@noahrevoy
Natural Law Senior Fellow @NatLawInstitute
I will show you how to build happy, high trust, intergenerational families.
No relay list published yet.
Recent Notes
I built an entire SaaS product that is roughly comparable to Kajabi in less than a week using Claude Code in the terminal.
It includes features Kajabi does not have that I specifically need, and it omits features Kajabi has that I do not.
I finished it, ran it locally, and while reviewing it, realized I wanted a few additional features. I described them to Claude. Claude thought about it, proposed an implementation, I agreed, and it built the features. Fifteen minutes later, I was testing them.
If I ask a traditional SaaS company for a feature I need, the odds of it being implemented are close to zero. The odds of it being implemented on a timeline that matters to me are effectively zero. In that model, my product has to adapt to the platform. Here, the platform adapts to my product.
I do not know whether every reader could get the same results. I am not a programmer either. But I am very good at describing exactly what I want, and just as importantly, what I do not want.
In this case, I gave Claude a governing document describing the business logic, followed by a nine step development plan. Each step was several pages long, and Claude was instructed to work through them one step at a time.
If you can clearly describe what you want, how it will be used, and how your business logic works, this approach can produce extraordinary results. If you go to Claude and say, “Make me a website,” it will make you something. It will probably look good. But it will not necessarily be what you want.
This method only works if you are good at thinking clearly and describing your intent precisely.
It includes features Kajabi does not have that I specifically need, and it omits features Kajabi has that I do not.
I finished it, ran it locally, and while reviewing it, realized I wanted a few additional features. I described them to Claude. Claude thought about it, proposed an implementation, I agreed, and it built the features. Fifteen minutes later, I was testing them.
If I ask a traditional SaaS company for a feature I need, the odds of it being implemented are close to zero. The odds of it being implemented on a timeline that matters to me are effectively zero. In that model, my product has to adapt to the platform. Here, the platform adapts to my product.
I do not know whether every reader could get the same results. I am not a programmer either. But I am very good at describing exactly what I want, and just as importantly, what I do not want.
In this case, I gave Claude a governing document describing the business logic, followed by a nine step development plan. Each step was several pages long, and Claude was instructed to work through them one step at a time.
If you can clearly describe what you want, how it will be used, and how your business logic works, this approach can produce extraordinary results. If you go to Claude and say, “Make me a website,” it will make you something. It will probably look good. But it will not necessarily be what you want.
This method only works if you are good at thinking clearly and describing your intent precisely.
1❤️3
I don't know. Maybe.
I personally had great parents who loved and supported me, and never once said a negative word about their role as parents. Yet I never had any desire for the marriage and family...
Your parents clearly gave you the impression that parenting is drudgery. In reality, it is an incredibly joyful, meaningful, and rewarding experience.
This is not about pretending it is easy. Everything worthwhile requires hard work. Everything. That has always been true.
And it is not only about what parents say. In many ways, what they demonstrate matters more.
I demonstrate to my children every day how much I enjoy being a parent, how much I love them, how much they enrich my life, and how happy I am to be their father.
If your parents had demonstrated to you how good it is to be a parent, and how much of a privilege it is, you would already have your own list of reasons for wanting children. Those reasons might differ somewhat from the reasons our grandparents had, but many of the core reasons are still the same and still present.
That said, historically, not everyone had children. Roughly half of men never did, and about twenty percent of women did not either. So of course, not everyone is going to become a parent.
This is not about pretending it is easy. Everything worthwhile requires hard work. Everything. That has always been true.
And it is not only about what parents say. In many ways, what they demonstrate matters more.
I demonstrate to my children every day how much I enjoy being a parent, how much I love them, how much they enrich my life, and how happy I am to be their father.
If your parents had demonstrated to you how good it is to be a parent, and how much of a privilege it is, you would already have your own list of reasons for wanting children. Those reasons might differ somewhat from the reasons our grandparents had, but many of the core reasons are still the same and still present.
That said, historically, not everyone had children. Roughly half of men never did, and about twenty percent of women did not either. So of course, not everyone is going to become a parent.
1
You see these testimonials online from parents who complain endlessly about how miserable parenting was for them. How horrible their children are. How exhausted they are. How much they suffered. How much their children now do not want kids of their own.
What they are really doing is bragging about being unskilled parents. Which is a strange thing to boast about.
That kind of public complaining is not honest reflection. It is terrible parenting. Just as you do not complain about your spouse in front of your children, you do not complain about being a parent in front of your children.
