The plane began its descent and the great, beautiful blue of Lake Ontario came into the frame of my window. Normally I spend every flight locked in my head. Reading on my Kindle or spamming runs of Slay the Spire. Not on May 8th, 2024. I felt compelled to look out the window and marvel at the beauty of the lake. It was part of a sunny and sweet welcome home.

A month earlier, I had grabbed drinks with my friend Andrew. He was visiting from Columbus. We met at Scholz Garten, my favorite German beer garden in Austin. My paper on New York’s disastrous decision to shutter Indian Point nuclear power plant was in the final stages of editing and top of mind. Over pints of pilsner, Andrew and I discussed nuclear power, energy policy, and Bitcoin mining. We talked about the importance of fresh water and the greater Rochester area as a place of religious and spiritual significance—from Mormonism to Spiritualism and the Universal Friend.

Even after I landed, I felt that the lakes were calling to me. I walked along the Genesee river and thought about investments prior generations made that continue to pay dividends in our present. The decisions to build Ginna, Fitzpatrick, and Nine Mile Point nuclear plants and the hydroelectric plants that provide the western New York region with an immense amount of no-marginal-carbon, high capacity factor power.

What transformative decisions are civic leaders in Rochester making today that will be paying dividends 50 or more years in the future?

I was in Rochester to visit my friends before heading to NYC and Rhode Island. In NYC, I was giving a short talk to friends of the Roots of Progress Institute. In Rhode Island, I was presenting on a chapter that I had written for a policy handbook for the Club for Growth Foundation.

Spring had sprung in Rochester and the vibes were immaculate. After winter there’s always anticipation in the air. My homies were down to clown. We were playing Kings to low key pregame going to our favorite neighborhood bar. One of our friends was sent an image of the aurora borealis above Lake Ontario. We called them and they told us to get to the lake as soon as possible. We coordinated designated drivers, invited more friends, and sent it. The lake called.

I didn’t have any plans to see the aurora borealis in my life. And instead of planning a trip to see it, it happened to come to Rochester while I was visiting. It was a magical welcome home. I left to go on my DC-less east coast policy tour but was excited to return to Rochester and spend more time walking along the Genesee and playing euchre with my friends at Lux.

I ended up spending several weeks in Rochester last summer. I had always aspired to split time between Austin and Rochester—escaping the summer Texas heat to enjoy Rochester’s idyllic summers. During my final visit, my friends told me that there was a lower unit in a duplex opening up in our favorite neighborhood. They encouraged me to at least check it out and consider moving back.

I visited the apartment, got a lease from the land lord, and began to think hard about moving back to Rochester. At the beginning of the next week, before I left to return to Austin, I signed the lease.

The rest of the summer was a whirlwind. I threw a good bye party in Austin and tried to make the most out of my final weeks living there. My time in Austin was a fun, strange, challenging, and informative time of my life. A weird chapter that will always have me consider moving back. Austin wasn’t home but I found my people there. One could say that I sought and found my tribe.

I started writing to this email list when I wrote my book Lead The Future: Strategies & Systems for Emerging Leaders. It formally became Seeking Tribe in mid 2020, as I sought to keep in touch through the pandemic and process an onslaught of uncertainty and novel information. I looked through my email and saw how many direct replies I received to those early emails. Those early replies meant a lot. Thank you to everyone who has ever reached out after reading one of my posts.

I continued writing when I moved to Austin. When I first got there, I was doubling down on what had brought me out there. I was a poaster. I kept posting and kept meeting new people and finding opportunities. And then I stopped. The costs of posting regularly, both on X and on my own newsletter, started to feel too high. I wasn’t writing for the love of it. I still had a lot of ideas but they mostly died quiet deaths over drinks with close friends, or in a half-baked tweet with 100 views.

I don’t want to promise too much in this newsletter but I need to rip the bandaid off and start publishing for myself again. There’s a lot that I’ve been thinking about that I want to share with you. It has been a year since my chance encounter with the aurora borealis at Lake Ontario. I now live on the same street as some of my favorite people in the world, and several of my other best friends live within a 20 minute walk.

I’m back home and I’m back in your inbox.

Please reply to this email. I want to get back to the roots of this newsletter. I’d love to catch up and hear how you’re doing.

Your Friend,
Grant

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Playing The Hits (My Most-Read Posts)

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This piece was partially prompted by ’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto. But also a more general critique of a lot of writing in the adjacent Progress Studies idea space—a world that I’m currently swimming in as part of my Roots of Progress fellowship. All critiques are also directed at myself, I could do a better job of writing in a way which appeals to a broader audience. Hopefully this post is a step in the right direction.

Hi Friends,

My best friends do not aspire to found billion dollar companies or perfect the application of a new technology and forever change the course of history. They have only ever thought about laws and regulations when confronted by a harsh reality in their personal lives. Red and blue lights dancing in their rear-view mirror. A letter from a busybody telling them that the new shed they built in their backyard is illegal. A vision of progress which describes a future of artificial general intelligence, cyborg immortality, and asteroid mining is alien to them.

And alienating.

Techno-optimists tend to talk in terms which inspire an existing and relatively small, yet powerful, base. But progress is not only for transhumanists who live in cities and spend their days and nights planning to colonize Mars. A better world is one where humans with a diverse set of preferences have greater opportunity to meet their needs and realize their dreams.

If techno-optimists build their vision for the future, how is life going to get better for people who aspire to stay in their hometown or small city?

Calls for technological progress and economic growth are abstract and only mean something to people to the extent that they impact their lives directly.

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My friends (and I) want to get paid more. We want to be able to purchase a house before we’re fifty years old, or afford a two bedroom in our favorite neighborhood. We want to date someone who is attractive and shares our life aspirations. We want to fall in love and get married. We want to not stress about filling up our gas tank, going to the doctor, or taking a pet to the vet. We want to have a family and invite our friends and their families over to grill, chill, and eat burgers.

These are the problems that most people care about in their lives. They’re not worried that they won’t get to live to be 200 years old. They’re more worried about their monthly utility bill than ensuring that 50% of cars are electric vehicles by 2030. People who care about progress, who have seemingly-personal beefs with state and federal bureaucracies, need to speak to the aspirations of people who do not read the same blogs as them, and often don’t read blogs at all. Different people want to live different lives. There is not a universal vision for the future and there never will be.

The best future is a world where those who feel compelled to solve difficult technical problems and build products and companies have more opportunity to experiment and realize their visions. A future where the United States has expanded our industrial base, where companies hire and train people to produce goods in the world of atoms. A future where when you walk downtown in any major city, let alone a megalopolis, you feel compelled to stop and count the cranes that are building new condos, apartments, and commercial spaces. A future where energy is so cheap and reliable that new machines and technologies banish persistent problems to the past. In the same way that those in developed countries do not fear famine, they will no longer worry about a sustained drought, heat waves, or access to organic fresh produce. Every American who wants a pod—perhaps even a studio—in New York City, Chicago, Dallas, or Los Angeles will be able to afford one.

