Tag: Confidence

Categories
Startups

Day 1318 and Intention

I am experiencing a peace about the future I didn’t fully expect to find. I’ve been lucky enough to have a number of long term efforts start to paint a picture of success.

I began a process of examination of my last several years somewhere in the last half decade as I prepare myself and my work the next stage of growth. I’ve made a number of fairly significant decisions as my idea of where the future is headed and how I myself expect to live in it. A lot of these choices are public and revealed preferences. I don’t make it a secret.

I’ve been considered a doomer only because I think one has to look with calm and clear eyes at the problems in front of you. Only then can you really build optimism about your capacity to improve. Being merely positive isn’t a bad thing, but positivity is only driving you towards success if you are planning realistically. A good attitude is just a starting point.

I’ve taken things slowly. Sometimes it feels painfully so. But the intentions I had to be prepared to live in a more chaotic world means I live a stable life now even as daily uncertainties exist for everyone.

My intention is to approach building the future with optimism. The problems are large but I work with many focused and sober minded people who actually can and do build solutions. Fighting the future won’t do much. But who says it’s got to be a fight? Maybe we can bring on better things.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1316 and August Has Its Moments

I wasn’t expecting August to be much fun but I’m on an enjoyable roll through the first week. Maybe the politicians will listen to us and maybe they won’t. But stuff still gets built no matter what the news says so I’m just working what’s in front of me with my people.

We’ve had relatively good luck with weather this week and the fires have blessedly not been blowing into the valley. Which does a lot to improve moods. It’s cool, bright and you can breathe.

Add in a few prime season tomatoes, some fresh basil, a Japanese watermelon at its peak, and you’ve got the making of a great evening. With sunset coming earlier every day I can almost feel like fall might come after all.

The simple pleasures and a lot of work keep the summer from driving you too crazy. But if you need a little crazy might I interest you in some thoughts on ratfucking and campaign semiotics.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 1314 and Picking Up Good Vibrations

I am so tired. A wave of good news, good startups, good luck and good vibes has been coming my way. Pet Sounds may be Brian Wilson’s best work but good vibrations are a universal broadcasting frequency.

I am choosing to tap into those good vibes even if I’m concerned about well just about everything. There is nothing to be done but work the problems in front of me.

No blackpilling

So I’ll keep nurturing my good vibes. I won’t be blackpilled. I can make a difference and so can you.

If you want to send some good vibes and solutions my way, I’ve got some sort of neck pain from tension in my traps that is messing with me fiercely and I’d like to work through that. That’s the level of problem in front of me that’s solvable. That’s a vibration that can be raised. Maybe you’ve got some stuff you need help with. Hit me up with solutions or problems.

Categories
Finance Politics

Day 1313 and Ridiculousness

I enjoy noting numbers that represent milestones (100, 1000) for my daily writing habit. But I’m really a sucker for the cool dates. Today is day thirteen hundred and thirteen of writing every single day.

1313 is terrific. It’s an odd number. It’s also a composite number. 1313’s prime factors are 11, 7, and 17 so really a fan favorite set of numbers just on mathematical properties alone.

I asked perplexity for a synopsis on the numerology and enjoyed the very woo woo response. 1 represents new beginnings, leadership and self assertion. 3 represents creativity, self expression and embracing change.

I am sure everyone would like new beginnings that have the confidence to embrace. I’ve got so much going right I can almost tune out the ridiculousness of the moment. Ridiculousness incidentally was a 2011 MTV a clip show of licensed viral internet content that somehow ran for 1428 episodes.

Isn’t it funny what has staying power? Sometimes you’ve just got to keep at the ridiculous things in check and keep at the thing no matter how ridiculous it looks to others.

Maybe you unwind some things and rebalance yourself and keep at it. Or maybe you bring a dead bear cub to Peter Lugers. The world is filled with ridiculousness. Don’t let it stop you. Every day is a new beginning where you can lead yourself through change.

Categories
Politics

Day 1308 and Policies For Any Political Party

I don’t know why I let myself do this but I got irritated by the American election cycle. I have been libertarian and skeptical of the government well basically always. It was probably only really left flavored during a an Adbusters, Battle of Seattle, my favorite band is Rage Against the Machine teenager phase.

What can I say millennials did not like the government because the global war on terror went as well as every other war on “ideas” we’ve ever fought. We lost the war on poverty and drugs too.

But I do try to retain a kind of pragmatic libertarianism that is a recognition that my preferred politics isn’t always going to be broad consensus and it’s sensible to work opposing viewpoints as we have shared interests in civilization and America.

