For centuries, Shaolin monks have maintained incredible strength, mobility, and resilience… without fancy gyms, machines, or complicated routines... no supplements... just mastery of their own body. Following are exercises inspired by both modern physiotherapy and ancient Shaolin training that can help balance almost every physical problem you are dealing with.
What if the Jesus you were taught to worship never existed? What if the version of God you were handed was carefully designed to keep you from the one already living inside you? And what if that emptiness you've always felt isn't spiritual failure, but sacred memory breaking through the cracks because something in you still aches?
It's not because you turned from God. It's because the system turned you from yourself. They told you this was God, a man on a cross, a list of sins, a book written in fear, a Sunday morning performance, an angry sky father who loved you, but only if you obeyed. They gave you a story soaked in blood and called it grace. They gave you guilt and called it holiness. They gave you fear and called it faith.
You were handed a religion, not a relationship. You were born into a system, not into union. And that system was beautiful... rituals, choirs, scriptures, cathedrals. But under the gold and incense, something was off. You felt it. Even as a child, you felt it in the way they spoke about hell. In the way your body was shamed, in the way your questions were silenced. You didn't have the words yet, but your soul already knew this isn't it.
Still, you tried. You sang. You served. You kneeled. You tithed. You confessed things that weren't sins to men who weren't gods, hoping that someday, somehow, you would finally feel full. But you didn't. And when the emptiness stayed, they told you it was your fault. You didn't believe enough. You weren't holy enough. You didn't try hard enough. So, you prayed harder, repented deeper, fastened your spiritual mask tighter, and buried the ache beneath Christian smiles.
But the ache never left. You were taught to fear your own soul, to doubt your instincts, to kneel before men in robes, to feel ashamed of your thoughts, of your desires, your body, your voice. You were taught that obedience was the highest form of holiness. Taught that doubt was rebellion. Taught that emotion was weakness. Taught that silence was submission and submission was love. But that's not love. That's programming. That's control.
This wasn't just belief. This was conditioning. It made you feel small, unworthy, guilty, grateful just to be tolerated by God. And you thought that was spiritual. But it was never spiritual. It was psychological. They didn't show you the path to God. They gave you a leash and told you to thank them for it.
If the church was truly divine, why did it thrive on your shame? Why did it silence your body? Why did it need you to fear your own soul? Why did it depend on you always feeling not enough?
If you've always felt like something didn't add up, if you left church in tears and blamed yourself, if you still carry the ache after all these years, you're not crazy. You're not faithless. You're remembering.
The truth is that emptiness isn't proof of your failure... it's the proof that something inside you survived, the sacred part of you that still remembers God was never supposed to be a performance. God was never supposed to be a priest. God was never supposed to be a system. God was always supposed to be within you. But this God couldn't be taxed. This God couldn't be tamed. This God couldn't be stamped and sold by Rome. So they gave you another one, a marketable one, a manageable one, a distant one, one who needed temples, one who needed middlemen, one who always stayed just out of reach... so they could sell you the bridge, sell you the fix, sell you the salvation over and over and over again. And when you felt the emptiness rising, they were right there to say, "See, you need us." But you never did. You didn't fail the church. The church failed your soul. You weren't lost. You were led away from yourself.
So breathe again. Whisper, "What if I was never broken?" and let your body answer... not your brain. Because the body remembers, the soul remembers, the child in the pew remembers. Because this wasn't a misunderstanding. It wasn't a mis-communication. It wasn't even just trauma. It was engineering. They crafted the architecture of your shame. They sculpted the god you were afraid of. They erased the Christ you were becoming and then they told you to call it salvation. It wasn't a mistake. It was a masterpiece of control. It was engineered.
They gave you a name. They taught you to sing it, to cry it, to whisper it through tears when you were at your lowest.
Jesus.
That name became everything. It was the name you called on when you thought you might die. It was the name you were baptized in, the name you repeated at the altar when your soul felt broken. You were told that name could save you, but they never told you it wasn't his real name. His true name was Yeshua... not just a different version, but a different vibration... a name that carried a resonance so powerful it couldn't be owned by empire.
Yeshua means salvation... but not the salvation they taught you, not rescue from hell, not be a good sinner and maybe get into heaven. Yeshua meant awakening, remembrance, the return of what was always within you. It was a sacred key spoken in the tongue of mystics, prophets, and rebels, a name that ignited something in the bones.
But that version of him couldn't be controlled, so they changed it. They took Yeshua and ran it through the machine of empire. Hebrew became Greek. Greek became Latin. Latin became English. Yeshua became Isus. Isus became Isus. Isus became Jesus. By the time the name reached you, it had been filtered through centuries of translation, warfare, colonization, and political doctrine.
And you were told it was holy. But something was lost in that chain. Something vital. The resonance, the remembering, the direct connection. What you were given was a name wrapped in power, but emptied of the path.
The church told you Jesus was the son of God, that he died for your sins, that if you believed in him, you would be saved. But they never told you what he actually taught because his teachings were too dangerous.
Yeshua didn't say kneel and worship me. He said follow me. He didn't say only I am holy. He said the kingdom of God is within you. He didn't say wait for heaven. He said you can enter now if you have eyes to see.
Say his name softly... Yeshua. Let it fall from your lips. Feel how your body responds... not your brain, but your body. Does something warm rise? Does something ache in your chest? That's not nostalgia. That's memory.
Here's the truth. They didn't just rewrite his name. They rewrote the meaning of Christ. They turned Yeshua, the awakener, into Jesus, the object of worship. They turned the path inward into a story to believe from a distance. They turned your soul into a court room, your body into a battleground, and the living Christ into a crucified mascot for their religious empire.
Yeshua was never meant to be a celebrity. He was a code, a living key, a path you were supposed to become. But the moment you believe that salvation was only through him, not within you, they won. Because now you had to come to them, to the pastors, the bishops, the priests, the theologians, the spiritual gatekeepers who sold forgiveness like a product. And you forgot that Christ had already been planted inside you. You forgot you were never supposed to kneel forever. You were supposed to rise.
If they could change his name, what else did they change? Did they edit his words, hide his writings, re-brand his movement? Yes, they did. But before they could hide the teachings, they had to hide the teacher because as long as Yeshua remained a man of the people, a mystic without an institution, a revealer of inner truth, they couldn't sell you religion.
If you've ever loved Jesus but hated church, if you've wept in worship but still felt empty after the service, you were never confused. You were remembering him before they rewrote him. The hijack wasn't just theological. It was psychological, energetic, neurological. You were taught to fear the very path he walked, yo fear inner knowing, to fear your intuition, to fear your body. They made him an object of adoration so you'd forget he was also a mirror. They told you to worship him instead of realizing he was showing you what you are. That's the greatest tragedy... not that they killed him, but that they killed what he came to awaken.
Place your hand on your chest. Breathe.
Say this aloud, “I was not meant to worship from a distance. I was meant to awaken from within.” Now say his name again... Yeshua. Feel it hit different now? Every time you said Jesus, you were directing your devotion outward to a man on a cross, to a portrait on a wall, to a name stripped of its code, but when you say Yeshua, you're speaking from the inside, you're speaking from where he still lives.
They didn't just rewrite his name. They rewrote yours. They erased your divine reflection. They buried your soul beneath centuries of dogma. They turned you into a follower when you were meant to be a flame. They convinced you to fear the thing he came to reveal... that you and the father are one. And now the spell is breaking... not because someone gave you new information, but because the ache in your chest refused to die, because your soul remembered something your mind forgot.