The story you tell about parenting is the story your children absorb about family, responsibility, and the future.
In our house, my wife and I always talk about our children in positive terms. Always. We do not describe them as burdens. We do not call them difficult, exhausting, or hard. We do not frame parenting that way at all.
We talk about the pleasure of having children. We talk about responsibility as a privilege. About how doing hard things can be joyful. As a result, my son sees caring for his younger brothers as something honorable. He wants to do it. He enjoys it. He seeks it out.
Children learn what life is supposed to feel like by watching you. If you tell them that raising children ruins your life, do not be surprised when they decide they do not want children of their own.
The attitude you model about parenting is the attitude your children will carry when it comes time to decide whether to give you grandchildren.
What they are really doing is bragging about being unskilled parents. Which is a strange thing to boast about.
That kind of public complaining is not honest reflection. It is terrible parenting. Just as you do not complain about your spouse in front of your children, you do not complain about being a parent in front of your children.
The story you tell about parenting is the story your children absorb about family, responsibility, and the future.
In our house, my wife and I always talk about our children in positive terms. Always. We do not describe them as burdens. We do not call them difficult, exhausting, or hard. We do not frame parenting that way at all.
We talk about the pleasure of having children. We talk about responsibility as a privilege. About how doing hard things can be joyful. As a result, my son sees caring for his younger brothers as something honorable. He wants to do it. He enjoys it. He seeks it out.
Children learn what life is supposed to feel like by watching you. If you tell them that raising children ruins your life, do not be surprised when they decide they do not want children of their own.
The attitude you model about parenting is the attitude your children will carry when it comes time to decide whether to give you grandchildren.
3❤️1
Agency is a stack of learned frames. Miss one, and what people call “low agency” emerges automatically.
There are six minimum frames required for a lifelong capacity to generate agency:
1. Impulse Modulation
Ability to feel impulse without obeying it.
2. Emotional Modulation
Ability to feel emotion without distortion, flooding, or hijack.
3. Epistemic Updating
Ability to revise beliefs and strategies when predictions fail.
4. Reality Correspondence
Ability to perceive incentives, constraints, and causality as they are, not as wished.
5. Constraint Subordination
Acceptance of reality’s authority over preference, narrative, or grievance.
6. Responsibility Internalization
Treating outcomes as feedback about your choices rather than external blame.
Developmentally, this usually splits:
Impulse + emotional modulation are primarily trained early (often by mothers).
The latter four are primarily trained through consequence enforcement and reality arbitration (often by fathers).
Both parents can train all six, but someone must train each frame, or it simply doesn’t form.
Each missing frame produces a predictable agency failure mode:
- Poor impulse control → self-sabotage
- Emotional hijack → reactive decision-making
- No epistemic updating → repeating failed strategies
- Weak reality correspondence → fantasy planning
- Refusal of constraint → entitlement conflict
- Externalized responsibility → chronic blame
People experience these failures subjectively as “loss of agency,” the cognitive machinery is incomplete.
I have a book coming out on this planned for 2027.
There are six minimum frames required for a lifelong capacity to generate agency:
1. Impulse Modulation
Ability to feel impulse without obeying it.
2. Emotional Modulation
Ability to feel emotion without distortion, flooding, or hijack.
3. Epistemic Updating
Ability to revise beliefs and strategies when predictions fail.
4. Reality Correspondence
Ability to perceive incentives, constraints, and causality as they are, not as wished.
5. Constraint Subordination
Acceptance of reality’s authority over preference, narrative, or grievance.
6. Responsibility Internalization
Treating outcomes as feedback about your choices rather than external blame.
Developmentally, this usually splits:
Impulse + emotional modulation are primarily trained early (often by mothers).
The latter four are primarily trained through consequence enforcement and reality arbitration (often by fathers).
Both parents can train all six, but someone must train each frame, or it simply doesn’t form.
Each missing frame produces a predictable agency failure mode:
- Poor impulse control → self-sabotage
- Emotional hijack → reactive decision-making
- No epistemic updating → repeating failed strategies
- Weak reality correspondence → fantasy planning
- Refusal of constraint → entitlement conflict
- Externalized responsibility → chronic blame
People experience these failures subjectively as “loss of agency,” the cognitive machinery is incomplete.
I have a book coming out on this planned for 2027.
❤️1
I like the concept and do something similar in concept. Question for you. How often are you moving things around on your calendar? Things come up and disrupt a well-crafted plan.
My calendar has two types of entries: fixed appointments and flexible appointments.
