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.
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.
Everyone has their entertainment and mine is makes me a little bit of a stereotype. I hate podcasts but do most of my chores while listening to Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast.
I was catching up today with an interview with equities analyst Tom Lee. My attention got caught and stuck on his description of Bitcoin.
“Yes, Bitcoin is unlike other asset classes because there is a cooperative value. You know, the people who contribute to the network benefit from it. And that’s different than any other asset class.”
Now I don’t think this is unique to Bitcoin. Cooperative value can be found in everything from nationalist politics to luxury handbag resale pricing. But I do this it’s important to have cooperative values be baked into a network for it accrue value.
We’ve traditionally mitigated concerns about market cooperation through clear property rights and legal protections. We’d backed up those claims with things as abstract as a monarch. We’ve evolved to it to the slightly more concrete full faith of the United States and Byzantine bodies of securities law. Fiduciary duty and all that.
But as we become less inclined to trust that the buck does in fact stop “anywhere” we are looking for ways to mitigate that risk. How to operate in a world without trust? You develop trustless protocols. Humans have plenty of intuitions about trust and many these intuitions struggle without a clear person with authority to act.
So I ask if we are heading into a “headless” age?
As distrust in institutional power struggles we are seeking out new ways to continue the business of life and civilization even if a high trust society is in question.
You could even argue that we’ve got headless political parties as the Democrats and Republicans both struggle with defacto heads nobody particular trusts. I don’t know if we can live in a headless democracy. Deciding who is a citizen is a very different matter than deciding who is a shareholder.
The winding roads of spiritual practice often cross paths with the more practical minded subcultures interested in practicalities.
Doing a thing can be more enjoyable than documenting a thing but documenting turns out to be quite helpful in helping others learn to do things.
As we knit together our individual experiences our capacity to measure and systematize improves which in turn scales access if you are inclined to experiment. Getting a look at more than our personal n of 1 enables us to practice kitchen table science in areas prone being illegible or inscrutable.
I believe we are accelerating a number of types of revivalism thanks to the network effects of the internet colliding with religious and spiritual traditions.
Handing people what was once hidden knowledge naturally makes some people skeptical. We’ve gone from sharing breathing practices to documenting achieving spiritual ecstasy.
I’d like to maintain some degree of optimism about, well, everything. And yet I am struggling to maintain attitude control.
I like a little joke about navigating in space because I’m the sort of dork who enjoys science fiction books with lengthy digressions about spin and 3 axis stabilization.
But equally I do think it’s important to keep your chin up. Or nose up. It depends on whether you are piloting your emotions or a some other type of craft. It’s going to be forced metaphor post.
There is no need to crash yourself by getting disoriented navigating a situation in which you have some coordinates. It’s possible to calculate what’s going on and get yourself going in right the direction.
I am trying to do so by articulation, which yes is meant to be read as navigation joke, but is really just another goofy way of saying that writing helps me straight myself out.
So I am doing my best to keep my chin up emotionally and keep navigating what’s in front of me. It’s certainly better than a crash.
I spent my day at a policy organization’s gathering. I feel obligation to become as much a part of the civics process as I can. If we intend to have a working democracy it America it requires citizens who participate in an informed way.
Now cynics might say regular people don’t terribly like being bothered with the hard questions of self government. I’d say that obligates one even more to be a part of a civic polity that treats its participants with the dignity to be capable of self government.
The aspiration may never be fully met but if you cannot find a way to do that within the boundaries of civilization generally you get run out of town. Americans is the product of a lot of people who got run out of town. It shouldn’t surprise us that sometimes raw power rears its ugly head.
So much of my education was dedicated to participating in a Western canon of civilization. The portions of it that privileged anything all novel or even recent barely made a dent in my formal education. It did however spend a lot of time on the civics of Athens, Rome and the Protestant Reformation. And those are all stories of who should govern and on what authority.
Anytime there is a dislocation in the expectations between those who govern and the population it has to be worked out.
The western journey has been one of citizenship. If we cannot self govern in ways others agree to abide by we have lost quite a bit of ground in that quest. And history doesn’t have much positive to say about demagoguery or Vox populi. Anyways good luck out there this election season.
Despite the record breaking number of travelers, I had a pleasant United flight. The westward flights can be tricky for sleep as it’s not an overnight.
The logistics of this worked out as I slept 6 hours before a 4am wake up for the positioning flight and then on my flat lay got nearly a very decent four plus hours.
Munich to Houston is 10 hours & I slept well
My RHR was pretty high from the stress of flying but I was quite impressed that I got restorative sleep and REM. Those flat lays on Polaris really are worth it.
Once I landed in Houston I had a short layover where I was lucky enough to enjoy a sit down meal in the Polaris Lounge. I only wish I’d had more time to enjoy it but clearing customs, going back through security and rechecking luggage takes time.
United Polaris Lounge menu in Houston
After all this incredibly pleasant travel there has to be something right? I had a half mile walk to the E gates for my Austin flight. Americans don’t queue well so I arrived at the beginning of boarding. The entire plane boarded only for us to realize we had a serious mechanical issue.
We then deplaned and walked from the end of E gates to the very end of the C gates (about 22 minutes as the New Yorker walks and a mile and a half) to get to the new plane.
The crew was in danger of timing out while catering needed to do a supply for a down line flight. Someone’s executive decision worked in our favor as we got into the air without getting ice for whoever had the airplane next.
What is a two hour drive turned into a five hour ordeal but I made it in one piece and passed out much later than I intended after a full twenty four hours in transit.
Finally asleep at my hotel in Austin after a 4 hour mechanical failure & airplane change for a 30 minute fly time
The conference coincided with the annual Coincenter dinner which is an industry wide non profit effort to work towards policy goals for decentralized computing like Bitcoin & Ethereum and the wider cryptocurrency.