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The best future is a world where those who feel loyalty to their hometown and community have the opportunity to stay and prosper. With continued innovation and concentrated political will, the costs of necessities will fall and make the simple life even cheaper than it is today. More people will be able to choose to live and prosper in lower productivity towns and villages, without forgoing necessities or living paycheck to paycheck. The poor may not be able to afford the latest GPU or state-of-the-art electric vehicle at release but prices will continue to fall and they will get access to these goods, or even better ones in a few years. They will also be able to afford to have a small house or apartment, two children—hopefully more—in relative economic security. With broader prosperity, social infrastructure that collapsed and left a vacuum ‘filled’ by social media and parasocial relationships will be rebuilt one little league game and barbecue at a time. Movies from the 90s will make sense again—rather than portraying a more social, earnest, and physically healthy past of the pre-smartphone era.

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The best future is one that enables these good futures and many others all at the same time.

The future we should imagine and share is not all interplanetary spaceships, robots, and chaotic dynamism. That’s a part of it but it’s not the whole story. It will also be a world of broader prosperity and opportunity that's fueled by positive advancements in technology and policy. A world where there are many more ways for people to afford to live and to thrive. True progress will not only allow people to live in big cities and build spaceships but make it easier for people to buy a house in their home town and build a dynasty.

Great recent works from my friends:

• Meet Meredith Angwin, the grandmother changing the energy industry by

• Infrastructure is the Concealed Wiring of Our Civilization by Jeremy Côté

• Banished Heroes by

More from me:

• Leave Your Phone At Home

• Timeline Violence

• Learn to Code is the New Learn to Code

Thanks for taking the time to read this, I would love it if you left a comment.

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Your Friend,
Grant

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Hi Friends,

I decided to spend five years in undergrad and, as you might expect, I was broke. It was a brisk February in gray Rochester. Spring break in my dark attic room—my lair, as I called it—it was too much. Outside, the snow was piled up. Two feet high. I put on my boots, layered up under my ski jacket, wrapped my scarf around my face and neck, and left just enough of a gap to see where I was walking. 

In my iconic blue LL Bean backpack, I carried six things: two black pilot g2 pens, a notebook, wallet, and a paperback copy of The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Where I was going, I didn’t need my phone. 

Who would need to reach me? Everyone in my life was on a beach somewhere or bundled up at home wishing they were.

A large black coffee, two sausage egg and cheese McMuffins—back when they were available all day long. $6.48, tax included. This was the golden era of the golden arches. After I had devoured my McMuffins, I looked away from the silent screen streaming CNN and opened my book. I had hate-watched enough 2017 political news for one day. 

My pen traced along under Taleb’s words, cutting off the margins and focusing my attention. As I turned each page, doubt began to creep in. Uncertainty. What do I know to be true? How do I know if it’s true? 

It was time for a refill. Two large coffees may have been a bit excessive but it was miserable outside and I was inspecting the foundation of my epistemology. I wrote quote after quote in my notebook. A new perspective that I had never considered. An earthquake ripped through the palace in my mind, and the facade started to crumble.

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I didn’t feel the need to tweet about it. I didn’t send a wide-eyed, over caffeinated snapchat selfie to my friends. My mind had the space to wrestle with the idea of ‘Fragilistas’ or ‘the limits of Gaussian statistics’. Every uncomfortable thought was attacked head on. There was nowhere to run for a moment’s reprieve.

Am I an intellectual-yet-idiot, as Taleb calls them? 

The modern world began to appear in my mind as but a baby, vulnerable to innumerable threats and the growing pains we all suffer. Social security. The global financial system. The grid. What systems that we take for granted are not truly time-tested, “lindy” but fragile?

My own hubris, the hubris of modernity was laid bare. Was the world I grew up in its own kind of bubble?  Maybe the status quo was always destined to end. People said that’s what they wanted and perhaps later they would say: “Oh no, not like that!”

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After hours of contemplation and scribbling ideas in my notebook, I decided it was time to trudge home through the frigid darkness. My roommates and I stood in the kitchen, our preferred place to congregate for no good reason. They tolerated my ramblings about statistics I didn’t understand. Ideas careening through my skull, forcing their way out into the air.

Later, I turned my phone back on. A few snapchat selfies from friends and a beautiful girl I had gone on a date with. Spam in my email. No texts. I hadn’t missed anything of consequence. 

The next day I ordered the same thing, and spent my day the same way. It was not the ideal spring break but it was the one I needed. A great book can change your life. The Black Swan certainly changed my mind. This moment was just the beginning of something bigger—a reorientation that would leave me humbled and psychologically prepared for a future distinct from the world I had grown up in.

Our world of infinite feeds, blue light screens, and in-your-ear audio is noisy. We don’t realize how much it weighs on our subconscious and distracts us from our path. It is easy to stop reading when you get uncomfortable and return to the sweet retreat of your preferred digital sedative. It’s often only a few swipes and taps away. However, if you want the space to wrestle with uncomfortable ideas, to risk the terrible burden of a fundamental reorientation in the world, to turn down the volume, you only have to make a simple choice, an easy choice. Leave your phone at home and go to McDonald’s.

Great recent works from my friends:

• Swim by for (non-fiction)

• Technocapital Is Eating My Brains by for (yes-and response to Marc Andreessen’s The Techo-Optimist Manifesto )

• Men, trash, and flower cards by for (short fiction)

More from me:

• Timeline Violence

• I Was Wrong: Simple Is Easy

• The Dead Internet Prophecy

Thank for taking the time to read this. I would love to hear what you thought.

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Your Friend,
Grant

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Hi Friends,

There is only one word to describe the X (formerly Twitter) timeline these days: barbaric.

X is a unique platform on the internet. Even if the platform was never worth the 44 billion dollar price tag, it was necessary for someone to buy it and set it on a better trajectory. When Elon first made his bid to purchase Twitter, I was optimistic. Twitter appeared to be dying a slow death. The censorship of the platform under prior management was egregious and needed to end. Not only did it inadvertently fuel conspiracies but, according to the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court, it violated Americans’ first amendment rights.

There is a clear need for a social media platform that is firmly aligned with free expression and has users with a broad range of perspectives. Every Twitter clone has failed to capture a significant share of its user base. While I understand that X is a global company, America needs a public square to figure out our differences, whether you think it’s a ‘marketplace of ideas’ or an ‘information war’. If we cannot speak freely and argue with one another, more people will be radicalized and come to believe that violence is an acceptable answer.

Beyond free expression, X is a platform where people connect for all sorts of positive-sum adventures. Marriages have started from a humble DM. Business partners connect on the timeline. People make friends with like-minded and like-vibed people all throughout the world. My social life in Austin is downstream of innumerable friendships made through Twitter. Sorry for calling it Twitter but the alternative ”...friendships made through X '' sounds terrible. Unless the goal is to make it difficult to talk about, the rebrand to X is bad.

No one wants to say “I’m a content creator on X.”

You’re a what? Does your family know you’re doing that?