Flexible appointments are tasks that must be solved that day. They usually take about fifteen minutes. They cannot be pushed to tomorrow, but they can be done at any point during the day. I place them in the first available slot in the morning so they get cleared off my radar early.
Fixed appointments are different. If I have an appointment with someone, there are only two things that will stop me from attending: an act of God or illness.
Because of that, fixed appointments almost never move. Flexible tasks move often. Sometimes I start a flexible task and realize it cannot be done at that moment, so I reschedule it.
The point is that it stays on the calendar. It does not disappear. And because of that, it gets done.
Flexible appointments are tasks that must be solved that day. They usually take about fifteen minutes. They cannot be pushed to tomorrow, but they can be done at any point during the day. I place them in the first available slot in the morning so they get cleared off my radar early.
Fixed appointments are different. If I have an appointment with someone, there are only two things that will stop me from attending: an act of God or illness.
Because of that, fixed appointments almost never move. Flexible tasks move often. Sometimes I start a flexible task and realize it cannot be done at that moment, so I reschedule it.
The point is that it stays on the calendar. It does not disappear. And because of that, it gets done.
Whenever I have something important to do that I cannot do immediately, I schedule a specific time to do it.
I do not put it on a to do list. I put it on the calendar.
To do lists are for things I would like to do, but may never get around to. If something is truly important, it goes on the schedule in a block of at least fifteen minutes.
I tell myself a simple rule: if it is not on the calendar, it will not get done. Because it will not. If I do not write it down, I will forget.
The advantage of this rule is that it also creates the inverse belief. If I write it down, it will get done.
First benefit, when the time arrives and the calendar says it is the next thing to do, I simply do it.
Second benefit, it removes the mental load entirely. I no longer have to keep the task in my memory. I do not carry it in the background while I am doing other things during the day. I can forget about it completely until the scheduled time arrives.
That means I am not stressing about what I need to remember. I know I have left myself the information I need to do the task tomorrow, next week, or whenever it is scheduled.
This is how you build a low stress schedule.
I do not put it on a to do list. I put it on the calendar.
To do lists are for things I would like to do, but may never get around to. If something is truly important, it goes on the schedule in a block of at least fifteen minutes.
I tell myself a simple rule: if it is not on the calendar, it will not get done. Because it will not. If I do not write it down, I will forget.
The advantage of this rule is that it also creates the inverse belief. If I write it down, it will get done.
First benefit, when the time arrives and the calendar says it is the next thing to do, I simply do it.
Second benefit, it removes the mental load entirely. I no longer have to keep the task in my memory. I do not carry it in the background while I am doing other things during the day. I can forget about it completely until the scheduled time arrives.
That means I am not stressing about what I need to remember. I know I have left myself the information I need to do the task tomorrow, next week, or whenever it is scheduled.
This is how you build a low stress schedule.
1
Here's your bedtime routine game-changer: spray magnesium oil on your child's feet and legs right before bed. Gently massage it in while you read their bedtime story.
Try it for 5 nights straight and watch what happens. Most parents tell me their kids fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. Costs less than melatonin gummies and actually works.
Try it for 5 nights straight and watch what happens. Most parents tell me their kids fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. Costs less than melatonin gummies and actually works.
1
Ending your bloodline because you hate the opposite sex is a weird flex.
1👁1
Spiritual Americans
There is a very small, almost negligible number of people in the world whom I would call spiritual Americans. These are people who, if they moved to the United States, would look right, act right, and fit naturally into American culture, norms, and demographics in every meaningful way.
That pool is extremely small. There is no vast reservoir of Americans scattered around the world waiting to be imported in order to boost population numbers.
When large numbers of people are imported, what is being imported is not Americans. It is people who bring their own cultures, their own habits, their own ways of organizing society, and their own ideas about governance and morality. Those ideas inevitably shape how they live, how they organize, and how they vote. That outcome is entirely predictable and obvious.
There is only one way to make more Americans.
Americans have to have more children.
There is a very small, almost negligible number of people in the world whom I would call spiritual Americans. These are people who, if they moved to the United States, would look right, act right, and fit naturally into American culture, norms, and demographics in every meaningful way.
That pool is extremely small. There is no vast reservoir of Americans scattered around the world waiting to be imported in order to boost population numbers.
When large numbers of people are imported, what is being imported is not Americans. It is people who bring their own cultures, their own habits, their own ways of organizing society, and their own ideas about governance and morality. Those ideas inevitably shape how they live, how they organize, and how they vote. That outcome is entirely predictable and obvious.
