Ever heard of this guy? 

Yes? Thank god. No? Please stop causing me pain. His name is David Blaine. He’s the f*cking man. A magician, but the man. For over 30 years he’s been pushing the boundaries of psychological pain and discipline, turning self-torture into art.

He’s held his breath underwater for 17 minutes, starved for 44 days, caught a bullet in his mouth, and kissed a king cobra.

The real-life Dos Equis guy.

He cares about perfection. Mastery. Thus, he has to constantly drag himself through this valley of suffering for every new trick he begins:

But David isn't insane as his tricks look. He's just understood something most of us haven't - mastery requires murder. Not of people _duh, but of everything that bogs you down. Your precious first drafts, your guru worship, your outdated mental models, your thirst for some arbitrary status.

And in our current hellscape of information warfare, his approach holds the most unlikely lessons for you and your brain.

You’ve heard of this one before. Writers especially know this rule. Grinding for hours on making the first, perfect sentence of your e-mail? Stop that. Banging your head against a wall to distract yourself from making mistakes? No more.

Ed Sheeran described it like dirty water: “Writing songs and playing live is like turning on a tap in an old house; first you’ll get the mud and dirty water, but the more you get it out, the quicker the good water starts flowing.”

David Blaine takes this quite literally. Watch him practice a trick, because he'll destroy 50 near-perfect attempts to get the one.

As David shows us, just keep trying to break the bottle, even if you fuck it up the first time.

Surprisingly, this is exactly how you need to treat media consumption these days. It’s tempting to fall in love with that first hot take you see on a topic you’re not too familiar with, especially when it’s all glossied up in a shiny campaign ad like NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s.

Or that Tucker Carlson rant about GDP being meaningless..?? That ain’t it, chief.
_{fun fact: every other measurement people propose to use instead of GDP… gives us basically the same as GDP.}

You can’t be hard on yourself about falling for it. It’s just natural that your brain wants to fall in love with the explanation that looks and sounds smart. It's easy, but it's also how you end up blindly following charlatans like that guy.

In his show Do Not Attempt, Blaine learns the Japanese concept on mastery called Shuhari.

Now let’s use apply it to our dystopian media landscape:

As big hoss Blaine learned, mastery means eventually destroying and remaking the method that made you. In an age where many people spend more time with their phones than their families, mastering the device you clock months of your life on is the way, not retweeting based on headlines like your strange uncle in Idaho.

George Mack is the master behind this ad.

He also wrote this: 

We're so desperate for daddy figures that we'll worship anyone with a blue check and a confident tone. Twitter/X is littered with anonymous accounts with millions of followers run by Macedonian teenagers in their mom’s basement. TikTok is full of loud, fake prophets whose only credibility lies in making a catchy hook and having a ring light. Facebook is full of AI-generated engagement bait and grifters who discovered that saying "they don't want you to know this" prints cash from engagement.

No adults in the room.

David Blaine gets this. When he travels the world, from South Africa to Indonesia, learning from masters, he doesn't see gods; he sees people who've put in the thousands of of reps who he can learn from. That simple.

Just look at geopolitics: NATO has spent over two years hoping Daddy America would handle Putin while Ukraine bled. The old dictator Assad ran to Russia when his regime in Syria collapsed, still believing Papa Putin would save him.

No Superman will stop you from making your 47th bad crypto investment _{seriously please stop}, and only you can pull yourself out of your perfectly curated echo chamber.

Here’s a fun quote from former head of the UK’s secret intelligence service, MI6:

Translation: The liberal world order you had the benefit of growing up is on the brink, fighting for its life. Strong men all around the world are leaning into "might makes right,” while many of our democratic leaders are trying to play nice still, asleep at the wheel.

Worldviews now have the shelf life of gas station sushi _{please dont ever eat}. Democrats still think using the old gatekeepers (NYT) to fact-check matters, while their opponents are building parallel reality networks. Republicans think tariffs are magic freedom dust that won't raise prices. Everyone's fighting the last war while the next one's already started.

The Democrats’ media game is still so weak, as they haven’t caught up to how the current media environment is changing how people interact with the world.

This is exactly how we end up with Minority Speaker of the House, Hakeem Jeffries, posting whatever this is as his attempt to pander:

Meanwhile, the entire right-wing media ecosystem coordinates messages lock and step, like a K-pop fandom. I mean look at this:

Huge right-wing media figures on Epstein:

The only guy who seems to understand the new rules and ready to play ball is Gavin Newsom (of all people, i know).

Fellow Gen-Zer _lfg, economic commentator Kyla Scanlon nails what happens when this behavior goes all the way to the top, where we end up having a president trying to run a country like a SoundCloud rapper runs their career - hectic:

It’s like everyone is FAFO’ing right now. Your cousin with the sports betting addiction. Turkey with their currency. El Salvador going all in on Bitcoin to save their economy. The UK reaping what they sowed with Brexit. People thinking any day now how "AI will solve everything." Putin with "Ukraine will fold in three days" (my guy packed parade gear to celebrate their immediate victory, for god’s sake!).

To a certain extent, David Blaine has built his career off of FAFOing, but with painfully methodical preparation, realistic expectations, and a pure love for the game, not out of delusion. These are very different things.

Understand the difference so you can update your priors.

Remember when this happened? 

Some guy in the room had asked Zelensky why he doesn't wear a suit, but the fossil didn't realize he was playing checkers while Zelensky was playing "survive a Russian invasion." Very different game.

The status game has always varied across countries and contexts, but it seems to be changing faster than before widespread use of social media.

“Old” status markers are seemingly turning into liabilities:

Meanwhile:

A lot going on.

Even the wealthiest people in the world can’t pull off how to display the old status markers properly without looking…kind of clownish.

Case and point - Bezos getting roasted throughout his whole wedding

The global leaders who get this and appeal to our worse sensibilities rather than antiquated notions of status seem to garner the most favor:

Zelensky in Ukraine has navigated this paradigm shift very well. His military garb is now more iconic and powerful in his context than any suit.

If there’s any coherence among notions of status across borders and class, it’s people’s thirst for authenticity. So the premium isn't on old notions of status anymore; it's on authenticity, or at least the performance.

Look at what goes viral: Duolingo's unhinged social media presence, TikToks showing how the sausage gets made, OnlyFans girls explaining their pricing strategies.

But watch for the trap: the opposite of caring about status is still a decision that shows you do care about status. The "I don't give a fuck" crowd spends hours perfecting their idgaf aesthetic. It's status games all the way down.

So be like Blaine. He just wears whatever allows him to light himself on fire to perform a high jump:

People love to say "strong beliefs, loosely held,” but most people operate on the opposite: weak beliefs with a death grip.

Your gurus are human, your worldview is temporary, and your status is a game whose rules often change over time, and even faster these days.

David Blaine gets this. That's why he can catch a bullet in his mouth, not because he's fearless, but because he's learned how to challenge every attachment, every assumption, every need for status approval.

He's more than a magician - he's an assassin.

That’s why he can do these insane things with ease:

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.}