doctorate and a law degree. Don’t you feel like an underachiever now?

It turns out that “jumping on boxes” is known by the $250 per hour consultant word, “pylometrics.” From the Latin root Pylo for “pile of” and the ancient Greek word “metron” which means “communist measurement system.” Pylometrics came to world attention when the Soviet track and field teams of the 1970’s were turning in absolutely amazing performances. One trainer thought, “hey, it must be all of the jumping on boxes stuff that they’re doing,” and completely disregarding the simpler theory of, “win Olympic medals or we’ll shoot your family.”

Regardless, as noted above, he renamed it pylometrics so he could charge $250 per hour to talk about it.

Well, if one of the best wrestlers ever to live thought that pylometrics should be a part of his routine, well, why not? (Previous post: Pugsley decided he wanted to be an NCAA champion in wrestling. (LINK)) If you’re going to try to be the best, you emulate everything you can about the very best people you can find. Everything. Pugsley even has a poster of Putin up on his wall now.

So, I was on Amazon, totally not looking for hair tonic when I found the boxes shown above. Did I say boxes? Yeah. I saw the picture and expected three. Turns out that a cube exists in three dimensions, so they delivered just one box with three heights – 16 inches, 20 inches, and 24 inches. It turns out if you rotate the box . . . well, you get the picture now.

The Boy put it together when it arrived, but then he had to leave, so that left Pugsley and I in the wrestling room with the cube. To be frank, I was concerned that Pugsley wouldn’t be able to jump up on the 16” side and we’d have to get something smaller. I was hoping that it wouldn’t hurt his confidence to have to jump on the “short box.”

He set it with the 16” side facing up. He jumped, and stuck the landing on top of the box like an Olympic® gymnast.

John Wilder: “That was awesome. Okay, try 20 inches!”

He tried once, twice, and was up on top on the third side.

John Wilder: “That was amazing!! Try 24 inches!

Pugsley: “No, I can’t do that.”

John Wilder: “Try.”

He jumped up. Not quite.

Again. A miss.

Third time? He stuck to the top of the box like there were magnets in his feet.

Also this month, friend was doing Crossfit®.

Things you never need to guess about a person: if they are vegan, if they drive a Prius®, or if they are in Crossfit©. Now if you find an actual human that does all three of these things, you might have found a smug singularity – beware or you might get sucked into the smug . . . . (my friend isn’t smug, just often sore after working out).

Anyhow . . . when working up to a max in the deadlift (the king of all lifts) my friend tried to stop at 100 pounds. She thought that was enough. Too hard.

Her coach encouraged her – and she maxed out at 180 pounds.

Most days we have no idea of the things that we are capable of, if only we try. The thing that generally limits your life is . . . you. If you want to be the best, you have to start by working like the best. And believing in yourself.

You might not get there, but you’ll know that you didn’t hold back. You’ve put the game in your hands.

I know where you could go to buy a box . . .

College is Expensive and Your GPA is as Inflated as an Instagram Model

“But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg – isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!” – Animal House

Pugsley climbing a climbing wall. Not pictured: college degree he earned.

Last week we reviewed how college may provide (does provide) a lot of poor choices for student degrees – essentially you can get a degree that’s not worth very much to any employer. But, thankfully, in an era where I can look up the most obscure facts online, I can count on college being cheaper now?

No. It’s more expensive than ever.

Huh? You have a service that more people are requesting, one that’s essentially unlimited since Wikipedia® is free, and the prices go up?

Yes. But Wikipedia™ does not have climbing walls.

At least colleges are paying more for instructors/professors, right?

No. Colleges are increasingly pushing instruction onto “adjunct” instructors. These adjunct instructors are generally paid in PEZ® and pity. If the college feels guilty, it leaves a little extra on the nightstand in the morning.

How much have prices gone up?

Prices have gone up everywhere, but let’s pick Harvard™. In 1970, Harvard cost about $4,000 a year for tuition. Not bad? Well, the median family income was about $10,000 back then, so, not so bad. If you hustled you could (with a small scholarship and working a pizza delivery job) make it.