Our mission is to defend the rights of individuals to build and use free and open cryptocurrency networks: the right to write and publish code – to read and to run it. The right to assemble into peer-to-peer networks. And the right to do all this privately.
In that vein, I’ll be discussing the intersection of artificial intelligence as the #FreedomToCompute at Consensus as this is THE issue for everyone who uses compute as a tool to solve problems.
It’s an opportunity to discuss the big public goals around the future of machine money and machine intelligence.
I’d argue this includes the entire software industry and by default anyone who is reading this post. Our most important rights will be decided by how we handle policy on these issues. Math is leverage.
Crypto has the basic problems facing artificial intelligence. Both spaces rely on open, available and trustless compute. Both are under intense scrutiny and face significant regulatory capture risks.
It’s never been a better time to get involved in these topics. We need open protocols and interoperability standards far more than we need fretting about safetyism and hysterics about science fiction.
Doom solves no problems but software does. We need safe harbors and policy sandboxes so we can continue to nurture algorithmic innovation for us all.
We achieve consensus through open networked & decentralized systems of governance and value. A trustless system reaches consensus we all agree upon through the mathematical verification of compute. Decentralized collaborative approaches are the path to alignment.
The further we get from truth as a set of shared experience we agree upon as humans, the more crucial a trustless future becomes.
AI and crypto offer us transparent solutions to agreement. Machine intelligence needs machine money and machine governance.
Humans beings are not truth seeking animals. We are social animals. We decide the boundaries of culture together. Rationality is an aspiration resting atop faulty sensors and emotional baggage.
But we can reach a consensus. Mathematics gives us the tools to differentiate between thing and not thing. We can encode quite a bit into binary.
We can seek to know things impartially. From there we share our experience with others. We measure and compare. Trial and error is collaborative. To be able to come to an agreement on a shared truth is the whole goal.
To be able to collaborate widely and through shared and mutually agreed upon standards remains the ambition of civilization. Coordination unlocks progress.
With artificial intelligence we can extend out the realm of what we know. Networking together all our emotionally faulty sensors, conflicting pieces of cultural & emotional knowledge together reveals bigger things.
If, from that networked reality, we are then able to scale the abstract business of solving specific and concrete problems all the better.
Building within reality requires us to agree on an acceptable consensus. We can verify positions and align incentives together. The alignment is all of us coming to a consensus on how we allocate our attention, willpower, and resources.
We reach for technological progress through alignment which is organized through the network consensus layers of governance and value.
The freedom to compute is essential to alignment. In a trustless world, we are able to reach consensus we can all verify.
I love cotton. In my Waldorf third grade, our year long class project was to plant, grow, harvest, gin, card, spin & dye cotton. Along with a similar wool project, this childhood experience instilled a love of fibers, fabrics & textiles in me.
The Agriculture Marketing Service of the USDA oversees efforts to improve the position of various commodities produced in America. Other campaigns include Got Milk, Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner, and Pork: The Other White Meat
We work to make cotton the best it can be through research, textile innovations (like water- and wind-resistant cotton apparel and moisture-wicking, wrinkle- and stain-resistant cotton), and sustainable advancements like finding new uses for cotton and cotton byproducts, reducing land and water usage, and modernizing agricultural processes.
We make sure you know about all of cotton’s amazing benefits through advertising, retail and influencer collaborations.
You might be annoyed to find that American cotton growers are obligated to pay into a government marketing program which underwrites social media influencers.
Cotton is the most popular natural fiber in the world with 25 million tons a year produced so it’s perhaps not unexpected American has an incentive to promote it as one of our commodities.
Cotton is crucial natural fiber which means it has its share of a controversies as commodity for things like its water & pesticide use and genetic engineering to withstand the herbicide glyphosate.
In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel synthesizes groundbreaking research from archaeology, economics, and science to reveal a surprising history. The cloth business spread the alphabet and arithmetic, propelled chemical research, and taught people to think in binary code.
This thesis suggests to me that fashion bitches are one of the original tribes of technology brothers. To care this much about the feature sets of a base layer clearly marks us as nerds. So I’ll finish this up with a personal anecdote.
I am furious at a brand of upper market cotton basics called Splendid. I’ve been buying the same long sleeve classic tee-shirt from them for at least a decade. It claims to be a 50% blend of Pima cotton and Modal. Both are considered premium fabrics with long fibers. Modal is a semi-synthetic developed in Japan made from beech trees. There are many grades of both fibers Splendid could source and in the past I’ve found the tee to wear extremely well. I’ve got a half dozen that never pilled, held its color & shape, and gave me years of wear.
Last month I bought three new Splendid tees as I becoming fearful of the downward trend in quality of manufactured goods. I’ve been trying to stock up on basics I’ve relied on in the past. Alas it would seem my most reliable shirt in my favorite fabrics has come to an ignoble end.
Splendid no longer manufactures with premium extra long cotton fibers as a new shirt pilled & caught onto other fibers in my tee shirt drawer.
I am taking the Connections course run by Joe Hudson’s Art of Accomplishment. I was introduced to the approach through Johnny Miller’s Nervous System Mastery course. I was lucky enough that be able to participate in one of Joe’s live coaching sessions I was so inspired by the work I saw I committed to a longer course of study.
The Connections curriculum takes you through an approach whose acronym can be shortened to VIEW.
Today’s sessions was on impartiality. Impartiality is owning what you want without imposing it on yourself or others. It’s harder than it sounds discovering an agenda for yourself and others.
With their exercises and a partner you find your own assumptions and defensive thinking in short order