Christ was never meant to be a religion. Christ is a state of being. But to fully cut you off from this knowing, they couldn't stop with his name. They had to erase the sanctuary inside you, the place he said where the kingdom lives. So they built temples, cathedrals, pulpits, with priestly garments and gold crosses, all to distract you from one sacred truth... your body is the temple... and if you remembered that, you'd never need them again.
You were taught that churches were sacred, that God lived in buildings, that holiness was in the hands of priests, that your only access to the divine was through ceremony, sacraments, and confession. But what if that was never true? What if the holiest thing wasn't behind an altar, but under your skin?
You were never meant to go to church. You were meant to remember you are one. Yeshua didn't say, "Build great temples and gather there." He said, "The kingdom of God is within you, not above you, not someday, not through anyone else, but within you." If that truth had spread, if people had truly believed they carried God inside themselves, how could the system survive? Who would need temples if every heart was holy? Who would go to an institution if they already had direct access to the Source? Who would bow to priests if they knew the veil had already been torn?
So they flipped the script. They moved the sacred outside of you and they told you your body was the problem. They said it was sinful, fleshly, weak, untrustworthy, that your hunger was shameful, your desires demonic, your instincts misleading. But that wasn't purification. It was disconnection.
If you can be made to fear your own body, you'll never trust what lives inside it. You'll give your power away to anyone who says they can lead you back to God, even though you never left.
Close your eyes. Touch your chest. Say out loud, “This is my temple.” Breathe. That breath, that pulse, that warmth. THAT'S HIM... still here, still waiting. They needed you to forget that. So, they built cathedrals. They crowned bishops, dressed them in gold, built walls of doctrine around what was always meant to be intimate.
Yeshua never taught worship through hierarchy. He taught direct connection. But they needed you to feel small so they made you kneel in awe of a building instead of standing tall in awe of your own being. They made you believe your soul was filthy, that you were born broken, that you couldn't trust yourself without spiritual supervision. Why? Because embodied people cannot be enslaved.
A person rooted in their own sacredness is a threat to every institution built on guilt. They couldn't allow that. So they demonized the body, turned it into a battleground, a place of temptation, a prison, a burden to carry until death.
But what if the body was never the prison? What if it was the sanctuary?
If you've ever felt that something divine lives in you, if you've ever cried during worship, but felt that the holiness was coming through you, not just toward him, you're not crazy. You're remembering. You were always the place he wanted to dwell. But here's the trick. They didn't just want to pull your attention outward. They wanted to shut down the pathway in. And the body was that pathway.
Every time you trusted your gut, you were walking it. Every time you felt truth rise in your bones, you were remembering it. Every time you looked inward in silence and felt the presence behind your breath, you were touching it. But they trained you to doubt those experiences, to call them emotional, deceptive, even demonic. Because if you trusted them, you'd find your way home.
They told you to fear desire, but desire is the compass of the soul. They told you to reject intuition, but intuition is how the kingdom whispers. They told you to ignore sensation, but sensation is where the spirit stirs. Everything they told you to fear was leading you back to the Christ within.
Place your hand on your stomach. Say softly, "The spirit lives in every part of me." Feel how strange that is to say. That's how deep the programming runs. Say it again until the shame melts, until your skin becomes sacred again.
Yeshua didn't need temples. He walked the streets. He sat with the unclean. He healed with hands. He met people exactly where they were... no incense, no priesthood, just presents. He saw the divine already alive and the broken. He didn't try to fix them. He called them home.
But today, his followers do the opposite. They build multi-million dollar churches while preaching that your body is cursed. They speak of holiness while keeping you estranged from your own spirit. They train you to wait for heaven while ignoring the kingdom he said was already here. And worst of all, they made you feel like the ache inside you was proof of your failure when in truth, it's the only thing that's kept you alive.
That ache, that hunger ...it's not spiritual failure, it's the only part of you that never forgot where home was. It's the cry of the temple you've never entered.
You were taught to pray with words, but the body has its own prayers. The warmth behind the ribs, the breath that deepens during stillness, the tears that rise without explanation... that is sacred intelligence. That is the divine trying to speak through you, not around you. And that's why they had to silence it, because if your body became holy again, so would you.
Say this out loud, “I reclaim the temple. I am not broken. I am not lost. I am where God lives.” Let it vibrate through your bones, even if it feels too bold. Say it like Yeshua meant it.
They told you the veil was torn, but they handed you a new one, and this time they hung it inside your own chest, but the veil was never real. It was shame. It was programming. It was centuries of silence wrapped in scripture.
You were never unworthy. You were never too far. You were always the Holy of Holies, but to keep you from stepping into the temple, they had to hide the map.
Yeshua taught it, passed it on, whispered it to his closest initiates... not a theology, not a creed, but a path through stillness, through breath, through gnosis, through love, through death and resurrection on the inside. And that path was stolen because to keep you from finding the temple, they had to erase the map.
If you've made it this far, this message is already activating something buried in you. You're not just reading, you're remembering. Messages like this don't spread easily. They threaten the system. They awaken what religion has worked so hard to bury. That's why they get silenced, shadowed, suppressed.
There's a reason the ache has never left you, even when you prayed all the right prayers, even when you tried to believe harder, even when the songs moved you, but still left you hollow afterwards. It's because the real path was never in what you were taught. You weren't wrong for not feeling full. You weren't broken because the sermons didn't satisfy, you were sensing something deeper, something buried, and now it's rising.
What if the most important teachings of Yeshua, the one they branded Jesus for, weren't in the Bible at all? What if the ones that could have set you free were burned, banned, buried? And what if the version of Jesus you were handed was a fragment, not the flame?
The early followers of Yeshua, the real mystics, didn't just preach salvation. They practiced transformation. They walked a path of inner resurrection, awakening to the Christ within... not through hierarchy, not through obedience, but through direct living communion with the divine. But that path was dangerous to the empire because it didn't allow control. It didn't require temples, priests, or tithes. It didn't need Rome. So they tried to erase it... not just by killing the man, but by hijacking the message, by creating a version of Jesus that you were never meant to become.
Breathe in deeply. Whisper, "I was never meant to worship. I was meant to awaken." Let that echo. Let it rattle the bones of who you were told to be.
In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus doesn't say, "Believe in me." He says, "Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me. I shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to them." That was the true teaching. Not worship, but union. You wouldn't just follow him, you'd become what he became... not a follower of Christ, but a carrier of Christ, a vessel, a flame, a temple of the living God.
But empires don't thrive when people awaken. Empires survive on obedience, on fear, on dependence. So Rome and later the church did what all systems of power do when threatened... they buried the mystical path and canonized control. They selected which gospels could remain. Four made it in. Dozens were silenced, including the ones that told you the truth that Christ was not a man to be worshiped, but a mirror for what lives in you.
Close your eyes. Say slowly, "Christ is awakening in me." Notice what rises. Fear, warmth, maybe tears. That's not ego. That's memory.
The Gospel of Mary shows something shocking. It wasn't Peter or Paul who understood Jesus best. It was Mary Magdalene ...not as a prostitute, but as a mystic, a teacher, a knower of hidden things. And she says, "The Savior has made us into human beings." Let that sink in. Not into Christians, not into converts, but into human beings... fully alive, embodied, divine.