Harvard now costs over $43,000 a year. Median family income is closer to $60,000 a year, so prices (in terms of a family income) are up over 180%. But Harvard® has literally billions of dollars in a cash horde that the administration rolls in when they can’t get enough sleep. Other colleges have gone up more. Much more. One state school has gone up (since 1980) from $6,000 tuition to $40,000. This is more than Harvard’s 180%, but I won’t do the math because I’m feeling like I don’t want to. Oh! The solution is left to the student! Yeah, that’s what the books said . . .

So why are prices going up?

One theory, and it’s a good one, is student loans. Student loans were created as a mechanism to trap young people into debt before they can legally buy whiskey means to allow anyone to go to school as long as they were willing to borrow enough money.

Student loan debt is the very worst kind of debt I know of that doesn’t involve a blood oath with the Mafia. It is the herpes of debt.

Just like herpes is incurable and makes you (when disclosed) a lot less attractive to the opposite sex (or same sex, or whatever combinations including androids that are possible in California) student loan debt makes you less attractive. And you can’t declare bankruptcy and get out of student loan debt. Again, like herpes, it’s forever. Unlike herpes, you can pay your debt down to zero.

But you should avoid both of them, if you can. Debt, especially student loan debt, will outlast your mortgage. I bought and sold four houses, three unicorns and one wife before I paid off my student loan.

I met him. Nice guy. But he never did a song about a unicorn or a Pegasus.

But why would student loans cause the cost of college to increase?

Simply put, there’s more money available? The colleges most exposed to student loans increased their tuition the most. Quite simply – tuition expands to consume as much money as you can feed it. There’s a pretty comprehensive study that proves it – you can find the info here (LINK). What, am I supposed to do all of your research?

So where is the money going?

PEZ® for the adjunct professors? No. Administrators. I’ve seen this before in other organizations that aren’t subject to market punishment (like, say, your friendly federal or state government or school district). One administrator has a job. It’s not a hard job, but it’s his (or hers). They are paid, at least partially, on the number of staff that they have. So, they get approved positions for “essential” work. Soon enough, a job that was barely important enough for one person is now down by a staff of thirty. (This tendency will be discussed again in a future post, and was discussed in “Government is a Jobs Program here (LINK).)

Professor Doom is a very good writer. His blog is “Confessions of a College Professor” and I strongly suggest that you read it, especially if you are certain that colleges are bastions of honor, learning, and goodness. Recently, the learned Professor had a post where he described that at Evergreen College in Washington State, that there is one administrator for every six students. I kid you not. Here’s the link (LINK).

But the education is better, right?

Again, I’ll have to defer to Professor Doom. He writes again and again how grade inflation has taken off (LINK). I tried to find his post about how, due to a computer error, bunches of students at a school he was at were signed up for a class AFTER they got their schedules.

When this error was discovered at the end of the semester, fully a third of students (who had never attended class) had an “A” in the class that they had never been to and weren’t aware of. Yeah, you read that right.

In at least a third of your classes, you never need attend and you’ll pull an “A”.

Wow. That’s not really education at all, except maybe in the “son or daughter of a President or Senator who gets on a corporate board of directors because they can fog a mirror” way.

Why?

On snowy day a long time ago I decided I wanted to teach. A new college had come to town – I had never heard of it, “University of Phoenix™.” They put an ad out looking for faculty, and I sent in my résumé. Or rësümë if you’re in a 1980’s hair metal band.

Well, in the 1980’s I had hair . . .

I got an immediate call back. Pretty soon I was in “New Faculty Training” – which included a batch of people with master’s degrees. Most of us had teaching experience at the undergraduate level – that was, back in the day, how you paid to go to grad school.

We sat in a circle and discussed how to teach at the University. We would get stock options if we did well. The curriculum was set, and it was explained to us that the students were often working. And had a tough time. So we shouldn’t treat them exactly as students.

Think of them as customers instead, we were told.

So, what if a student never came to class?

“Well, they’re paying for it, so, it’s not a problem.”

What if a student didn’t turn in an assignment?

“You should give them a chance to turn it in late – they might have had a sick kid.”

One of the prospective faculty got pretty blunt: “So, we shouldn’t flunk them?”

The leader of the orientation paused. “Well, not if you can help it.”

So, a course you didn’t have to show up for, you could turn in assignments late, and would almost never flunk? That sounds like the state of higher education today.

