First Principles
The newsletter
See life at a different resolution. Experiments in time, energy & mastery. The objective is fidelity to reality.
First Principles the newsletter
See life at a different resolution. Experiments in time, energy & mastery. The objective is fidelity to reality.
6,000+ subscribers in under 12 hours of launch on LinkedIn, and a growing community on Substack
#3Energy
Physics, not psychology, directs human behavior. Why persuasion is energy allocation, and how to translate your objective into someone else’s value hierarchy.
#2Settling
I left the school two days in because of the data. What the experiment revealed about reality, energy allocation, and the intrinsic cost of settling.
#1Shaolin
Six hours a day of Shaolin training in rural China while building an investment bank. An experiment in constraint, energy allocation and mastery.
Why do we say yes?
Persuasion follows the same laws that govern everything else in the universe.
Energy is conserved, transferred and dissipated. Life developed inside these physical limits. Natural selection favored organisms capable of acquiring and allocating finite resources well enough to survive. We inherited the results.
I have spent years observing the structures beneath human behavior and synthesizing them into a unified theory of energy allocation. Unsurprisingly, it follows the same principles as the universe.
My own M-theory of human behavior: thermodynamics govern our choices.
I start with time, below energy. But for practical purposes, since we are three-dimensional beings living in four-dimensional spacetime, energy is the variable we can track and manipulate.
Resolutions of reality
- Time
- Physics
- Evolutionary biology
- Neuroscience
- Psychology
- Behavior
First Principles of Persuasion
Coming in 2027
Persuasion is physics expressed through behavior. Natural selection is bound by the laws of physics. Physics defines the boundary, biology enforces it, psychology expresses it. My original framework, from twenty years of research, is the foundational layer beneath sales, marketing and persuasion.
Every decision is an allocation
Action =perceived value−perceived cost
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