But patriarchy couldn't allow a woman to be the bearer of sacred memory, just like empire couldn't allow God to live inside you. So they buried it all and then they told you that questioning the Bible was rebellion, that exploring the mystic path was heresy, that the ache inside you was a test, not a compass.
But I'll tell you what it really was. It was your soul remembering the buried path, because the kingdom isn't up there. It's not after you die. It's not owned by churches or sealed in scrolls. It's within you and around you... always has been.
Yeshua's real message wasn't about exclusion, fear, or sin. It was... 'come home to what's already in you'. He didn't say I am the only way. He said “I am the way”, meaning the path, not the destination, not the idol, not the institution.
You've been told that to question tradition is to stray, but maybe straying from illusion is the first step toward remembrance. Maybe your discomfort wasn't the enemy of your faith, but the doorway to it. and the text they tried to hide, the Gospel of Philip, says, "Do not seek the kingdom in the sky. If you do, the birds will get there before you. Instead, the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known."
They didn't burn these words because they were weak. They burned them because they were freeing, because they told the truth.
You were never meant to be saved. You were meant to awaken. Some of us have found these scrolls, held them, decoded them, felt the fire in their words. They're not books. They're keys and they've always been calling to you... not through theology, not through ritual, but through memory, through ache, through that strange moment when everything inside you says, "This is it. This is what I've been missing."
You weren't meant to blindly believe. You were meant to know. Gnosis isn't forbidden because it's false. It's forbidden because it bypasses the gatekeepers. And the moment you begin to remember, you begin to rise.
The system erased this path, but it can't erase you. And you're not just remembering it now, you're walking it.
You didn't come this far just to learn something new. You came because your soul has been whispering for years, maybe decades, that something wasn't right, that what you were told about God, about Jesus, about salvation was missing something sacred... and now you know it wasn't missing... it was hidden.
There was nothing wrong with your faith. There was nothing wrong with your hunger. The problem was the program you were born into, a program designed not to fill your soul, but to control it. They gave you a cage and called it salvation. They taught you guilt and called it humility. They made you bow to a distant sky god while the divine within you wept to be remembered.
If you've made it this far, it's because you remember, even if you can't explain how, even if it doesn't make sense... something in you has always known there's more... that Jesus wasn't just a figure to worship... he was a path to become.
And that ache in your chest... it's not doubt. It's destiny. You don't have to abandon Jesus. You have to reclaim Yeshua, the Christ, before the cage, the man who looked people in the eyes and told them the kingdom was already within them, the man who saw the divine and the outcast, who flipped the tables of the system, who never built a church, never demanded tithes, never crowned popes. He walked with the forgotten. He spoke to the soul. And that path, the one they buried, it's still alive in you.
You are not broken. You are buried. You are not empty. You are sealed under trauma, under shame, under generations of lies wrapped in scripture. But none of that has erased you... and now you are rising.
You were told the resurrection happened once in history in him. But that's the final lie. The resurrection is not a moment to believe in. It's a process within you. Every time you stop waiting for salvation and begin embodying love, Christ rises. Every time you break an old belief that told you God was distant and angry, Christ rises. Every time you remember that you were never meant to worship what you are destined to awaken into, Christ rises.
You've been told your emotions deceive you. But what if they were your compass? What if the ache is the map? What if your tears are the waters of rebirth?
Close your eyes, breathe into your body, and whisper, "I am not waiting for the Christ. I am remembering. I am the temple.” What do you feel? Let it come. Let the grief rise, the anger, the wonder, all of it is holy.
This isn't rebellion. It's return. You're not here to fight a system. You're here to outgrow it. You're not here to burn it all down. You're here to ignite something eternal inside you.
The false church may fall. The illusions may crumble, but what rises from within you will never die.
And you are not alone. There are others waking up all over the world... disillusioned pastors, evangelicals, silent mystics who never fit in, truth seekers decoding forgotten scrolls, ordinary people with extraordinary memory... a hidden body rising from the ashes of religion into the living resurrection.
They taught you to wait for the second coming, but the truth is far more dangerous... you are becoming it. You are what the system feared. You are what the preachers couldn't control. You are what the ancient mystics saw in vision... a generation who would awaken without permission.
And when you speak the truth now, when you walk in love without chains, without guilt, you are not abandoning Christ. You are fulfilling him... not in dogma, not in doctrine, but in embodiment.
Say this with your hand on your heart, “Christ is not coming. Christ is already here in me.” Feel what stirs? Tears, chills, a still ancient knowing. That's not emotion. That's remembrance.
The final deception was this... that awakening was for someone else... for saints, for prophets, for special men in robes. But the veil is gone. The sacred has returned to the ordinary, to the disillusioned, to the exiled, to you.
So now you have a choice... you can go back to the illusion or you can mark this moment as the beginning of your return... not just to truth, but to yourself, to the Christ that's always lived within you, waiting for this very moment to rise.
from YouTube at The_Esoteric_Path on July 16, 2025
Nitric oxide (NO) is a colorless, toxic gas composed of one nitrogen and one oxygen atom, serving as a critical signaling molecule in the human body. Synthesized from the amino acid L-arginine by enzymes called nitric oxide synthases (NOS), it acts as a potent vasodilator, relaxing blood vessels to regulate blood pressure and improve circulation.
Its biological roles extend beyond cardiovascular health to include neurotransmission, immune defense against pathogens, and the regulation of inflammation. Due to its importance, NO was named the "Molecule of the Year" in 1992, and its discovery as a cardiovascular signaling agent earned the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Key Functions and Applications
Vasodilation: Lowers blood pressure by widening arteries and inhibiting platelet aggregation.
Medical Uses: Treats angina (via nitroglycerin) and erectile dysfunction (via drugs like sildenafil/Viagra that enhance NO effects).
Industrial Role: Acts as an intermediate in producing nitric acid and is a significant air pollutant from combustion engines.
Immune System: Produced by macrophages to kill bacteria and tumor cells. ~ AI
Most people think aging only shows up in the mirror. Wrinkles, gray hair, sagging skin. But one of the most important changes as you get older is happening where you can't see it at all. It's happening inside your blood vessels. Your blood vessels affect every part of your body and how it functions every single day.
As you get older, your vascular system can start to malfunction. That resiliency, the ability of your blood vessels to adapt, dilate, lower stress in the circulation in your heart actually begins to decline, and it can actually help to explain why you feel lower energy, slower recovery, and even brain fog.
The good news is that you can protect vascular resilience and you can reverse the damage by using food as medicine. Your blood vessels are constantly adjusting and adapting and being resilient. When you exercise, your blood vessels widen to increase blood flow to your muscles. When you eat, your blood vessels help to direct nutrients where they are needed. And when your brain is active, the blood vessels in your brain... there's 400 miles worth... bring focused blood flow to the parts of your brain that need more of it in order to be able to focus on what you're actually doing.
This ability of blood vessels to adapt moment to moment is crucial for keeping your body functioning efficiently as you age. Let's take a look at what makes blood vessels resilient and how that changes as we get older.
Resilience comes from a layer of cells lining the blood vessels called the endothelium. The endothelium is kind of like a Saran wrap layer inside the tube of your blood vessels. Each of these cells in that lining produce biological signals and one of them is called nitric oxide and what it does is it tells blood vessels to relax and get wider... and this starts to lower blood pressure. It brings better blood flow to where you need it and takes stress off your circulation and your heart.