That was my last meeting with the University of Phoenix©.

Was it a smart financial move? I just checked. I wouldn’t have been a billionaire if I would have stayed with them. So, whew.

What happened, John Wilder?

Prior to our current generation, college had been about the reputation of the institution and the graduates. If you were a Harvard® man or a Vanderbilt™ grad, that meant something. Not only was the curriculum difficult, but you only had a very small chance of even getting into the place.

The reputation of the school was that it was difficult – only the best should try to get in. Only the best will succeed. The often repeated story was of a Dean getting up before the freshman and saying, “look to your left . . . now look to your right. Only one of you will be here in four years.”

That was something they were proud of. If you didn’t dig in and study, well, you’re gone. That enhances the value of the school’s name.

This was important. The school would rather eat a kitten (an actual, living kitten without condiments like creamy horseradish sauce that go great with kitten) than put a graduate out that wasn’t up to their standards.

Now? Students are “customers” and the administration wants as many of them as possible so they can spawn a never ending series of administrator clones (college administrators reproduce asexually) to bring into the college administration. They don’t want to kick a student out, because that would mean that they would lose the precious, precious money that the student brings in. So they need things to attract more customers. Like elephant rides. Free panty hose. Margarita Tuesday.

Oh, did I mention that our college has climbing walls?

Time Goes By Too Fast? Blue Öyster Cult, Pascal, and Ben Affleck May Save Us Yet

“All Rome rejoices in your return, Caesar. There are many matters that require your attention.” – Gladiator

Memes – a tool of attention control? Or cats with eated cookies?

One curse of modern life is . . . always being in a rush. A hurry. Where is the time? How do you expect to do that? It’ll take hours to do that?

And it’s a constant refrain now – we end up at midnight wondering . . . where did the day go? The rush? It adds to stress, and stress clearly causes health problems over time.

Yeah, that time we don’t have enough of. Where did all of our time go, anyway?

I seem to remember that Blue Öyster Cult (in the song Burning for You) promised me . . . “Time everlasting, time to play B-sides . . . “

So, where is my time to play B-sides? (Historical note: In order to hear a stupid song you liked, it was required to buy either a full album, or to buy a “single.” The “single” cost less, and had the song you really wanted to hear. On the other side of the popular song was the “b-side” – generally a song that wasn’t very popular, and never would be very popular. Thus, if you had time to play b-sides, you were wealthy with time. Now you can just go to the Internet and have any song ever recorded played for you instantaneously.)

Television

The real issue now is that every moment of every day can be filled with media: YouTube®, Netflix©, Amazon Prime Video™, Hulu©, HBOGO®. Those are just the video services, which doesn’t include the television your television has recorded for you to watch later.

But if it were just videos, we’d be okay. Virtually every time I type this, either YouTube® is providing background music, or one of the movies that I watch as background noise (The Accountant® is one that I like a lot, and Batman vs. Superman™ is another – don’t judge me for my Affleck Affection Affliction – my doctors says it might be curable).

Now, however, we can watch an entire television season (via binge watching) in several days – creating an immersive event that can be disorienting.

When The Mrs. and I first started watching “Lost” on DVD, well, there were several 3AM nights because we couldn’t stop watching. “Just one more episode . . .”

Social Media

Then we add in interactive online experiences – FaceBorg®, Twitttttterrrr©, SnapGram™. These are experiences engineered to grab your attention. Twitter shows you a notification when it wants you to see the notification to maximize your engagement. There’s nothing random about these web services. And you’ve probably heard this before, but if they’re not charging you to do it, you’re the product. With these social media services, you are completely the product. FaceBird© expected to make $27 from the data it harvested . . . from each user. Who paid? Who knows? Let’s just say your late night searches have drawn . . . some attention)

Not pictured: Cambridge or Stanford.

Cambridge and Stanford (the universities, not the two dudes named Cambridge and Stanford that were Muppets®) did a study, and found that with 10 likes FaceBlog© knows you better than a work colleague. 150 likes? They know you better than your parents know you. 300 likes? They can beat the Persians at Thermopylae. Just kidding. They do, however, know you better than your spouse. And everyone knows the Persians are still on MySpace®.

Only this many likes and then FaceBlock® says . . . THIS IS SPARTA!