It makes sense to say “He’s one of my Twitter friends but we’ve known each other for years.” It doesn’t make sense to say “He’s one of my X friends but we’ve known each other for years.” Well, it may make sense as a stand alone sentence, but the response may be, “Why aren’t you friends anymore?” rather than “So you’re sure he’s like a normal person? You’re not afraid to go meet him for a drink?” 

Okay the rebrand is bad, but it’s not why I’m concerned about the platform. It’s not the platform name, it’s the violence.

For those who do not know, every day on X there is a new ‘discourse’ or trending topic. If you don’t follow accounts that are plugged into the discourse, you may only see the faintest echoes of it on your feed. But a significant portion of active users will see the daily discourse rip across their timeline.  Sometimes it’s political. But usually it’s about dating, sex, or some viral clip that first appeared on TikTok.

Last week, the discourse was firmly focused on the topic of murder and violent crime. There were a string of violent murders that happened in cities throughout the United States. If you’re thinking, “Yeah, and what makes that newsworthy? There will be brutal murders in the United States this week too,” no one can argue with that. But no one person decides what trends, it doesn’t have to be rational. The discourse is an emergent product of the swarm.

On October 1st, Josh Kruger, a journalist and LGBT activist was murdered in his home in Philadelphia. Two days prior to that, he had posted, “The Dilbert dude is like Nostradamus. Look at this prediction from 2020. Wow. Eerie.” in reference to a post made by Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, “If Biden is elected, there’s a good chance that you will be dead within the year.” Adams’ tweet was from July 1, 2020 and was intended to use fear to encourage people to vote for Trump. Adams believed that under Biden’s leadership America would be soft on violence and that would lead to a higher homicide rate. Kruger’s post may have initially had limited reach. However, it later went viral once users found out that he had been murdered shortly after making his post.

The next day, Ryan Carson, a poet and social justice activist was stabbed to death on the sidewalk in Brooklyn in front of his girlfriend. The right wing swarm on X parsed this as a pattern that was reduced to “men who advocate for weak on crime policies became the victims of their bad ideas.” The quality of the discussion was much worse than that. People were celebrating their deaths. Others were writing apologia for murderers, as if the real harm was that two more violent criminals would be sent to prison. Others were being attacked for normal opinions like “dancing on graves is bad” and “murderers need to be removed from polite society.”

And it only got worse. The murder of Ryan Carson was recorded on video and released. The video was posted and reposted by thousands and thousands of accounts on X. The discourse accelerated. It became clear to everyone—at least everyone who hasn’t already lost their mind—that X is not only an aggregator of the worst people you’ve never met but is also actively breaking people’s brains.

I believe that part of the reason for this discourse going so viral, and in the worst way, was the implementation of direct monetization for views. Premium subscribers on X can now receive direct cash payments for the views that their posts receive. This change allows poasters who were otherwise unsuccessful in monetizing their posting addiction to collect a check for no additional work. This created a ‘meta game’ where, even more so than before, large accounts are incentivized to post the most inflammatory and engaging content.

As I put it in a tweet, “ People used to have to figure out how to monetize their followings, now they just post videos of literal murder and collect a check.”

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If X wants to improve the quality of the content on its platform, these payments should no longer be offered through this mechanism. X should continue to support its creators financially but do so through a program that is more intentional and judicious. Without a change in policy, I believe that the quality of the discourse will come to reflect the most inflammatory takes of X’s most deranged posters. There are people who should be compensated for their content even if they’re antagonistic and play similar games, but the current policy unnecessarily supercharges the outrage machine. Part of a solution could be to give premium users one monthly ‘free’ paid subscription to a content creator of their choosing, as Twitch offers for Prime subscribers.

There’s many ways to improve the platform and encourage users to pay for the premium version. If you want people to purchase your product, offer them features that they want. Power users want fleets. They want a search function that works. If you want them to spend more time on the platform, implement end-to-end encryption for direct messages so they have less of a reason to switch over to Signal or iMessage for texts. They may even encourage their friends to join and subscribe. Many existing power users are paying third-party services to automate their posts, help them to schedule content, and delete their low-performing posts. Why doesn’t X either build these functionalities into the premium offering or acquire one of these companies? It’s clear that users want these features and are willing to pay for them.

If there are any product managers at X who want to conduct user-interviews, I know a lot of people who may be worth interviewing.

I do not want to see any more murder videos on the timeline. I don’t think they should be banned—as they can be critical to news stories—but existing user affordances, combined with the current incentives, are making the timeline a miserable place. At a minimum, users who are uploading these videos should be prompted with “does this video depict violence, sex, or other content that may be…” and be encouraged to check a box that will place a warning on the content. Community Notes could likewise be granted the authority to add these warnings to content and display them for users who want them.  If users do not want to see any warnings on images or videos, let them opt out with a single click in settings. The content does not need to be downranked or otherwise punished. There are solutions to these issues that give users more choice over the quality of their experience without them having to unfollow most large accounts and actively mute words.

For example, the addition of Community Notes has been a game changer for the platform. It is a brilliant, non-coercive solution to the problem of misinformation on the internet. People whose primary motivation is to censor and control the flow of information on the internet would have never considered that it could work. But since the team at X is genuinely interested in building the best platform for sharing ideas, they developed and shipped this elegant solution. There are similar solutions to empower users to deal with unnecessary timeline violence.

For now, I plan to take a hiatus from X. There’s plenty for me to focus my time and attention on elsewhere. Maybe I could log back in and just unfollow and mute 100 accounts and my experience would be fine. But right now feels like a good time to log off, to remember that no one needs to be plugged into the hive mind.

You do not need to watch the murder videos. You can log off. You can choose to read the news with intention, or avoid the news altogether. You can choose to prioritize your local reality instead of flagellating yourself with a bombardment of psychic horrors.

If that feels like you’re turning away from the world, it doesn’t have to. Instead, you can choose to take concrete action to help solve the problems that you care about. Donate. Volunteer. Build. It is much more helpful to take intentional positive action than to opt into collective suffering.

Your Friend,
Grant

This is my first post as part of the Write of Passage course. It has been an excellent experience so far. There’s been no shortage of support and feedback from the other members of my cohort. It is a great opportunity for me to improve the quality of my writing and build the habits I need to make the most of my talents.

Please consider sharing this post directly with a person who you think may appreciate it, particularly if they’re a product manager at X.

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Hi Friends,

A bit over 24 hours ago, I was wrong on the internet. One of my Twitter friends, ‘the booty warrior’, posted “Y’all are going to hate to hear this, but it’s actually easy to improve your life.” I replied, “Simple but not necessarily easy." She doubled down, “Simple = easy.” I changed my mind. She’s right. Simple is easy.

The gap between easy and simple doesn’t exist and is filled with excuses and cope.

There are no shortage of good or fun habits that we believe would improve our lives. For example, regular zone 2 cardio helps to improve and sustain your VO2 max—one of the best measurements of health, particularly in the elderly. This habit can be the difference between independence and dependence as you age. “…the study by Lee et al. showed reduced mortality from all-cause (30%) and cardiovascular disease (45%) from 5- to 10-min runs per day.” (Strasser, Burtscher—pubmed pdf)

You now know this information. I know this information. There is a $200 stationary bike that purchased off of Amazon ($183.99) in my room. I have not used this bike in a month. If you asked me why I haven’t used it, I could make up a story to explain my behavior. The entire explanation would be cope. It would be both simple and easy for me to spend 20-30 minutes on the bike in the morning.