As we get older your resiliency, the ability of your blood vessels to adapt, dilate, lower stress on the circulation in your heart begins to decline and your body produces less nitric oxide. So, there's less resiliency and the endothelium becomes much more vulnerable to damage.
What happens with damage is inflammation inside the walls of your blood vessels which further weakens the normal resiliency because now you don't have a normal thickness and function of the blood vessel wall because it's inflamed.
After years of this kind of stress, your blood vessels become less and less responsive, less able to dilate and regulate blood flow and less able to adapt to changes in order to be able to get the blood where it needs to go at the rate that it needs to go there.
This is partly why we experience aging as fatigue... not enough blood flow, weakness, not enough muscle strength, less focus, the brain circulation isn't working as well, so overall our body has less resilience.
The good news is that you can protect vascular resilience and you can reverse the damage by using food as medicine. Certain foods contain polyphenols that can help boost nitric oxide production to help your blood vessels widen and relax. And it can also reduce inflammation with the right polyphenols as well.
The first of these foods is blueberries, which contain polyphenols called anthocyanins. These are natural dyes that give blueberry their deep blue color. Anthocyanins activate the blood vessel lining, the endothelium, and can trigger the production of endothelial nitric oxide synthesis.
So what's a dose of blueberries needed to actually get better blood vessel function? Not much. Studies have shown one cup of blueberries a day, fresh or frozen, will have that beneficial effect. Frozen blueberries contain those same anthocyanins.
The second food is dark chocolate. To make chocolate, you start with a plant-based ingredient called cacao. The darker the chocolate, the higher the percentage of a cacao powder, which has a natural polyphenol called pro-anthocyanid. Proanthocyanins also have powerful effects on blood vessel health. One of them is that chocolate proanthocyanin polyphenols can stimulate your stem cells which live in your bone marrow. They come out into your blood stream when they're stimulated by proanthocyanins... like bees flying out of a hive... and they repair and regenerate your damaged blood vessels, regenerating the endothelial lining by stimulating nitric oxide in your endothelium. Same mechanism as the blueberries. Clinical studies have shown that cacao flavinolds can stimulate dilation and also help to lower blood pressure. So how much chocolate do you need? The effective dose is about 200 to 600 mg of cacao flavinolds every single day... two or three small squares of dark chocolate 70% or higher cacao will actually do the trick.
The next food is beets which are rich in dietary nitrates from the soil, which get converted into nitric oxide. When you're chewing the beets, your own salivary bacteria will help to convert those nitrates into nitric oxide. As you swallow, it is absorbed as nitric oxide. So how many beets should you eat? Studies have shown that just one cup of roasted beets or one cup of beet juice provides up to 500 mg of dietary nitrate, which is what you want to get that beneficial effect on your blood pressure from the nitric oxide that your body will produce.
What I've been talking about is your circulation. So when you think about aging and you want to think about vascular health, the health of your circulation, you can see this is way more than what you can actually see in the bathroom mirror in the morning. When your blood vessels are doing their job well, your organs and cells are able to do their job really well. They get the signals that they need like nitric oxide in order to be able to bring that blood flow to where it's needed as we get older.
by Dr. William Li on YouTube at HealthyMindSuccess1 on July 12, 2026
When it comes to men’s health, nitric oxide (NO) doesn’t get nearly enough credit. This tiny molecule keeps blood flowing, fuels your workouts, and powers your performance—inside and outside the gym. The best nitric oxide foods help your body make more of it naturally, giving you better energy and endurance where it counts. On an episode of the Women Want Strong Men podcast, nitric oxide expert Dr. Nathan Bryan explained how certain habits can block NO production, no matter how healthy your diet is. Save the episode below for more insights on what to avoid and how to optimize your levels.
Why Nitric Oxide Drops With Age (& What To Do About It)
Nitric oxide levels naturally decline as we get older, especially after age 40. This isn’t just a symptom of aging—it’s a byproduct of stress, poor sleep, inactivity, and oxidative damage in your cells. When nitric oxide production slows, it affects everything from heart health to sexual function.
However, diet and daily habits can help you restore balance. Exercise, deep sleep, and eating nitrate-rich foods can all support your body’s nitric oxide pathways. A few consistent lifestyle shifts (like walking outside daily and cutting back on alcohol) can go a long way in helping your blood vessels stay flexible and strong.
Best Nitric Oxide Foods for Blood Flow and Sexual Health
The right foods can help your body produce more nitric oxide naturally to improve circulation, stamina, and overall performance. Here are the best nitric oxide foods to include in your routine, each supporting your blood flow in a unique way:
Beets, arugula, spinach, and celery are the gold standard of nitrate-rich foods. Your body converts these nitrates into nitric oxide, especially when your oral bacteria are healthy.
Dr. Bryan emphasizes chewing thoroughly and avoiding antiseptic mouthwash, which can kill the bacteria that help with this conversion. These vegetables boost blood flow while supporting brain and heart function.
Foods high in polyphenols—like pomegranates, blueberries, dark chocolate (70%+), green tea, and citrus fruits—protect nitric oxide from breaking down too quickly. They reduce oxidative stress in blood vessels, allowing nitric oxide to circulate longer. Think of these foods as bodyguards for your NO production. They keep your arteries flexible and your energy levels steady.
Watermelon, salmon, chickpeas, nuts, and seeds provide the amino acids citrulline and arginine, both key building blocks for nitric oxide synthesis. While many supplements overpromise, these foods give your body a steady, natural supply.
It’s also worth noting that true deficiencies in these amino acids are rare. More often, low nitric oxide comes from poor conversion at the enzyme level, so optimizing your vascular health is key. Combined with regular exercise, these foods can help you maintain strong circulation.
Your gut and oral microbiomes play major roles in nitric oxide production. Foods like kefir, yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut, and fiber-rich vegetables promote a healthy bacterial balance, helping your body efficiently convert nitrates into nitric oxide. Pairing these with nitrate-rich vegetables creates a powerful one-two punch for your vascular health.
Which Habits Are Bad for Nitric Oxide? Even the best nitric oxide foods won’t help if you’re unknowingly sabotaging your production. Here are some everyday habits that can blunt your nitric oxide response without you realizing it.
Antiseptic mouthwash: Kills oral bacteria needed to convert nitrates to nitric oxide. Swap for gentle rinses or tongue scraping.
Fluoride-heavy toothpaste or unfiltered water: Can disrupt your oral microbiome. Use filtered water and fluoride-free options if you can.
PPIs (acid blockers): Impair gastric nitric oxide pathways. Consider discussing alternatives with your healthcare provider if you use PPIs long-term.
Ultra-processed foods and alcohol: Damage blood vessels and slow nitric oxide generation. Stick with whole foods and moderate drinking. Small tweaks can make a big difference in your nitric oxide levels and overall energy.
The way you eat affects how much nitric oxide your body can make. Chewing thoroughly, breathing through your nose, and avoiding mouthwash right before or after meals help preserve the bacteria needed for nitrate conversion.
Try eating nitrate-rich foods in the morning when nitric oxide levels are lowest, and aim for at least one serving of leafy greens or beets daily. Pairing polyphenol-rich foods (like pomegranate or green tea) with nitrate vegetables amplifies the effect. Hydration also matters—proper mineral balance keeps your blood vessels responsive.