There is only one way to make more Americans.
Americans have to have more children.
1
The Current System Fails to Attract the People We Want in Power
We have a persistent misunderstanding about political leadership that is actively worsening our problems: we imagine that competent, honest people will seek power out of moral duty, and that low pay is a virtue that keeps politics “clean.”
In reality, the opposite is true.
Positions of rulership carry extraordinary responsibility, risk, scrutiny, and opportunity cost.
Anyone competent enough to govern a complex modern society is, almost by definition, capable of earning vastly more money, with less exposure and less reputational risk, in the private sector. When we deliberately underpay such positions, we are not signaling virtue, we are signaling that we do not value competence.
It is true that a very small number of people will pursue power out of moral obligation alone. But this is a statistical anomaly, not a governing strategy.
Even in a country the size of the United States, the number of individuals willing to bear immense personal cost purely out of duty is vanishingly small, a handful per generation at best. That is not enough to staff a legislature, an executive, a judiciary, regulatory bodies, and oversight institutions. And even among those few, not all will succeed, remain healthy, or avoid bad luck. Civilizations cannot be run on moral miracles.
What happens under low-pay regimes is entirely predictable:
Competent, honest people self-select out.
Those who remain are either:
- ideologues who value power over outcomes, or
- opportunists who expect to be compensated indirectly through corruption, influence, or post-office rewards.
Low official pay does not reduce corruption. It filters for people who plan to corrupt.
Why Punishment and Transparency Alone Cannot Fix This
Many people respond by saying: “Fine, then we’ll just impose stricter transparency and harsher punishments.” This sounds serious, but it misunderstands how institutions form and sustain themselves.
Punishment without prior attraction creates a perverse outcome:
1) It further deters competent people, who already have better options.
2) It leaves enforcement in the hands of the incompetent, the ideological, or the corrupt.
It turns transparency into a weapon rather than a tool, selectively applied, politicized, or performative.
This leads to the exact failure mode we see today: rules that exist on paper but are enforced arbitrarily, by people who lack either the skill or the incentive to enforce them fairly.
A crucial question is almost never asked:
Who is supposed to design, implement, and enforce transparency and accountability if we have not first attracted competent people into the system?
You cannot build high-quality enforcement institutions with low-quality personnel. You cannot punish corruption out of a system that has selected for corruption.
Why the Order Matters
The sequence of the solution is not optional.
First, you must make rulership positions sufficiently rewarding to attract people who:
- have real alternatives,
- have reputations to protect,
- and have something substantial to lose.
Then, once competent people are present in sufficient numbers, you can:
- build real transparency,
- create auditability,
- and establish credible enforcement mechanisms.
Only then does punishment become effective, because it is:
- competently administered,
- evenly applied,
- and backed by institutions that function.
Reversing this order guarantees failure. Punishment-first approaches do not purify systems; they hollow them out.
The Core Correction
The uncomfortable truth is this:
If public office does not pay enough to attract capable people, the system will be run either by fools or by criminals, and often by criminals who pretend to be fools.
Compensation is not about rewarding virtue. It is about correcting selection pressure. Transparency and punishment are not substitutes for this, they are downstream tools that only work once the right people are present to wield them.
None of this is easy. If it were easy, history would look very different. But difficulty does not excuse getting the order wrong. And right now, we are getting the order wrong in a way that guarantees continued institutional decay.
We have a persistent misunderstanding about political leadership that is actively worsening our problems: we imagine that competent, honest people will seek power out of moral duty, and that low pay is a virtue that keeps politics “clean.”
In reality, the opposite is true.
Positions of rulership carry extraordinary responsibility, risk, scrutiny, and opportunity cost.
Anyone competent enough to govern a complex modern society is, almost by definition, capable of earning vastly more money, with less exposure and less reputational risk, in the private sector. When we deliberately underpay such positions, we are not signaling virtue, we are signaling that we do not value competence.
It is true that a very small number of people will pursue power out of moral obligation alone. But this is a statistical anomaly, not a governing strategy.
Even in a country the size of the United States, the number of individuals willing to bear immense personal cost purely out of duty is vanishingly small, a handful per generation at best. That is not enough to staff a legislature, an executive, a judiciary, regulatory bodies, and oversight institutions. And even among those few, not all will succeed, remain healthy, or avoid bad luck. Civilizations cannot be run on moral miracles.
What happens under low-pay regimes is entirely predictable:
Competent, honest people self-select out.
Those who remain are either:
- ideologues who value power over outcomes, or
- opportunists who expect to be compensated indirectly through corruption, influence, or post-office rewards.