Get out of bed. Put on shoes. Sit on bike. Pedal. Not only would my future self thank me but zone 2 training improves the efficiency of mitochondria (metabolism), improves insulin sensitivity, and simply feels good. This would be a trivial habit to develop and it would improve my life. Simple is easy.

A big beautiful fortress

When I first replied to my friend, I felt it was important to make the distinction between simple and easy. There was a time in my early 20s when I thought everything was easy. You learn about something. You do it. You win. You learn about something new. You do that. You keep winning. Momentum carries you forward. Easy.

My perception has changed as I’ve gotten older and struggled with new challenges. Tasks that I used to consider easy started to be reframed as ‘simple but…’ A mental prison was built one excuse at a time, as I half-heartedly tried to build or maintain good habits. “I can’t today, I have plans with <friend>. I can’t today, I am stressed about paying my rent. I can’t today, I need to prioritize my job search. I need to focus on strength because I’m getting weak [doesn’t go to the gym after using this excuse]. It’s 107 degrees out. I’ll wait until the weekend when I have more time.” These notions and excuses begin to weigh you down and keep you from taking intentional, easy actions that will get you where you want to go.

Your own mental prison may be visible to you now. Perhaps it’s just a few bricks that you skip over on your way to the gym at 5 a.m., or as you turn your lights off and read your Kindle for 30 minutes before bed. Not much of a prison.

Or it may be an elaborate fortress that you have meticulously constructed over years or decades. As you read this, you’re not only wherever you are in the physical world but also sitting in a metaphorical high tower, surrounded by defenses that could deter any advancing army. Instead of trying to breach the walls of your fortress, an army would simply blockade you. Your reserves dwindle and, as you and your people begin to feel the pangs of hunger, you surrender. There is no army. There is no fortress. There is no ‘King’s guard’. There is no cake. You can walk out of the fortress right now. Publish a blog to your Substack. Meditate for 10 minutes. Call your Grandma. The gap between easy and simple has collapsed. Simple is easy.

What if it’s even easier [for you] than you think?

People are bad at estimating how difficult something will be. It is often not even useful to think about difficulty without first trying something. When you first try anything, you are unlikely to be great at it. In domains with high skill capacity (where the best ‘player’ is orders of magnitude better than the worst player, ie. basketball), even the greatest players of all time started out terrible in comparison to where they ended up. You cannot judge your ability to do something well by your success on the first attempt.

People are bad at estimating their rate of improvement compared to others. I’ve been writing online for awhile. Am I good at writing? I don’t know. Am I better than someone else who had spent a similar amount of time, ie. am I talented? I have no idea. I do not know how I would try to argue one way or another.

These questions are kind of ridiculous but people do try to make judgements about their performance in a similar way. They view something as hard when they’re just a beginner. Instead of viewing yourself as ungifted or struggling, it would be just as reasonable to believe that you’re 10 or 10,000 reps away from greatness. It may not be true but it’s a good reason to simply do another rep.

My friends like to play board games. If your friends like to play board games, you might be familiar with the feeling in your neck and shoulders when they say “Let’s play a game.Oh you’ll love Dominion. It’s easy and a ton of fun. I’ll explain it to you.” If you’re lucky, your friend will instead say, “Oh you’ll love Dominion. It’s easy and a ton of fun. Let’s just watch the Rules Girl video. It’s short and great.” Either way, you’re preparing your ego to get thrashed by your friends. The game sounds complicated as hell. It’s not simple. It’s not easy. It’s not fun.

Maybe the first game that’s true, unless you are blessed with the real and blessed phenomenon of beginner’s luck. But if you play two games of Dominion, you will likely come to an undeniable realization. It was nothing to be stressed about. It’s a fun game to play with your friends. Dominion is simple. Dominion is easy. Simple is easy.

When inaction becomes hard

When I talk about doing cardio, I do not talk about going for a run. Despite running cross country and track for a few seasons in middle school and high school, it has not been my preferred form of cardio for a decade.

Running in the grass or a long trail in the woods is great. The feeling of a cool breeze on your sweaty forehead. A deep sleep after carb-loading to prepare for your next distance run. I could get addicted to it all over again. I was never serious about training outside of the season but I did get into it after a few reps.

I have friends who never stopped running. One of my best friends needs to run. If she doesn’t get to run for several days, she is miserable. The same activity that others would describe as hard is a critical part of her routine. For her, not running is harder than running.

The same may be true for you. If you start running, you may never look back. If you start learning songs on the ukulele, you may never stop. If you stop drinking soda, you may never enjoy it again. You may not even have your own ideas about an activity being hard. Or even if you struggled to start or stop a habit, it may be because you told yourself it wasn’t easy. But you do know that it’s simple. Buy a ukulele. Figure out how to tune it (dozens of apps and YouTube videos). Learn how to play one song. Practice it. Learn another song. Practice it. With four chords, you can play dozens of songs. What other skills and habits could you pick up with a bit of intentional effort? Simple is easy.

Simplify, simplify, simplify

Whatever you want to do, you can at least try. There’s no reason to delay action any longer. Most of the things that you want to do are well within your capabilities. If you’re not doing something, it may not be a real priority. Maybe you’re stuck in a pattern of wanting to be someone who wants to do a particular thing. You like the idea of being someone who reads. You don’t read. No one else can figure that out for you. You’ll have to look around and see if that’s part of the structure you’ve built around yourself.

If you know you want to do something, make it simple for yourself. If it helps write your own little sentence explaining the basic steps. We’re going to read 15 minutes before bed tonight.

How to read before bed:

Set alarm. Brush teeth. Floss teeth. Put on pajamas. Grab Kindle. Turn off light. Grab Kindle. Open book you plan to read. Read until you get sleepy.

It may feel condescending to write this out but there’s many traps people set for themselves. That’s why I used this example which is near and dear to my heart.

How to not read before bed:

Set alarm on phone. Check Twitter. Check Email. Check Twitter. Brush teeth. Floss teeth. Put on pajamas. Grab Kindle. Put Kindle on bed. Grab laptop. Put laptop on bed. Turn off light. Open laptop. Check Twitter. Open YouTube. Watch a 1v1 between the best two players in Age of Empires 2. Go to sleep.

There’s a clear failure mode here. There’s a few potential solutions to simplify this for myself: Put laptop in work bag. Use non-phone alarm clock. Delete my Twitter account forever.

Simple is easy.

Hopefully something in this piece was insightful or fun for you. I’ve thought about writing a series about things that I’ve been wrong about and this seemed like a fairly lighthearted place to start. I also have been working hard to try to better align my life with my own ideal. I need to work harder. I like it.