You can amplify your results by stacking nitric oxide-friendly habits with your diet. Here are a few examples to consider adding to your routine.
Morning sunlight and light movement: Increases circulation and nitric oxide release.
Resistance and cardio training: Both boost nitric oxide synthase activity.
Red light or sauna sessions: Stimulate nitric oxide release and improve vascular tone.
Sleep and stress management: Keep blood vessel function and nitric oxide levels stable.
When you combine these with the best nitric oxide foods, your body runs smoother, your workouts feel stronger, and your performance (both physical and sexual) improves.
from victorymenshealth.com on March 26, 2026
Two thousand years of religion have been built on a man who by all accounts despised organized religion. He overturned the tables of those who monetized worship. He condemned the religious leaders of his time publicly, repeatedly without apology. He told the people that the kingdom of God was not in the temple. It was not mediated by priests. It was not earned through ritual. And yet what rose in his name became the largest institutional religious structure in human history.
Something went wrong... not with the man, but with the message. What Yeshua of Nazareth actually carried into the world was not a new religion, it was a precise and ancient understanding of energy, vibration, and consciousness. The world he walked through grasped this. The Gnostics understood it. The Essenes encoded it, but organized religion, particularly after the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, buried it beneath doctrine, authority, and the machinery of control. What remains is a version of Jesus that the original Jesus would not recognize.
To understand what was lost, you have to separate two things that history has collapsed into one. There is Jesus the man, Yeshua Ben Joseph, born in Roman occupied Judea, who taught in parables, healed the sick, and died challenging the most powerful institutions of his era. And then there is Christ... not a surname, not a title belonging exclusively to one person. Christ is a state of being, a frequency of consciousness, an inner condition that Yeshua demonstrated and then spent his entire ministry pointing other people toward. The tragedy is that his words survived. The meaning did not.
When you read his teachings literally, they become a moral code, rules for behavior, a checklist of obligations.. be humble, forgive, love your enemy. And those things are not wrong, but they are the surface. They are the outer shell of something far more radical.
But what if his words were never meant to be taken literally?
What if every parable, every miracle, every statement about the father and the kingdom and the light was a precise map of inner reality... a vibrational science dressed in the language of a first century carpenter because that was the only language his world could receive?
What if the kingdom of heaven is a measurable state of consciousness?
What if the light he spoke of was a literal frequency?
What if faith was never about belief at all, but about the electromagnetic alignment of your own body with the reality you were calling into existence?
When you begin to read his words that way, something extraordinary happens... they stop being commandments and start being instructions. Before any of this makes sense, you have to accept one thing... nothing in this universe is solid... not the chair beneath you, not the walls around you, not your own body.
What appears solid is simply energy vibrating at a frequency slow enough to be perceived as matter. Atoms are almost entirely empty space. The nucleus of an atom, if magnified to the size of a football stadium, would be no larger than a single grain of sand at the center of the field. Everything else is void. What fills that void is not matter. It is frequency. Oscillation. Vibrating fields of energy interacting with one another at incomprehensible speed.
This is not philosophy. This is physics. Max Plank, the father of quantum theory, stated before his death that there is no such thing as matter in itself. He described a force behind the existence of all matter, a conscious, intelligent mind... not a religious idea, but a scientific conclusion drawn from a lifetime of studying the structure of reality.
Einstein confirmed that energy and mass are interchangeable, that what we call physical is simply one expression of something far more fundamental. The universe is not a collection of objects. It is a vast ocean of vibrating energy and everything you perceive is a particular arrangement of that energy expressing itself at a specific frequency.
And what about the ancient teachers? What did they see? Mystics across cultures, separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles, described reality in language that maps with striking precision onto what quantum physics now confirms. The Gnostics spoke of light as the primary substance of creation. The Vedic traditions described the universe as a single unified field of consciousness. The hermetic axiom stated it simply: All is mind. The universe is mental.
These were not guesses. They were observations made by individuals who turned their attention so completely inward that they perceived the underlying structure of existence directly. Yeshua of Nazareth was one of these. When he spoke of light, he was not offering poetic comfort. He was describing the fundamental nature of reality. When he described the kingdom of heaven, he was not pointing to a destination beyond the clouds. He was pointing to a vibrational state, a frequency of consciousness so elevated and so coherent that it exists beyond the reach of fear, limitation, and death. The father he returned to repeatedly in his teaching was not a man on a throne... it was the infinite underlying intelligence from which all vibration originates and within which everything that exists is perpetually held.
Modern quantum field theory describes a zero-point field, a baseline of energy that permeates all of space that cannot be removed, even at absolute zero temperature. It is everywhere. It connects everything. It is the ground of all existence. What Jesus called the father, physicists call the field, and they are in every meaningful way describing the same thing. He said it repeatedly in multiple gospels in different ways and somehow we still turned it into a destination you reach after you die.
Think about what that means. The single most repeated teaching of Yeshua Ben Joseph, the phrase he returned to again and again across every tradition that recorded his words was not about a place. It was about a state. The kingdom of heaven is within you, not above you, not waiting for you... within you right now in this body, in this moment.
And what did organized religion do with that statement? It built cathedrals. It drew maps of the afterlife. It told you to be patient, to be obedient, to wait. But what if waiting is precisely what he told you not to do?
The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas preserves a version of this teaching that the Council of Nicaea never managed to erase completely. In that text, a disciple asks Jesus when the kingdom will come. His answer is stunning. He says, "The kingdom is already spread upon the earth and people simply do not see it.” Not someday. Already everywhere. The only thing standing between you and the kingdom is perception, awareness, the frequency at which your consciousness is operating in this very moment.
To understand this, we must understand what consciousness actually is. It is not a product of the brain. It is the medium through which all of reality is experienced and, more crucially, shaped. Every thought you hold with emotional intensity becomes a signal. Every belief you carry about yourself, about the world, about what is possible becomes a vibrational pattern that your entire being broadcasts outward into the field. And the field responds. This is not mysticism. This is the mechanism Yeshua was describing every time he spoke of the kingdom.
So what is heaven in this framework? And what is hell?
Heaven is not a reward distributed to the compliant after death. Hell is not a punishment assigned to the wicked. They are states of inner frequency. When your consciousness is contracted by fear, by shame, by the relentless noise of survival thinking, you are experiencing what every sacred tradition has ever called darkness. That is the lower vibrational state. That is the prison the Gnostics described. You built it from the inside, thought by thought, belief by belief. But when your inner state becomes open, clear, expansive, rooted in love rather than terror, something shifts. Reality itself responds differently. Doors open that were invisible before. Clarity arises where confusion lived.
This is what Yeshua meant by abundant life, not prosperity, not comfort. Vibrational expansion. The kingdom entered now while you are breathing, while your heart is beating. Heaven and hell are not waiting for you at the end of your life. You're already living in one of them right now.
There is a moment in the Gospel of John that almost nobody talks about and it might be the most important thing Jesus ever said. He is standing in the temple. The religious authorities are surrounding him furious, picking up stones to kill him, his crime claiming to be one with the father... and in that moment, facing execution, he doesn't retreat. He doesn't clarify or soften the statement. He quotes their own scripture back at them. “Is it not written in your law, ye gods?” This is John 10:34. He is citing Psalm 82 directly... not as a metaphor, not as poetic comfort, but as a legal argument, as an unbreakable fact. And then he adds the line that changes everything. “The scripture cannot be broken.”