I am hugely affected by my proximity to international founders who adopted America because of the opportunities we have here that are unmatched elsewhere. Our market capitalism has given truly exceptional talent from places that suffer varying degrees of oligarchic, authoritarian and socialist systems.

It’s with this in mind that I’d like to ask American politicians but in particular the Democrats to please consider policy that allows us to remain a place where the best and brightest can rise and thrive. It’s good for all of us

My five basic policy asks are as follows

1) Stop taking aggressive, over broad interpretations of both criminal and civil statutes in regard to crypto. The SEC is trying to kill a nascent industry instead of shape and grow it. There are other first world countries taking different approaches. Japan seems to have adopted healthier ways. I’d like Gensler gone personally as I struggle to see this as anything but petty Wall Street protectionism.

2) Focus antitrust efforts on the industries where consolidation is harming Americans in structural ways like PBMs and agribusiness.

3) Retract the Biden EO on artificial intelligence and take an approach to akin to how we settled the encryption wars in the 90s. We don’t want to strangle a new industry as it is emerging just for the benefit of a few large incumbents and the fears of a few radicalism’s.

4) Stop discussing the ludicrous unrealized capital gains tax. It’s unconstitutional & structurally devastating to novel businesses. Only the rich will be able to afford to own a piece of a startup which will further limit social mobility.

5) We have got to find a way for companies to exit and IPO that isn’t this middle stagnant path of Microsoft’s regulatory capture corporate investment playbook. Markets need liquidity to function and the public deserves the chance to be rewarded.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1305 and Well Now I’m Scared

Things have taken a turn for the worse on the timelines. I’m not all that bothered by the feral internet, but I do occasionally find myself staring down the dark corridors of anonymous “holders of risqué opinions” and I wonder about my life choices.

I’ve written before about how I think our communication channels are where most of war gets waged now.

I can feel all the shifting crazies that come from an unstable media environment. Our endocrine systems are simply not built to metabolize this much information and noise. Signal is lost in the static.

I suspect a lot of rational voices will make the choice to bounce out of the moment simply to avoid the informational shrapnel. Alas these days it’s less of a metaphor. How quickly we forget that just weeks ago someone tried to kill a presidential candidate.

If rational people don’t want to engage. And given where we are with ridiculous hysterics over couch coitus I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t. Well you will be left to the hyenas. Millions have already retreated to the cozy web. As they reemerge it’s only a reminder of how bad things are online.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1303 and Toaster F*ckers

If you are someone with a gentle constitution who finds vulgar language or discussions of sexual appetites upsetting, this post won’t be for you.

I doubt I have readers like this as one of my most viral pieces was titled “dickriding” but just in case you’ve been warned. I’ll be discussing the toaster fucking problem today.

I’m not a big consumer of pornography nor do I enjoy most fetishes but I generally share the attitude that you shouldn’t yuck someone else’s yum. Millennials are a tolerant sort. Yet I wonder if it’s time for us to revisit philosopher Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance theory.

Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, introduced in his 1945 work The Open Society and Its Enemies, posits that unlimited tolerance can lead to the demise of tolerance itself. Popper argues that if a society tolerates intolerant ideologies without limits, those ideologies will eventually dominate and suppress tolerance. Therefore, to preserve a tolerant society, it must be intolerant of intolerance.

via PerplexityAI

I’ve have a lot of skepticism about how one executes on being intolerant of intolerance. It’s often illustrated with Nazis. Now there are many ideologies I find intolerable but as an American who believes in free speech I will fight for the right to be intolerant. As long as you aren’t trying to mess with my inviolable rights go ahead with your weird shit sexually, politically or otherwise.

Naturally this has yielded some people who go a lot further than you’d like. There is a Hacker News post that has come to be known as the “toaster fucker problem.” I’ll post it in whole so you can get the flavor of just how far people will go for their weird niche obsessions.

I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself.

I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends “I want to fuck a toaster” Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.

Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds “Toaster Fucker Support group” where he reads that he’s actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.

Apply this analogy to literally any insular bubble, it applies as equally to /r/thedonald as it does to the emaciated Che Guevara larpers that cry thinking about ringing their favourite pizza place.

Now you think surely internet fetishism has nothing useful to teach me. Surely this sort of thing wouldn’t bleed into serious spaces like politics or economics but after 2016 all bets are clearly off as to the seriousness of our political discourse.