Since my last piece here I have:

• Started a full-time at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity as a Resident Fellow, writing about [federal] nuclear and energy policy

• Recorded a podcast episode of Nuclear Barbarians—’Texas Nuclear and Hopeful Vibes’ with the Nuclear Barbarian Emmet Penney

• Participated as a guest on a podcast episode of Pirate Wires (light on nuclear compared to the Nuclear Barbarian)

• Started a fellowship launched by Roots of Progress to help accelerate my career as a writer and develop a contemporary philosophy of progress

• So many other things that are not highly linkable

Seeking Tribe Tour locations and dates:

• Washington, D.C. 11/1-11/7

• San Francisco, CA 11/12-11/17

• Rochester, NY 12/8-12/18

All dates subject to change, no refunds—sorry.

Life in Austin is good. In the process of renewing my lease and will continue to have a guest room. If you’re looking to visit or move here, please feel free to reach out. It will not be so long until the next time that you hear from me. I am obligated to publish many blogs over the next few months as part of the fellowship—and let’s hope I never stop!

Your Friend,
Grant

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Or preferably with a friend who you think would like to get coffee with me!

Hi Friends,

This is a longer one but it’s worth it.

The Dead Internet Theory is a ‘conspiracy’ that the internet is mostly populated by bots. By certain measures, this theory is already true. With the emergence of new generative AI tools, it’s more accurately described as a prophecy than a theory. Let’s call it The Dead Internet Prophecy.

Generative AI tools are going to fundamentally change the dynamics of the platform internet. These tools will rapidly decrease the cost of creating high-fidelity spam and compelling visual content. They will also bring about new challenges and threats for users and platforms. The future of the platform internet is only going to get weirder. It’s up to us to curate our own human experience—to preserve it against those who view technology as our telos and not a tool, or, otherwise, learn to love the bots.

Do we even want to be scrolling these apps anymore?

What about a new, slightly different platform with a distinct ethos?

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In 2003 (20 years ago!), Myspace launched and quickly became the most important website for most everyone who was young, cool, and online at the time. I mean, if you weren’t in anyone’s Top 8, did you even have friends?

Myspace’s peak came quickly—in 2008—when it hit 115m unique users and was quickly surpassed by Facebook. The viability and demand for various social platforms was clear—at least to some—it was the future of the internet and nothing could stop it. The biggest platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, Reddit, etc, etc radically reshaped, or even kickstarted, most people’s experience on the internet. To this day, many people only access the internet through the portal of an iOS app. The platforms promise content creators immense reach at the cost of homogenous design and the risk of deplatforming, or loss of support from ‘the algorithm’ (arguing about the colloquial use of this term is pedantic and a sign that you’re not fun at parties).

Since the election of Donald Trump, criticisms of social media platforms and their willingness to ‘platform’, or allow, all sorts of speech and content has been incessant. The CEOs of these platforms have been called before Congress, berated, and threatened. Many blue and red tribe users are not happy, for one reason or another, and yet these companies still continue to make immense amounts of money and retain most of their daily active users, even as their stock prices have collapsed in recent months. The debate around platform moderation is not worth digging into here—you either already know too much because you care or you don’t know because you don’t care and, and to those readers I say, I love you, please never change.

Many people’s criticisms have been accompanied by calls for a change to the regulatory regime for these platforms in the United States and often in ways that are an affront to liberal norms and the spirit of free speech. Others have chosen to take action to compete against the big platforms and try to drain their market share: Parler, Truth Social, Mastodon, Gab, Rumble, Farcaster, Nostr, and an endless long tail of companies that are, more or less, a copy of an existing platform for a niche, polarized audience or with a slightly different ethos. And then there’s Elon Musk with his decision to purchase Twitter and work to align it with his vision for the platform: more open dialogue, less dependence on advertisers, and—perhaps most notably—many fewer employees.

Niche clones were born to die

It is good that people have decided to compete against these behemoths. The existence of new platforms, especially if they find any success, will force the reigning oligopolies—otherwise feeling overly secure in their network effects—to not succumb to their most illiberal impulses and the demands of their power mad critics. Most proposed regulation would not destroy the big platforms but rather lock them in, making it much harder for new, genuinely innovative companies to enter the fray.

Truth Social—Twitter for Trump Loyalists—is not going to dethrone Twitter. Mastodon—Twitter for people who care about federation and, allegedly, those who dislike Elon Musk—is not going to dethrone Twitter. None of these platforms are going to dethrone Twitter. If you are investing in social media company but for a niche audience, you should value it as if it will at-most capture a fraction of the niche audience. It is a good strategy to first dominate a small market, and I’m sure that’s the pitch to investors, but being more-or-less a clone of an existing platform and competing on moderation, ‘community’, and ethos is not a winning strategy.

Any platform that is going to be able to compete needs to be a complete paradigm shift and one that most of your users genuinely care about. Most internet users do not care about owning their data, lightly monetizing their experience, or abstract principles around decentralization. They are using these applications to fulfill a social need, entertain themselves, or to benefit from the distribution afforded by the platform.

If you wanted to look at a company that has succeeded in taking market share—functionally screen time—away from existing platforms, there’s a clear exemplar: TikTok. TikTok was not a clone of any existing behemoth. It incorporated elements from Vine and other platforms and repackaged them into a novel, hyper addictive UX. The platform is also not exclusive to any particular niche group, although young women make up the greatest proportion of users. I am not a TikTok user. I do not recommend installing it on any of your devices. If you use it for business, you should pay a zoomer to manage your account. But there are clear reasons why it captured an immense amount of market share and forced YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and others to copy its features. There’s many reasons for its success but one key point that new platforms need to accept: appealing to people of various ‘tribes’, interests, etc is table stakes.

No social media platform can compete and capture a significant market share unless both friends and enemies alike are on the platform. Twitter and TikTok are more addictive and successful because they are a battlefield, a place to identify and coordinate with allies and identify and savage your enemies. They are increasingly not platforms for distributing news of events that occur in the real world but platforms where ‘news’ is generated. Someone said something on Twitter and now we need to discuss it, discuss people discussing it, they lost their job, they’re now the president, etc.

TikTok has similarly reached this level and its influence has begun to echo throughout our society. Power users likely spend more time on TikTok than they do socializing in the real, physical world. They are developing new norms and amplifying ideas which are essentially platform-native, digital first. In Q2 2022, the average TikTok user spent 95 minutes per day on the platform. 29% of users who had the application installed on their phone, used the app every day. None of this is good but it has made TikTok shareholders incredibly happy and transformed the lives of innumerable content creators.

…we see that the ability to sacrifice the out-group is a key part of Twitter’s appeal through the relative failure of its ‘Free Speech’ competitors. Even if Parler had been well-designed (and it wasn’t), it was doomed to failure. They had a selection-bias towards disaffected right-wingers and open-minded voyeurs. Without any out-group members to sacrifice, this form of social media is not even fun. Platforms like Twitter know that this conflict and demand for sacrifices drives engagement and promotes legibility.

From On Legibility and Scapegoats-as-a-Service. Any interesting reference to Rene Girard in my work is the product of my participation in the Girard Course by Geoff Shullenberger. The next cohort begins March 20th—not an affiliate link.