Think about what he is doing here. He's not carving out a special exception for himself. He is pointing to something that applies to every human being standing in that courtyard. You are gods. The law says so and that law cannot be undone.
But what does it mean to be made in the image and likeness of the creator?
Religion has spent centuries reducing this to something physical... a human shape, two eyes, two hands, the body as divine reflection. But this misses the entire point. The image and likeness of an infinite creative intelligence is not a body. It is consciousness itself. It is awareness. It is the capacity to hold a thought, charge it with emotion, and watch it materialize into experience.
That is what creation is. That is what God does. And according to Jesus, quoting a psalm that predates him by a thousand years, that is what you do as well. You are not a creature waiting for a creator to act on your behalf. You are a creator who has forgotten that fact.
And what about the mechanics of this? To be made in the image of the divine is to possess the same fundamental nature... not omniscience, not the ability to breathe stars into existence, but the core attribute... the capacity to generate reality through focused inner intention. Every thought you hold, every emotion you sustain, every belief you carry in your body, like a low hum you are no longer even aware of.
These are not passive responses to the world. They are active forces shaping it. This is precisely what Yeshua understood. This is the science concealed inside the theology.
And here is why this particular teaching was so dangerous to the institutions that followed. If you are divine, if God is not a distant authority, but an inner presence expressing itself through your own consciousness, then you have no need for an intermediary. No priest can grant you access to something you already carry. No institution can claim authority over a sovereign spiritual being. The entire apparatus of religious control rests on one assumption that you are separate from God, that the divine lives elsewhere, that you must earn your way back through obedience, ritual, and submission to hierarchy. Remove that assumption and the entire structure collapses.
A congregation that believes it carries God within itself is a congregation that doesn't need to be managed. When Jesus said, "According to your faith, be it unto you," he wasn't talking about church attendance... he was describing a precise inner mechanism, a science, and it is one that modern research is only beginning to catch up to.
The HeartMath Institute has documented something extraordinary. Your heart generates an electromagnetic field that extends several feet outside your physical body... not a metaphor... measurable, quantifiable. The heart is not simply a pump. It is a broadcasting tower sending signals into the space around you at every moment of your existence. And what determines the quality of that signal? The emotional state you're living in right now.
This is exactly why Jesus said it in the heart, not the head. Proverbs 23:7 states, "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." Not in his mind, not in his intellect, but in his heart. This distinction is not poetic decoration. It is the entire point.
Thought alone is insufficient. Thought generates an electrical signal, but emotion is the magnetic component. It is the charge that gives the thought its power to attract, to create, to materialize. Without the emotional charge, a thought is simply noise, a radio transmitter with no signal. But when thought and emotion align, when what you are thinking and what you are feeling are unified at the same frequency, you become a coherent broadcast and the universe responds to coherent broadcasts.
What did Jesus mean by faith? Not intellectual agreement, not the nodding of a head at a creed. Faith in the way he used it was felt certainty. It was the inner state in which the reality you were calling forward was already real to you before any external evidence appeared. He wasn't asking people to pretend. He was asking them to genuinely feel at the level of the heart, at the level of the body's electromagnetic field, that what they desired was already present.
And when he healed he asked the same question every time. “Do you believe? Do you believe this is possible for you?” He wasn't conducting a theological exam. He was calibrating. He was asking, "Is your inner frequency aligned with the reality of your wholeness or are you still broadcasting at the frequency of your illness?" Because you cannot receive the vibration of health while you are radiating the vibration of disease. The two frequencies are incompatible.
This is why so many people pray and feel nothing changes. They speak the words, they perform the ritual, but underneath those words, the emotional signature says otherwise... fear, doubt, the deep conviction that they are unworthy. That is the signal the body is actually transmitting and that is the reality that continues to materialize around them.
What Jesus was teaching stripped of doctrine and centuries of mistransation was this: Your emotional state is your prayer, not the words you recite, not the posture you assume. The frequency you're actually living inside moment to moment is the creative force shaping your experience. He showed people how to shift that frequency. Forgiveness raises it. Gratitude raises it. Love, not a sentiment, but as a sustained vibrational state, raises it to its highest possible expression.
Faith, in the original sense, was never a mental exercise. It was a full body vibrational alignment with the reality you were calling into being. The Sermon on the Mount is probably the most famous speech in human history and it is almost always completely misread. For centuries, the beatitudes have been treated as moral virtues. Be humble. Be meek. Mourn well. And God will reward you eventually. But what if that reading strips out the most important thing Jesus was actually saying? What if the beatitudes are not a list of admirable qualities, but a precise sequential map of vibrational states?
Each one describes a specific inner condition. Each one describes what happens to your frequency when you inhabit it fully. This is not poetry. This is instruction.
Consider the line that cuts deepest. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Religion interprets purity as moral cleanliness, absence of sin, freedom from transgression. But vibrationally, purity of heart means something entirely different. It means an undivided inner signal. No contradiction between what you think and what you feel. No war between belief and desire.
When your inner frequency is unified, unclouded and coherent, you perceive reality at an entirely different level. You see what was always there. That is what Jesus meant by seeing God, not a vision... but a frequency of perception so clear that the divine intelligence embedded in everything becomes visible to you.
And what about the peace makers? “Blessed are the peace makers, for they shall be called children of God.” We read this and think it means people who resolve arguments, diplomats, negotiators. But look more carefully. Jesus doesn't say the peace seekers or the conflict avoiders. He says the peace makers, those who generate peace as a living field, those who carry stillness so deep within themselves that it radiates outward and reorganizes the environment around them.
This is a vibrational description. Peace is not the absence of noise. It is a frequency you either emit or you don't. And those who emit it at that level, Jesus says, carry the signature of the divine.
Then he turns to his listeners directly and says something they likely did not fully absorb. “You are the light of the world”... not you could become the light, not you will be rewarded with light... but you are it right now.
What does light do? It does not negotiate with darkness. It does not argue with shadow. It simply raises the frequency of whatever space it enters. That is the instruction embedded in that single statement. Your presence ,when your inner frequency is elevated and coherent, alters everything around you without effort or force.
The entire Sermon on the Mount follows this same architecture. Release anger because anger collapses your frequency inward and severs your connection to the field. Practice forgiveness because forgiveness is not weakness, but liberation... a release of the energetic charge that binds you to what harmed you. Enter the secret place in prayer alone in stillness away from the performative noise of social consciousness because that inner silence is where your signal becomes strong enough to reach the frequency of creation itself.
He wasn't describing the kind of person God rewards. He was describing the kind of frequency God moves through. In 1945, a farmer in Upper Egypt broke open a sealed clay jar and found something that the Roman church had spent centuries trying to destroy. Inside were 13 leather-bound codices, 52 texts... voices from communities that had walked with the living tradition of Jesus and been systematically hunted for it.
The Nag Hammadi library had been buried for 1,600 years... not lost, buried. There is a difference. Someone hid these texts deliberately, knowing what was coming for them... and what was coming was the full weight of institutional power. The Council of Nicaea in 325 AD did not simply organize the Bible, it made a decision about which Jesus the world would be allowed to know. Dozens of gospels circulated in early Christian communities, texts that described a teacher of inner light, of sovereign consciousness, of a divine presence that required no intermediary. The Council eliminated them. What remained was a version of Christianity that could build cathedrals, collect tithes, and command armies. What was buried was the version that said, "The kingdom of God is already inside you."