Everyone is fully free to go to the absolute lunatic fringes of every issue because no matter how wild your beliefs you can find someone else online who shares it.

If you want to fuck a toaster not only will you find fellow fetishists but Rule 34 suggests there is probably pornography of it. Who could have guessed the consequences of 1987’s cartoon The Brave Little Toaster right?

Because totally regular people are no longer shamed for being into weird shit you can, and do, see totally regular people discussing weird shit.

It’s often hard to judges what real and what’s fake. A Twitter shit poaster went viral for suggesting that Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance fucked a couch. The memes are amazing.

It was was fact checked as false by the AP and other news organizations. The comedians will never let it go as hey these days who knows if the guy is a couch fucker. A popular Netflix cartoon called Bigmouth made horny tweens fucking a cushion a plot arc so maybe the millennial senator from Ohio might be too.

Now as much as I’m all for presenting all sides of an issue it’s very possible that we can take people at their words. We don’t need to ramp everything up to toaster fucking. It’s perfectly fine to discuss things on the merits without going to the edge of the metaphorical map of social propriety. So I guess I’ll be looking for a copy of Popper on the book shelf this weekend.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1300 and Close The Loop

The last few weeks or so of history happening has felt agonizingly long. Almost inescapably so. I first wrote about the concept of the long now on Day 326 in 2021 after being inspired by Epsilon Theory.

The pandemic made it harder to believe in the future because the present became a holding pattern. Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory calls this The Long Now.

The more we put off investing in a future the more the long now stretches on. We borrow against all the things that could build us a better tomorrow. And we fall back.

Being trapped in the long now never serves your own interests. Your priorities shouldn’t be tangled into the frozen fear of a worse tomorrow. Every day we have the chance to close the loop on something in our lives and bring the future we actually want a little closer to reality.

Having now written for thirteen hundred days in a row I have a sense of both my own progress but also a reminder of how long it takes to build something when the world is dragging at your attention at every turn.

Closing the loop in your life means not letting yourself be dragged from your priorities. Setting those priorities should be in your control no matter how much is happening. It doesn’t have to be bigger than your own life but you have more agency than you think.

Categories
Culture

Day 1287 and The Long Haul

Good things take time sounds like pablum.

Rome wasn’t built in a day”

Every time there is a boom cycle fools rush in. I don’t know why someone would expect that luck would be adequate to any large task. Luck is the default conditions to even get started.

Then you gotta get lucky a lot. Multiple times a year if you are aiming to lead any industry. And you have to keep doing it until one person who compounded so much effort and will that what looked like luck is simply habit and habit becomes process and process becomes results and results get sustained.

And yes decay sets in. And it gets harder. Every gain requires the energy that it requires. Leverage is often simply about being the one that makes it for the long haul. Maybe discretion is the better sort of valor but I’ve yet to meet a winner who was a coward.

Categories
Finance Startups

Day 1286 and Halfway There, Living 2024 On A Prayer

An estimated 50% of the global population is participating in elections across 60 countries. That includes as supra-national entities like the European Union holding major elections. Naturally this made anyone who has to do any type of planning anxious.  

Concerns about access to compute and adequate energy, overbearing and inconsistent regulatory regimes impacting exits, growth and liquidity events, and the post-ZIRP monetary policy driving up cost of capital have been in the foreground of startup communities.

I see this reflected in my H1 investments. Access to energy, access to compute, and decentralization of both compute & energy are directionally the major trends that I believe will matter over the next decade. 

CapEx concerns and hyperscaling may grip the Magnificent 7 and worry analysts at Goldman Sachs but I’d encourage students of economic history to look to Carlotta Perez and her theory of deployment in previous economic innovation cycles for a more nuanced take. I think simple reads of over-investment are for suckers. 

From where we stand, capital serves the founders who make things of real value. That takes time. Regular builders have simpler needs while they do it: the freedom to make what they want with readily accessible tools without interference. 

We originated #FreedomToCompute as a tagline that shows our values. Not only has it driven me deal flow, but the coalition of e/acc, crypto, and El Segundo hardware/deep tech autists even changed a political party’s platform.

I’ll admit that I was surprised by the Republican Party’s adoption of innovation in crypto, artificial intelligence, and space as a core policy plank. They must really be courting startups as a constituency but I’m happy to have as many as possible aligned with us.

Science and progress are values traditionally associated with liberalism’s left leaning parties, but it seems the axis of “the best is yet to come”  is a wide coalition. My heuristics have thusly been updated so we can remain up and to the right. 

Anna Gat’s Axis of Hope