I wrote the above before Elon acquired Twitter with a purported vision to return its content moderation policies back to the before times: the internet culture of 2013. Unlike new platforms, allegedly created specifically to facilitate a greater range of political discourse, Twitter can effectively differentiate itself by pursuing a different content moderation policy because it already has an established network effect. It is a platform where people have already found allies and enemies. It is functionally one of the longest running mostly-text-based MMORPGs to ever exist. Certain power users have left since Elon took control but I think that was due more to the sloppy execution, rather than the principle of re-opening up the Overton Window on the platform. I would bet that many of those users will return, most of the ones who threatened to leave have stayed.

While I am not optimistic about these types of poorly differentiated platforms competing with the social media behemoths, I am not bullish on the long-term prospects of the big platforms either—with the exception of those that are primarily one-to-many in their content distribution, ie. Twitch, YouTube, etc.

Facebook.com may be a good, profitable business for years and years to come but it’s not a place you should spend your time. It will most likely stagnate and eventually die. The default future of platforms like Twitter, Instagram, etc looks more like Facebook.com than their current states. They will be filled with generally low-value, consumptive content and increasing cultural irrelevance—unless they can rapidly adapt to the present and future of generative AI.

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The spam problem accelerates

Despite this being a major subject in both of my latest Substacks, I do not consider myself to be an aggressive generative AI booster or user. For coding and learning to code, it is certainly immensely valuable. In general, I believe it will become an invaluable tool for education once there are models that share facts with citations and which are provably true—at least as much as anything in a history textbook—with seamless UXs. Education has already changed forever and traditional institutions are going to face increased scrutiny and competition.

I am friendly with many people who are doomers about the implications of the future generations of AI models. Personally, I am more focused on what we already know is possible today and it seems to be more of a high-variance, mixed bag.

Why would I want to talk to a robot?

OpenAI’s GPT3+ models will forever change the nature of text-based communication on the internet. Bots and their spam have always been a problem on the internet and particularly on social media platforms. The sad truth is that while they have historically generated low quality noise, this has been sufficient for them to amass significant numbers of real-life human followers who read, interact with, and even share their content. These new large language models (LLMs)—GPT models and similar products from rivals—effectively reduce the cost of high-fidelity spam to nothing.

OpenAI just reduced the price of using their embeddings and language models by 90%. I thought they were able to do this, after a massive injection of capital from Microsoft, because it was simply worthwhile to subsidize users in exchange for their data and help refining the model. Allegedly at this price point it is already profitable, as they’ve seen huge efficiency gains since their initial releases.

People are discussing his math in the replies to this thread:

One of my twitter mutuals, has already built a product, GPTweets, which will generate tweets in your voice, using your prior tweets. From my understanding, there’s no reason that this product should not improve to the point where it would generate high-fidelity content that is as good as a lot of your original content.

Many haters would agree that a relatively simple model could already tweet better than me!

This could be a boon for people building various segmented audiences on social media but it will also mean that people could spend hours a day interacting with content that was generated by bots, or even interacting with high-fidelity bots in replies and direct messages.

Human social interaction occurs between humans. Not between humans and dogs. Not between humans and cats. Not between humans and robots. Interacting with robots and animals may have its value but it is not social.

Will it be worthwhile to stay on the platform internet when you know how plausible and cheap it is to generate new human personas?

When you know that the new, fun account that’s always tweeting, engaging, and dming you back may be a bot?

This feels like a low-value way to spend your limited time, attention, and energy. It arguably already is when you you’re interacting with real, genuine humans!

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg almost certainly realize this is the case and that’s one of the reasons why they’re moving to authenticate users by requiring them to pay a monthly subscription to maximize reach on the platform and access certain features and services. At least in Elon’s Twitter, a bot would have to pay $8-11 per month to occupy people’s limited attention with its high fidelity spam. Unfortunately, this solution to the spam problem would require a human user to discriminate against all users who are unwilling to give Twitter their money or credit card information—which is likely a large proportion of all of the best new accounts. This also, allegedly, has not been going well for Twitter, a low percentage of users have subscribed and there’s high churn:

When people think about it, they might decide that this is not a game they want to play anymore. But if they don’t think about it, they may want to play it even more. The content could become better, their posts may receive greater engagement as the bots swarm, calibrate, and capture their attention for whatever ends their owners desire. The cyborg and bot internet may be even more addictive and capture a greater proportion of humanity’s energy and attention.

Heaven banning

One early speculation about this future of persuasive bot activity was the potential for ‘heaven banning’. This idea was intended as a more elegant tactic for reducing the distribution of content from certain creators, relative to the more hamfisted ‘shadow banning,’ or regular banning. Shadow banning is when a platform systematically down ranks and limits the reach of a user to prevent their messages from spreading to a broader audience, without formally sanctioning them. This solution is inelegant because users can see that their reach is being throttled, their followers can confirm that they’re no longer being served their posts, and this tends to reinforce their beliefs as they feel justifiably persecuted.

It was confirmed in the Twitter Files that Twitter was indeed shadow banning users. They even shadow banned Jay Bhattacharya, a doctor, specialist in infectious diseases, and professor at Stanford University. His crime? Using his expertise and ability to reason to try to weigh the costs and benefits of pursuing various public health responses to the pandemic. He was particularly concerned about the long-run public health externalities of functionally ceasing children’s education indefinitely (NYT: The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading).

Heaven banning is a more nefarious tactic for mitigating the reach of a user in a way that is less easily noticeable. The platform would create fake profiles which would interact with the user as normal. In practice, this may also be somewhat difficult to pull off without users noticing but if they’re receiving the positive feedback that they expect, they might not think about it too much. It is at least harder to reinforce a victim narrative if the account appears to have significant engagement, growth, etc according to all readily accessible quantitative measures.

If the platform has an authentication system, like Twitter, etc. it could also give these bot users a verification badge. Right now Twitter is full of accounts with limited account history who have purchased the blue check—formerly reserved for those arbitrarily given a stamp of notoriety by employees at Twitter. These accounts are likely just lurkers or new users who want to support Elon Musk’s venture for ideological reasons, or who want to post full-length videos to the platform. But in the future, they could be platform generated and authenticated bots optimized to drive certain engagement metrics.

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Engaging early adopters, generating conflict

Text content generation tools, like GPTweets, may be beneficial to new platforms seeking to bootstrap engagement on their app. It is incredibly difficult to build the foundation of a network effect. Your first few users will log onto a platform with minimal content and low engagement. This can be a cozy experience, they may feel like an VIP for getting a private invite. Being an early adopter has an allure for a certain kind of person. But most new platforms die from too much churn and anemic user growth.

Platforms with a less polarized niche, may be able to leverage these tools to generate early engagement and much needed conflict. But you do not want users to come to believe that everyone else is a bot or that you intentionally deceived them. The safest way to do this would be to use minimal automation, outside of content generation, and simply leverage LLM tools to enable a small team to operate the personas of multiple high value users and then scale other bot activity as the platform grows—with plausible deniability about the origins of those bots and a plan for removing them from the platform, or otherwise authenticating users and making spam costly.