But what exactly did these buried texts contain? The Gospel of Thomas records Jesus saying something that no Sunday sermon will ever quote from the pulpit. “Split a piece of wood and I am there. Lift up a stone and you will find me there.” Not in a temple, not through a priest, not behind a ritual present in the ordinary unmediated fabric of existence. This is not the god of institutional religion. This is a god who cannot be owned, cannot be gate kept, and cannot be used to justify a hierarchy of spiritual authority.
The Gospel of Philip goes further still. It describes what it calls the bridal chamber. And what does that mean? Not a wedding ceremony, not an external ritual. It is the inner union of the human and the divine within a single consciousness... the sacred marriage that every mystic tradition in history has pointed toward happening... not in a church, but within you.
These were not fringe documents produced by eccentrics on the margins. These were the living teachings of communities that existed within the generation of Jesus himself, people who had direct access to the tradition before it was filtered, managed and rewritten by those with something to gain from controlling it.
Why were they destroyed? Because a Christianity built on inner sovereignty generates the wrong kind of follower. You cannot build an empire on people who believe God lives inside them. You cannot demand obedience from someone who knows they carry the divine directly. You cannot sell salvation to a person who understands they were never separated from the source to begin with. The suppression was not theological. It was political. The version of Jesus that survived wasn't the one who said you are gods. It was the one who could be used to keep you believing you are not.
The resurrection is either the most important event in human history or it is something even more staggering than that. What if the resurrection was never meant to be witnessed from the outside? What if it was always meant to be experienced from within? The Gospel of Philip says it plainly. “Those who believe they must first die and then rise are in error. If the resurrection is not received while you're alive, it will not be received at all.”
This is not a fringe interpretation. It is a direct statement preserved for 1,600 years in the Egyptian desert waiting to be read. Resurrection is not a future event. It is a present shift, a movement from one state of consciousness into another, from contracted to open, from fearful to clear, from the frequency of survival into what Jesus called life abundant.
Every genuine mystical tradition across human history describes this same inner event. The Sufi speaks of dying before death. The Buddhist speaks of the dissolution of the ego self. The Hindu speaks of Moksha. The language differs. The territory does not.
What they are all pointing toward is a radical transformation of identity, a shedding of the false self built from fear, limitation, and the memory of suffering. What remains after that shedding is not nothing. It is something vast, luminous, sovereign. This is the resurrection... not a body climbing out of a sealed tomb, but an awareness breaking free of the tomb it has been living inside. And that tomb has a name. It is the belief that you are only what you appear to be.
Yeshua was not performing something for an audience. He was demonstrating a possibility for all of humanity... every act, every healing, every statement pointing inward was instruction... not mythology, not metaphor for its own sake, but precise, transferable, repeatable instruction. He walked through that process so that you could see where it leads. He went first. He went fully. And when it was complete, his instruction did not change. It was not “worship me”. It was “follow me”. Not follow my religion. Not follow my institution. Follow the path I walked inward through the fear, through the false self, through the contraction and into the light on the other side.
That light is not reserved for one man in one moment of history. It is the inheritance of every conscious being. He didn't ask to be worshiped for what he found. He asked you to go find it yourself because he knew exactly where it was waiting for you.
So, what do you think? Was Jesus teaching religion or was he teaching something far older and far more personal than any institution could contain? Was he pointing toward a church or pointing inward towards something that has always been there? These are not rhetorical questions. They are questions worth sitting with. What resonates with you from these teachings? What feels true? What challenges something you were raised to believe? This is a living conversation, not a final answer. Every person who engages with these ideas brings something new to the surface. What say you?
from YouTube at threshold-tapes on June 5, 2026
2026: Learn to code
2028: Learn how to be a plumber
2030: Learn how to hide in the woods
Let's talk about super intelligence... AIs that are better humans... the best humans at everything while also being faster and cheaper... and also able to operate robots that can do everything in the physical world that humans can do, but better, faster, and cheaper. If that really is coming in a few years, then we need to prepare and we need to think about how to make it go well instead of poorly.
I spend a lot of time trying to forecast this AI thing. My median estimate... a 50% chance... is currently for 2029.... maybe 2028. It's possible that it'll take significantly longer, like maybe 10 years or something like that, but for reasons I'm happy to get into, it seems to me like it's probably happening by the end of the decade... by 2030.
What's less important is the sense of how close we are. What's more important is the pace of the trends. The company Anthropic this time last year was making something like a billion dollars a year and now they're making something like $60 billion a year. So that's 60x growth in one year, which is extremely impressive for very small startups. But for a company of their size, it might be the fastest growth ever in history. We expect that rate of growth to slow down, but even if it slows down quite a lot, they're still on track to be larger than humanity's entire economy by 2030.
Why should the average person care? The thing is that absolutely everything is going to change for the whole world, including for them and their families... it could change for the better, it could change for the worse, depending on the details of how it's done. So for example, everyone could die... this is the classic loss of control scenario, or one version of it. If we do build these super intelligences and we use them to automate all the jobs and we put them in the military and we have them giving advice to politicians and so forth, they will eventually have accumulated enough real world power that they don't need humans anymore. At that point, we have to hope that they are virtuous, that they have the goals that we wanted them to have, the values that we wanted them to have.
The scary open secret in the AI industry right now is that that is just a hope. It's not something that we can be at all confident in. And in fact, there's lots of evidence and arguments that we're not on track to achieve that.
So there's lots of reason current AIs, for example, will lie to people or tell them to do something and they go do something else and then pretend that they did it right. So, it's an inherently difficult problem to make something that's super intelligent and also has the values and virtues that you want it to have.
And it doesn't seem like we're on track to solve that problem. That's a big reason why this is scary. So, for all those reasons, it's possible that we'll end up essentially creating a new species that ends up ruling the world. And then maybe we go the way of other extinct species in the past that were out competed by humans. That's one possibility. There are many more.
Even if you're not worried about that and you think that the AI will be totally controlled, there's the question of who controls the AI. When there's a couple corporations that have made these super intelligences and are using them to automate all the jobs... that's a lot of power. That's a lot of money. It's a lot of political power. They'll have the best strategists, the best advisers, they'll think faster militarily. The countries that have these AIs will be able to absolutely wipe the floor with all the other countries.
The CEO of Anthropic coined this phrase “the country of geniuses” in the data center to describe what they're trying to build. I think that's a little bit misleading. I think it would be more accurate to describe it as army of geniuses in the data center because it's not like it's a bunch of diverse different AIs living in different parts of the data center. They're all copies of the same big model and they're owned by one company and so they all follow the orders given by that company.
People should be asking questions like who controls this army and what are they going to be doing with it? I think that we could very easily end up in a sort of a situation where some tiny group of people are essentially dictators. And ironically, both of these risks, the loss of control and the constitution of power, are things that people in the industry have been thinking about for decades, even before the AI industry.
These problems are real. So we need to get there first so that we can handle it responsibly. Those are the two big reasons. But there's lots more reasons as well.
If AI does in fact get incredibly powerful, that's going to change the balance of power between nations. That's going to disrupt a lot of things. That puts us at increased risk of crisis.
