Why you shouldn't Venmo your friends 👇
We have this belief that before money, we did complicated exchanges amongst one another. One cow for thirty bushels of wheat or whatever.

According to David Graeber in "Debt: The First 5,000 Years," we have no record of that actually being the economic system anywhere pre-money.
Instead, if we were making exchanges with people we knew, we just gave each other stuff and expected that someday they'd help us out too.

I'll share the meat from my hunt with you, you'll help me build a hut when I need a new one.
The invention of money let us deal with strangers.

Since we didn’t live together, we didn’t have that built in trust that they’d return the favor eventually. So we used money instead.

Money is what you use when you don’t trust the other person to return an equal favor to you.
So when you venmo your friends for every round of drinks, you’re telling them “I don’t trust you to do me an equal favor in the future.”

You aren't part of my tribe, so I need to settle my accounts with you now.
I didn't realize how nice making this change was until I moved to Austin from NYC and it was no longer the norm to Venmo people for small things.

It creates much more of a community vibe, and I definitely recommend adopting it as much as possible if you haven't already.

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More from @nateliason

7 Dec
One of my favorite mental models for health I picked up from @dranthonygustin

I'll call it "The Deficiency Question"

Basically before you add anything to your body, ask yourself:

Do I have a deficiency in this thing?
For example, Vitamin D.

Vitamin D is a supplement everyone can, and probably should, take, because Vitamin D is something most of us are painfully deficient in.

Being deficient in it causes all sorts of terrible health outcomes, so that supplement seems like a good thing.
But what about something like skin moisturizer.

Does your body have a "moisturizer deficiency"?

No, that's silly. You're probably just making other lifestyle choices leading to dry skin that you should address instead.
Read 9 tweets
4 Dec
Alright I've been working on this for the last couple weeks, and I'm really excited to announce a new Membership for my blog!

Here's everything it includes 👇
First, I want anyone curious to have the opportunity to check it out, so you can use the code "FREEMONTH" at checkout to get the first month free.

Sign up link is at: nateliason.com/sign-up

Alright, on to what it includes:
Monthly Members Hangouts!

Each month I'm going to do a private zoom with members to answer any questions, discuss recent articles or medleys, share any new tools I'm enjoying, and more.
Read 17 tweets
3 Dec
If you're worried about COVID, ask yourself:

How many hours of sunlight do you get?

How much alcohol do you drink?

How clean is your diet?

How much intense exercise are you doing?

How much excess body fat do you have?

This is a great time to get your health in order.
Read 5 tweets
30 Nov
I was having this conversation with @rdeliason yesterday and it's an interesting thought experiment so I figured I'd share my thoughts on:

Given COVID, should you travel to see family for this Christmas?

👇👇👇
There are huge costs to just blindly following stay at home orders that aren't getting talked about enough:



Just because we're being told to stay home doesn't necessarily mean we should.
There are a few angles we need to think about:

- Risk to you
- Risk to family (or who you're visiting)
- Risk to society
Read 17 tweets
25 Nov
If Jordan Peterson is writing another book it should be about overcoming the Benzos addiction he was hiding while writing the last book about getting your life in order.

Huge opportunity for him to honestly share his challenges with others suffering similar struggles.
Writing another book giving life advice without addressing that comes off as hypocritical
Read 4 tweets
29 Oct
My mind has been completely blown.

THC is secretly legal in Texas, and you can buy it OTC in Austin.

Read on to learn about this incredible, brilliant loophole.
It turns out that THC is not one "thing." It has a bunch of different compounds, and only one of them is illegal.

Delta-9 THC is the THC you're most familiar with. But there's a very close cousin, Delta-8, that's not actually illegal.
When you buy normal weed, it has Delta-9 THC, Delta-8 THC, CBD, etc.

Some people figured out how to extract CBD and make pure CBD supplements, which we all know about.

But now some companies have found a way to extract the Delta-8 THC, while removing the illegal Delta-9
Read 8 tweets

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