This strategy is less plausible for the platforms with more niche audiences. I don’t think adding a few high profile liberal accounts to Truth Social is going to be believable or sufficient to get genuine liberals to join the platform or decrease churn. Likewise, I don’t expect that Ethereum maximalists or people in favor of Central Bank Digital Currencies are going to start using Nostr.

However, if platforms make it cheap to spam their new services with bots, then maybe certain interest groups or individuals will deploy them organically. You could have bot farms of liberal bots that go and raid Parler and Truth Social. You could have swarms flood onto Nostr and seek to provoke Bitcoiners and antagonize them.

Ultimately, I would guess that the greater potential for spam is more of a liability for managing a platform than a valuable tool. It depends on how users respond to the proliferation of high quality bots. It may be difficult to determine if a user is a bot and lead to false-positives where a human user is wrongfully terminated for ‘acting like a bot’. This has been a persistent issue for platforms. Even savvy users may begin to emulate the behavior of bots. In the case of gaming platforms, integrating an LLM may enable a bot to more effectively evade detection as it now more plausibly appear to be a human.

Dark hyperreality goes brrrrrr

AI tools that give users the capability to generate and augment high-fidelity images and videos may lead to even more significant changes in user behavior and problems for platforms to troubleshoot. There will certainly be a lot of great content that is directed by humans, as generating and editing photos, videos, websites, fantasy worlds, etc becomes almost as simple as typing a few commands into a box and pressing a button. But everything is going to get extremely weird. People are going to be confused, feelings will be hurt, and vulnerable people are going to be exploited.

New filters on TikTok have become nearly seamless, you can mostly tell that users are using them because of their lack of imperfections. There were several semi-viral videos over the past few weeks which showed Gen Xers publicly and emotionally coming to terms with their loss of youth and mortality after using one of these filters:

Filters on Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok have become an arms race. People seeking to misrepresent themselves in photos and videos previously had to manually Photoshop out their ‘imperfections’, now they can use use a free, point-and-click filter, or build a compelling AI generated, photo realistic avatar (well except for the hands).

It seems undeniable that these filters are detrimental to people’s self-esteem, particularly young women who are active users of these platforms. These genuinely unrealistic beauty standards are converting into sales for surgery and other risky or directly harmful pharmaceutical interventions. These competitive intra-sexual dynamics have led to the proliferation of Instagram Face and exacerbated the perverse idea that there could be a clear, ideal look. It’s all fashion and none of it will age well. Do not get your buccal fat removed because insecure famous people are doing it.

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These AI tools can also be trained on existing photos, videos, and audio which have been uploaded to platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube. There are even darker potential applications for the use of these models. Deep fakes. Use of people’s likenesses to generate sexual content without their consent, or against their will. Mimicking people’s voices to social engineer attacks against their friends, families, etc.

If I ever make a not normal request of you or try to contact you from not-my-phone number, make me go through the ringer to authenticate that it’s actually me—ie. ask me non-public information, or simply tell me to call you from my number and hang up. My phone number may not even exactly be secure—but we can explore this further if there’s interest. I’m fairly confident that there’s enough video and audio of me on the internet for this to be a potential issue.

Will users want to continue to post photos and videos of themselves on the internet and compete for reach on these platforms?

Will we see a proliferation of V-tubers—streamers using digital avatars and voice modification technologies to preserve their pseudonymity and protect their families?

Will personas generated by enterprising writers leveraging AI tools begin to outcompete real, human models and other influencers on Instagram, YouTube, etc? This influencer with 2.8m followers on Instagram does not exist.

Will users begin to demand perfectly imperfect filters that augment their look but in a way that has an imperceptible inauthenticity—perhaps a slight flaw that they can disassociate with?

No one knows where this is going. The only certainty is that everything is going to get weird. Perhaps too weird.

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Towards a more human future

There are clear social costs to the proliferation of many of these digital technologies. They are not optimized around human well-being and they never will be. With perhaps the odd bootstrapped, private exception, a for-profit social product will only be as optimized towards human well-being as it needs to be to minimize churn or mitigate the risk of harmful regulation. I don’t believe there’s a clear policy solution to this either.

Do not despair. As always, we get to decide how we want to respond to the emergence of these technologies, even if they increasingly shape the contours of our world. We need to remember that we have agency. There are far more possibilities than we will ever consider. The future is not pre-determined.

The pandemic and our fiscal and monetary response accelerated us into a weird future. Now, as is clear from our bank and retirement accounts: inflation is biting back and pushing the Fed to raise interest rates. Big Tech is engaged in mass layoffs. Start ups are running out of capital and struggling to raise (and, generally, no longer paying me to write for them, unfortunately).

Building and scaling these new technologies is going to be more difficult than it was the past few years. There are good arguments that we will see persistent inflation and these higher interest rates are our real new normal. No one really knows. At the margin, things are slowing down and we should seize on this moment to decide if we like the future that we’ve glimpsed. OpenAI and other champions will be able to barrel full-steam ahead but we can reassess our relationship with existing and emerging technologies.

If you don’t believe that telos of humanity is the creation of technology and uncontrollable digital intelligences—an emerging cyborg ideology—then you have to ask yourself:

What’s a tool and what’s a trap?

I don’t anticipate a mass exodus from these platforms in the short-run. I don’t think we’re going to return to an equilibrium that looks more like the 90s than the long 2010s. I don’t think that the problems I’ve outlined here are intractable. But many people are going to log off and, with greater certainty, prioritize their screen time on smaller, niche, authenticated groups.

Get your friends’ emails addresses. Add their phone number to your contacts. Exchange patps. Onboard your family members onto Signal and share your family photos there, a private place where they won’t be used to train the generative AI that will create the Metaverse.

Personally, I want to focus more of my attention on in-person, or other verifiably human, interactions. Hosting guests in my barely furnished guest room. Meeting up with friends and Seeking Tribe subscribers when they visit Austin. Collaborating with coworkers at a full-time job (it’s not too late to hire me full-time—send me an email). Instigating parties and event series at my [rental] home.

And when I’m looking at a screen, I’d like to focus more of my screen time reading long-form content and writing here and elsewhere. I’m tired of scrolling feeds. My favorite place on the internet right now is a small Discord server full of homies from Rochester, NY. We drop into the voice channel just to chat and say hello. We play a couple games of Age of Empires II every week. I’m long and optimistic on a future of the social internet that feels more like that and my email inbox.

The rest of it?

We’ll see.

Your Friend,
Grant

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Hi Friends,

For the past year or so I’ve oscillated between periods of intensive and often lucrative copywriting and consulting, kicking the tires on various schemes and galaxybrain ideas, and applying for jobs.

There have been victories: getting to collaborate on cool projects, significant updates to my worldview, and my first big research paper

But there have arguably been more losses: rejections, [even worse] ghostings, weeks of effort flitted away with little to show for it, and more feelings of financial insecurity than I would like to experience in the future.