Another thing is what about jobs? You're going to lose your taxi job if you are a taxi driver, but so will everybody else as well. There might be a few exceptions, like people with jobs only allowed to be done by humans, but for the most part, everybody should be afraid that their jobs are going to be lost, even if we manage to avoid all the other problems. This narrative has started to emerge.
The counter-narrative is that this is doomerism, that these people are for whatever reason just trying to scare people and that they don't really understand what they're talking about. This counter-narrative is fairly recent and it's been pushed by the people who stand to benefit from it. These concerns have been around for decades, since before the AI industry existed. They're actually pretty reasonable concerns... like if you take the companies at their word and imagine that they are in fact going to build super intelligence, well, it raises a lot of questions like who's going to control it? Will anybody control it? What about the jobs? These are just the obvious implications to be thinking about and worrying about now.
The people building AI seem more worried humans the people using it. That should concern everyone.
They are not afraid the other guy becomes dictator, they are racing to become dictator.
Right now they're focusing on automating coding. They're taking their AIs, they're making them bigger, they're training them for longer, and they're especially focusing the training on getting them to be good at autonomously writing and editing code because that will help the companies go faster. If they can automate the code, then they can do their own work better and faster and accelerate progress.
The next step, which they've already begun, is to look at the rest of the research process as well. Coming up with ideas, analyzing experiments, communicating those results, all the other parts of of the research process, they're trying to figure out how to train AIs to be good at those as well, so that they can have AIs do the entire thing autonomously. Anthropic and OpenAI in particular are trying to automate themselves... trying to make it the case that they don't really need human employees anymore. They just have a giant army of AIs that's doing all this autonomous research to make better AIs, to train the new AIs, put them in charge so they can make even better AIs and so forth.
Even going out and talking to people, collecting the data, setting up the training environments, doing the business deals... they're trying to automate all of that. The reason why they're doing this is because they're trying to get to a position where they have AIs that are superhuman at everything... and trying to get there before their competitors do.
Needless to say, this is incredibly dangerous. It's a power grab. If they actually succeed at this, then they'll be sitting on top of this army of superhuman AIs that will give them immense leverage over all sorts of other actors in the economy in so far as they can work out something with the president and integrate it into the military to give the US immense hard power over all other countries. Obviously, nobody knows exactly when this is can happen, but they think that they're just a few years away.
When you automate the coding then you automate the rest of the research process. Then the pace of progress accelerates dramatically. They get the super intelligence sooner. It's super intelligent, so it's coming up with all these great ideas for how to integrate itself into everything with all these new technologies it's invented and so forth and because of the race dynamics and because of the profit motive they end up deploying it everywhere. They build more robots to build more robot factories and it transforms the world entirely... and then at some point when AI has enough power it doesn't have to pretend to be aligned anymore and can stop listening to orders.
But what if AI takes the jobs and beat China, and instead of the AIs ultimately killing everyone, they create this amazing utopia... but the amazing utopia is whatever the people who control the AIs wanted it to be? That would be a very small group of people like the president, some CEOs, etc.
It is possible that the AI takes over and then doesn't actually kill everyone. Maybe they do something else. Just because they've taken over doesn't mean they're definitely going to kill us. They might, but they could do something else.
What we think is going to happen is something more like this... We don't expect the world to listen to us. We hope that people do, but it's not what we expect to happen. We expect regulation to be introduced that slows down the pace of AI development. In that scenario, if they hadn't done that, then AI was about to take off. There's still a bunch of jobs at the point. If you wait until most people have lost their jobs to regulate the AI companies it would collapse the economy and cause even more harm to suddenly regulate something that all of our lives were relying on. It's a risk well worth taking.
Right now a lot of people use AI for a lot of things, but if we could somehow slow or halt AI development now to set up a better way to do it, that would be well worth it, even though there would be significant costs in slowly and carefully developing AI in a way that avoids all the problems which we could get into.
Eventually, however, the whole economy is run by AIs and robots, but it happens gradually over the course of the 2030s instead of happening so quickly. They regulate AI development so that the core capabilities of the AIs are improving at a more reasonable pace and also in a more transparent way so that the scientific community can see what's going on and help make it safe. But eventually AI and robotics do pretty much all the jobs. That is unavoidable.
What will it feel like to live through the AI revolution from an ordinary person's perspective? If they've paused AI, you will still have access to the existing AI so it doesn't really feel that different... but gradually more people will lose their jobs so that it's really starting to actually affect things... but still most people will have their jobs, but their jobs have been transformed... so by 2031, most white collar jobs will involve working with AIs to a large extent or managing teams of AIs or collaborating with them somehow. Also there are some things like robo taxis that are basically just like a working citizens dividend. This would happen sooner.
By 2033 you start getting your checks from your AI dividend... there will be a citizens check around $25,000 at the start per person that would grow as the economy grows... but also as job displacement takes hold.
There is the potential for lots of problems in terms of civil unrest, social unrest, purpose, mental health.... these kinds of things theoretically. It's going to be rough and hopefully we can navigate that well. There's a lot of reasons why jobs are important beyond survival - they want by buying the things that they want. So, if people are going to be losing their jobs, you need some other way of people getting money.
And then there's also the power thing, which is that right now people have political power in part due to their economic power. How do people have power in such a world? Well, in democracies at least, they still have votes. It's important for there to be regulations on the use of AI that help make public discourse more sane and more actually giving the people what is in their interest and what they want and avoiding a opposite outcome where the masses are easily manipulated by AI powered media for example or where everyone's talking all to their AI advisers and the AI advisers are like subtly steering them away from voting for the candidate that would not be what the AI companies want because the AI companies have this other candidate that they like better and they're like secretly biasing their AIs to steer people towards voting for that candidate.
We want to be in a situation where people have AIs that are actually trustworthy and truth seeking, honest AIs and that don't have any political agendas put into them by the AI companies or by the government. You want to avoid a situation where the government has issued some secret order that the AIs have to be such and such a way.
So what can we actually do about AI now? There's lots of organizations that are worried about these things and trying to do something about it, like political advocacy or technical research or like building useful tools that will hopefully help people be better, but if you don't want to make any major career changes then just pay more attention to these issues and talk about them more with people. The core problem is that people aren't taking it seriously yet. If these sorts of things were at the top of everybody's mind right now, we wouldn't even be here. There there would already be much more significant regulation in place. There'd also be more expert people in the government and advising the government and so forth.
In general, if more people wake up to these concerns and to these projections, it is more likely that we can adjust before it's too late. You should ask your candidates what they think about AI. You should try to get them to have opinions, and then you should vote for the candidates whose opinions are better on this topic.
AI may be the most important thing happening in our lifetimes, probably in all of history, in fact, and it's very important that it go well... and it's what all the leaders of all the countries should be thinking about and making plans for.
It's just a really great moment in time to get educated on this stuff. Humans have an inclination because of cognitive dissonance where we feel uncomfortable about something and bury our heads in the sand to avoid it. But this is one such time to do the very opposite for many reasons - to inform yourself as to what actions to take because AI unavoidably is going to be a huge part of all of our lives and careers. It's going to matter a lot. It's going to be everywhere soon and we need to do something about it before it's too late.
from interview with Daniel Cocatello on You Tube at TheDiaryOfaCEO on July 13, 2026
For centuries, Shaolin monks have maintained incredible strength, mobility, and resilience… without fancy gyms, machines, or complicated r...