And if they know you better than your spouse? They can certainly figure out your moods, the things that will get and keep your attention. Why? Their income depends on your attention.

The News

The news is becoming ever less based in truth and more and more polarized. So, the news isn’t only fake, it’s biased. Examples? After Trump was nominated for President, a news reporter did a straight news story that Trump had asked a woman with a crying baby to leave a campaign rally. Did he do it? Yes. Was he kidding? Well, yes. Humor is a powerful way to connect with a crowd – watching video of the event later, it was pretty obvious that it was a joke.

Both sides do it. It was reported that a “doctor” had reviewed Hillary Clinton and found that she had some form of cerebral palsy. Clearly, that would be devastating for her bid for the presidency. Clearly, there’s no evidence of the palsy post-election.

So, the news becomes polarized like a 120 volt outlet, all charged up to make you care passionately about things you’ve never heard about before.

Availability

All of the above are available to you everywhere and anytime. I can watch a movie on a tablet in bed while I check my phone to see how many people liked my last Tweeet®. It used to be (in the long-before time) that this level of immersive and up to date media was available only in limited locations. Now? Anywhere. Work. Working out. Driving to work. Driving home. At dinner. And throw your work e-mail on top of that so you can read the thought your boss had at 2am when he woke up to let the dog out.

Result?

You feel rushed – you have eliminated downtime. Back during the Revolutionary War, learning about the results of a battle might take weeks. Now? When ISIS was attacking in Iran halfway around the world from here, there were nearly-live videos uploaded to YouTube®. And we can watch the Kardashians doing . . . well, whatever parasitical thing they’re doing today. (I’m not saying that they’re exactly like human tapeworms, but there are a lot of unsettling coincidences . . . .)
Your ideas never have time to develop? How could they? They’re always being trampled by the ideas and opinions of others, couched in the most emotional manner possible to elicit the largest surge of anger or fear they can muster.
You lose the ability to focus and concentrate – there’s always some media begging for your attention at the periphery of your consciousness. Check that email – it might be important! (Hint: it might be important once a month.)
Shopping – for anything, anytime. Your commercial desires can be met instantly. Need to order ammunition for an AK at 8AM? Sure! Need to order posters for a protest parade at a podium? Sure!
Boredom with the mundane. Mundane literally means “Earthly.” I can co-pilot a TIE® fighter with Darth Vader©. I can grab a YouTube© video showing Russian teens at the top of the tallest building in Moscow. Live view a rocket launch? What can awe and inspire a generation that has experienced so many events virtually? Oh, wait, you search for ever more esoteric adventures. And you’ll find them – but none of them will occur around your location.
Video games, where you can expend hours achieving great goals, saving civilizations, destroying enemy fleets, founding empires. Great, pre-programmed goals. Other people’s goals. Goals that aren’t yours, and, when accomplished, aren’t at all real.
Preoccupation with news that has no impact on you, and that you have no control over, yet about which you are made to feel deeply that you’re willing to fight the other side to the death. Seems legit.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

This is Blaise Pascal – who had a nose larger than any ship in the current Canadian Navy, but wasn’t quite as smart as Newton. This irritates the French. Note the Blue Öyster Cult symbol in the background . . . Pascal was a rocker!

Mindset that our activity is our accomplishment. Our accomplishment is our accomplishment.
The mathematician Blaise Pascal said (roughly, this is my translation of what I remember he said in French because I’m too lazy to go to my library to look it up – heck, I even marked this passage when I first read it and am too lazy to go and check, but I’ll get close enough because, well, I’m John Wilder) “Activity distracts us, which removes our attention from how wretched we are.”
We’re being manipulated (not in a tinfoil hat way, but in a shareholder value way). FaceBrick® makes money off of you. Off of your eyes. Off of your attention. Off of your habits. It’s not a conspiracy that businesses will do whatever they can to make more money from you, even if the long term consequences aren’t in your best interest. But it is in their best interest to put in front of you the stimulus that they figure will give them the proper response.

Coping – How do I deal with it?