Low official pay does not reduce corruption. It filters for people who plan to corrupt.
Why Punishment and Transparency Alone Cannot Fix This
Many people respond by saying: “Fine, then we’ll just impose stricter transparency and harsher punishments.” This sounds serious, but it misunderstands how institutions form and sustain themselves.
Punishment without prior attraction creates a perverse outcome:
1) It further deters competent people, who already have better options.
2) It leaves enforcement in the hands of the incompetent, the ideological, or the corrupt.
It turns transparency into a weapon rather than a tool, selectively applied, politicized, or performative.
This leads to the exact failure mode we see today: rules that exist on paper but are enforced arbitrarily, by people who lack either the skill or the incentive to enforce them fairly.
A crucial question is almost never asked:
Who is supposed to design, implement, and enforce transparency and accountability if we have not first attracted competent people into the system?
You cannot build high-quality enforcement institutions with low-quality personnel. You cannot punish corruption out of a system that has selected for corruption.
Why the Order Matters
The sequence of the solution is not optional.
First, you must make rulership positions sufficiently rewarding to attract people who:
- have real alternatives,
- have reputations to protect,
- and have something substantial to lose.
Then, once competent people are present in sufficient numbers, you can:
- build real transparency,
- create auditability,
- and establish credible enforcement mechanisms.
Only then does punishment become effective, because it is:
- competently administered,
- evenly applied,
- and backed by institutions that function.
Reversing this order guarantees failure. Punishment-first approaches do not purify systems; they hollow them out.
The Core Correction
The uncomfortable truth is this:
If public office does not pay enough to attract capable people, the system will be run either by fools or by criminals, and often by criminals who pretend to be fools.
Compensation is not about rewarding virtue. It is about correcting selection pressure. Transparency and punishment are not substitutes for this, they are downstream tools that only work once the right people are present to wield them.
None of this is easy. If it were easy, history would look very different. But difficulty does not excuse getting the order wrong. And right now, we are getting the order wrong in a way that guarantees continued institutional decay.
2❤️2🤙1
Write down a short list of the people whose opinions matter to you.
Now rewrite that list from most important to least important. You may even want categories, because some people’s opinions matter on certain subjects and not on others.
Once you have that list, treat it as definitive. Everyone who is not on it no longer gets a vote.
Behave accordingly. Allocate your attention, effort, and concern only to those people.
The opinions of everyone else are irrelevant, because functionally, they are.
Now rewrite that list from most important to least important. You may even want categories, because some people’s opinions matter on certain subjects and not on others.
Once you have that list, treat it as definitive. Everyone who is not on it no longer gets a vote.
Behave accordingly. Allocate your attention, effort, and concern only to those people.
The opinions of everyone else are irrelevant, because functionally, they are.
113❤️2🤙2🫡1
Most people misunderstand power in government.
There are only a few true positions of power. In the U.S., there are roughly 800–1,200 elite rulership positions that actually make binding decisions over law, enforcement, courts, budgets, and force.
The President is only one of them, and over time, not the most powerful.
Roughly 10–15% are elected, 45–55% are appointed, and 35–45% are career or institutional roles (judges, senior bureaucrats, regulators, military command).
This means real power is mostly unelected, durable, and appointment-based.
Elections shape legitimacy and direction, but institutions run the country.
Elections alone do not change a country.
Nations rise or fall based on the quality of their institutions, whether they are understood, invested in, defended from corruption, and capable of attracting competent people willing to take responsibility.
If institutions decay, elections become symbolic.
If institutions are healthy, elections matter.
Ignore institutional competence long enough, and collapse becomes a question of when, not if.
There are only a few true positions of power. In the U.S., there are roughly 800–1,200 elite rulership positions that actually make binding decisions over law, enforcement, courts, budgets, and force.
The President is only one of them, and over time, not the most powerful.
Roughly 10–15% are elected, 45–55% are appointed, and 35–45% are career or institutional roles (judges, senior bureaucrats, regulators, military command).
This means real power is mostly unelected, durable, and appointment-based.
Elections shape legitimacy and direction, but institutions run the country.
Elections alone do not change a country.
Nations rise or fall based on the quality of their institutions, whether they are understood, invested in, defended from corruption, and capable of attracting competent people willing to take responsibility.
If institutions decay, elections become symbolic.
If institutions are healthy, elections matter.
Ignore institutional competence long enough, and collapse becomes a question of when, not if.
2❤️2🤙1