I don’t listen to the radio during my daily commute. That leaves over an hour without any media – any static. It took about a week to get used to it, but now I use that time to think – to plan for the day or night ahead. To think about the next post. To think about . . . anything. But the thoughts are my own.
When we go out to eat as a family, phones in a pile on the table. We’re there and discuss what each other think.
At work, I’ll sometimes take e-mail breaks – where I won’t review them for hours at a time.
Sitting without distraction to focus on a single problem or task. I find that, for me, music helps with the focus.
Writing daily the list of things that I really have to do. This will probably be its own post in the future. But I use and actual pen and pencil, and put it on actual paper. It makes a difference.

The trends are clear – barring a global war, great depression, currency collapse, or regional war near here, our attention span will be fought over on a daily basis. If you want to accomplish anything real in your life, if you want to avoid the stress that comes with the constant emotional treadmill, you have to come up with a strategy.

Thankfully? I have my willpower. That, and Ben Affleck movies. I can mostly ignore them. Hey – is Ben Affleck . . . my B-side?

If so, that makes me wealthy, indeed!

Tiny Fight Club, Taleb’s Skin in the Game, and Expensive Female Lawyer Reproduction

“A guy who came to Fight Club for the first time, he was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood.” – Fight Club

The Boy and Pugsley square off in a Beta version of Fight Club. Bigfoot is in the background as an observer.

I have a fight club in my basement.

Not an officially sanctioned, Tyler Durden® approved Fight Club. Just a small fight club, mainly involving me, The Boy, Pugsley, and (sometimes) The Mrs.

What is this tiny fight club? Well, it’s wrestling.

Wrestling season ended for The Boy a little sooner than he’d planned – he’s in high school and would rather have gone on from districts. We talked about it, and he was ready to commit to working harder for the coming year – and I read somewhere that “working hard” was correlated with “success.” Sounds like crazy voodoo to me.

But sometimes a hard loss will do that to you much more effectively than a win – when I wrestled, I learned something from each match I lost. Some wins? I didn’t learn a thing. And losing can either break you or motivate you. The Boy sounded motivated.

Given The Boy’s commitment, we immediately started practicing for the next year. Since Pugsley wanted to join us, we threw him in for good measure – he’s five years younger and a bit smaller than The Boy. I will note that The Mrs. has been after me for about two years to take a more rigorous and structured approach to coaching The Boy and Pugsley in wrestling. My excuse was that I didn’t want to interfere with their actual wrestling coaches and the work that they were doing with my kids – what if I taught them moves differently than the coach liked? Yeah, a lame reason, but it was my reason.

But after this year for The Boy, he was ready. He only has so many days left of wrestling, and he committed that he’d work with me to make the most of them. Fair enough, I’d commit to him to work hundreds of hours with him to help him be better. So we started practice. But before we started practice? I started reading, studying, and preparing to coach.

I prepared to start Tiny Fight Club (no, this wasn’t a restart of my failed Midget Hammer Fighting League):

What sort of things should I teach them? In what order? Wrestling is easily the oldest sport known to humanity – men were wrestling each other when we still hadn’t figured out how to knock two rocks together to make a “clunk” sound and way before they’d invented the Nintendo® Switch™.

Why did we wrestle in the murky depths of history? To impress the ladies, sure. Also, because it’s fun. Most importantly, as Jordan Peterson would say, this combat allows us to create a hierarchy, and having that hierarchy is important, as I describe in my perfectly awesome post about Peterson’s book (LINK).

But something more happened. I became engrossed in study about how to coach and what to coach. And Pugsley still had one more tournament left . . . so we had exactly three practices until he would finish out his kid’s wrestling season.

Like The Boy, Pugsley had been, well, stalled in his progress if not taking a few steps backward this year. He just wasn’t getting much better. But we had those three practices. And with them, and in drilling he felt more confident than ever.

The good thing about that last tournament? There were only two people in his bracket. One was Dirk. Pugsley had never even taken Dirk down (where you gain control over your opponent) in the last three years. The other wrestler, Ezekiel, well, Pugsley hadn’t beaten Zeke in two years. Literally he had wrestled these two other boys a dozen times or so in the previous two years and hadn’t beaten either one of them. What was three hours of practice?

In the very first match in his weight, Dirk pinned Ezekiel. Quickly. As was usual. Dirk routinely took first place.

Dirk’s second match was against Pugsley. Pugsley immediately (and with confidence) went out and gained control and got the take down! He was up 2-0. Dirk was in such difficulty (and pain!) he’d done anything he could to get off the mat. Pugsley dominated him for most of the period, then got in a pretty bad position, and then got pinned. But he came off the mat with confidence – he knew what I had coached him in worked – he had been amazing against an opponent he’d never even scored on. The next match he pinned Ezekiel in the first period. Zeke was not pleased – the creampuff he always beat had grown fangs. And Pugsley was sold on our practices.

On the way home he talked about wanting to be a national collegiate wrestling champion. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say, I now had “Skin in the Game” and so did my boys. And it matters.

(The following link doesn’t get me any money as of the time of this writing, but at some point I might monetize it. It’s Taleb. Buy the book, anyway.)

I am thinking about reviewing this book, but reviewing Taleb might prove to be difficult in this blog – it might require five or more posts. We’ll see. Buy it, anyway, and read it.

In the process of working through wrestling with The Boy and Pugsley – I found something interesting (outside of the bruises randomly outcropping on my biceps, forearms, and chest). I felt more energized than I’d felt in ages. The very act of working with The Boy and Pugsley to make them stronger and more skilled improved my attitude about . . . everything. My daily cardio workouts became sharper (and I studied wrestling moves during them). And my muscles started to grow as I kept up with the boys when we lifted after fight club.

But I also had another epiphany.

The combat serves many purposes: It builds confidence. It teaches to never give up. By example, it shows that hard work pays off in success. It bonds fathers to sons. It builds discipline (Pugsley’s respect for me has gone up 372% and his pre-teen surliness has utterly disappeared). These are all traits that will lead (along with intelligence and Stoic virtue (LINK)) to much greater than average social and economic success.

And I’m in much better shape, and I’m learning how to teach The Boy (no, you have to rotate more than 180˚) and Pugsley (no, you have to throw your head through while you get your hips under your shoulders) and The Mrs. (dear, could you make us all some nice sandwiches). I kid. The Mrs. oversees our deadly serious play. When The Boy complained that Pugsley smelled like sour milk, The Mrs. awarded The Boy a penalty point for “Involuntary Lactation.” That caused us all to laugh.

But the epiphany is that the combat pays off down the road in the ultimate Skin in the Game moment: this work is a precursor to reproduction . . . what?

Yes. Being a high status man increases reproduction possibilities. Being a high status woman doesn’t.

Huh?

How does that work??? Check this tweet out:

https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/973473559933747206/photo/1

I would say that being a high-powered female attorney actually lowers reproduction access for women. The most fertile years for women are in their 20’s – after that, it lowers drastically. By the age of 40? Forget it.

But high status guys? The guys back in the cavemen days that were winning the wrestling matches? They got a chance to reproduce. And 8,000 years ago, science says that only one guy versus 17 women reproduced (LINK). The odds are better now, one guy will get to reproduce for every out 3.3 women that to reproduce. 3.3 to one? Are you kidding me? Nope. High-status guys, only the top third, get to reproduce. I guess that choosy girls all choose the same men.

High status men.

Competition – physical competition is hardwired into the brains and souls of boys. And old men, like me. That’s why I felt so good – I was throwing myself into physical combat for the first time in years, and relishing it. Winning (and coaching well) provides many physical benefits – increased testosterone, brain chemicals and other science-y things in addition to the strength and fitness ability. If you look at the math, social hierarchy is a must for men.

In today’s society, that means a cool job with money. So, in order to have children, i.e., the ultimate Skin in the Game, the behaviors of competition and working long hours to increase income are absolutely necessary for men and are negatively correlated with reproductive success for women.

There’s no wage gap, at least not one based on any sort of discrimination. Thousands (if not more) of years of human breeding have made men drive to succeed – because success is the currency of reproduction.

The final observation for today:

Raising boys is a full contact sport. To allow them to reach their full potential they have to fight. I suspect that many (but not all) cases of ADHD and the other alphabet salads of childhood disorders that have suddenly emerged after existing . . . never, are really just boys not being able to take risks or have a fistfight or nurse a bloody nose or confront a bully – behaviors that bind them into the social hierarchy.

“We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.” – Fight Club

Oops, I guess I broke the first rule of Fight Club. Again.