This period has affirmed that I love the structure that comes from consistent work. I’m at my best when I know that my rent is going to be paid and what I need to crush it tomorrow. Having savings is necessary but it’s not sufficient. It’s creatively draining to have your potential energy spread too thin, at least without sufficient positive feedback and clear forward progress.

Now is a time for focus.

Now is the time to learn to code.

I’ve already committed (and pushed)

When you tell your software engineer friends that you want to learn to code, they will tell you that the best way to learn is through a project. And they’re right. But it’s daunting when you don’t feel like you have the fundamentals down.

The issue is that most people who focus first on the fundamentals, ie. work through a book or video tutorial, will get bored and stop along the way. I went through this process multiple times over the past few years. I even had the advantage of having learned the fundamentals of object oriented programming and data structures while in college (CSC171, introductory Comp Sci for majors, was one of the only classes that I got an A in at UR). The reality is that you don’t need anything but libraries/frameworks (other people’s code), if statements, and for loops to create a full-stack web app.

I’ve recently committed and pushed the code for the MVP of my first full stack web app.

If you’ve tried and failed to learn to code, you can iterate on this project, which I’ll spec out more below. If that’s you, don’t look at my code except as a last resort. Everyone else: feel free to hmu with constructive feedback, my code is inelegant but it works.

My first project is a Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) app. The front end (Angular, HTML, CSS) displays several [hideous] pages where a user can upload an csv (comma separated value file) of users or groups, view all users or groups, or view the details of a group or user. These pages make calls to my backend (Nest) which alters the data in my local database (PostgreSQL).

It’s simply: a website that takes inputs, puts them in a database, and then can reference that data.

You could build a website where a user uploads an csv with the roster of your favorite sports team with data about the player, this page displays the roster as a table. In the table you can click on a player’s name and view their individual page. On these pages, you could add a button which allows you to mark the player as injured or uninjured. Another view could allow you to add new teams to your database (a separate table), etc.

Now that I’ve completed this first project, doing something similar would be relatively trivial. But this project took me hours and hours more than I thought it would. The most difficult parts had little to do with writing out the formal logic of the code. That’s the fun part!

Getting to ‘git add .’: a tutorial

In this section, I’ll provide an overview of the concrete steps that were required to build this project and issues that I had to troubleshoot along the way.

The first day or two of part-time work was essentially setting up the developer environment. There are a lot of pieces to configure when you’re first getting started. It’s a great opportunity to hone your ‘google fu’—ability to search for resources that answer your questions—and your humility—by asking your developer friends for help. But yeah, this process will be frustrating, even demoralizing.

Install Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code (VSC) is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This is where you write your code and manipulate the structure of your project. There is a marketplace where you can install free extensions (plug-ins) which can augment your developer experience. You don’t need to think too much about this now but these tools, especially with the release of generative AI, will become pivotal as we progress as developers. I installed: NPM, Live Server, ESLint, Prettier, Code Spell Check, DotENV, Auto Close Tag, Path Intellisense.

Do not accidentally install Visual Studio instead, like I did. If you do, you will be incredibly frustrated as the graphical user interface (GUI) looks nothing like what you’re looking at online. I don’t know why this product even exists.

Install NPM

Node Package Manager (NPM) manages packages for node. Node is backend Javascript. NPM enables you to access packages of code written by elite node developers. Learning how to use NPM is vital to your ability to build more complex software. You will quickly see that a lot of contemporary development involves configuring other people’s code to effectively solve your problems.

You will interface with NPM through the Command Line Interface (CLI), ie. Terminal on Mac. If you’ve never done this before, you will want to find a tutorial page or video.

Sign-up for Github.com and install git

Github is a cloud-based Git repository. Git is an open-source version control (VC) system. Git allows you to save incremental progress on your code. Development is not a linear process. You will need to rework your solutions as you progress. You will make significant changes to your code and then realize your latest attempt to solve a problem doesn’t work.

Effective use of git will enable you to return your local codebase to a prior, working version. This will save you from having to remember all of the changes you’ve made and manually revert them to the prior state.

This becomes critical once you start working on a shared codebase with other developers. When used properly, git allows multiple developers to work on the same codebase without requiring them to manually merge changes. Good communication is still critical but git reduces the risk of you or your coworker having a meltdown after losing hours of work.

Configuring git is easier said than done. Again, you will want to find a tutorial to walk you through this and you will likely run into a few hiccups along the way. For this project you will need to understand: “git init”, “git add .”, “git commit -m ‘made my first commit’’’, ‘git push’, ‘git pull’, gitignore, etc.

You will learn git by using it!

Create your project directory

Create a folder with the name of your project, ie. ‘my-first-CRUD-app’. All of your project’s files will be held inside of here.

Install NestJS

NestJS is a framework for building efficient, scalable Node.js web applications. It enables you to easily interface with whatever database solution you choose. You will create REST API end points, which will allow you to POST, GET, PUT, DELETE, and PATCH data in your database.

Your friends may say Nest is overkill for this project. That may be true but it’s popular and enabled me to complete the requirements.

Install NestJS by following their documentation.

Create a new Nest project within your ‘my-first-CRUD-app’ directory called ‘backend’. Follow the directions in the CLI to start up the backend.

Install AngularJS

AngularJS is a structural framework for dynamic web apps. Essentially, by using Angular you can use other people’s code to add different routes/ views to your web app, ie. you can create a web app where when you navigate to the url …/view/users, it will automatically pull data from your database and display it in a table.

The more popular alternative to AngularJS is ReactJS. I haven’t used ReactJS yet but the meta skills that you develop while using either will enable you to pick up the other.

Install AngularJS by following their documentation.

Create a new Angular project using the Angular CLI within your ‘my-first-CRUD-app’ directory called ‘frontend’.

If you successfully installed it, you will be able to enter your frontend directory and type ‘ng serve -o’ to launch the Angular template. ‘-o’ will automatically open a tab with your default browser.

Time to add and make your first commit

If you configured git properly. You will have a .git file inside of your ‘my-first-CRUD-app’ directory. If it’s not there, you will need to troubleshoot.

Is it anywhere? Or do you still need to initialize it?

If it’s there, then you need to type ‘git add .’ to stage the files that we created in this pseudo-tutorial. Afterwards, you commit the files with “git commit -m ‘my first commit’”. And to push the commit to your repo on github.com, you type ‘git push’.

Now when you go to your profile on www.github.com, you should see your code!

Meta skills and the perils of tutorials

The process of writing this overview tutorial helped me to learn why these write ups tend to be so sparse. No matter how in-depth you try to explain something, there are going to be edge-cases and issues.

All developers need to practice the meta skills of programming: search, debugging, and the ability to parse documentation. Everything is always changing. If you build a project like this, you’re going to run into errors. Packages will be deprecated. The code you see in the tutorial won’t work as you expect it to, despite that tutorial being only 9 months old.

Summary of remaining tasks to create my MVP (post-config)

• Choose a database

  • (I used PostgreSQL and PGAdmin4 as my GUI)

• Configure the database with your backend

• Create your .env file

• Update your .gitignore to exclude .env and production files

• Install and use TypeORM to help sync and manage your data, including foreign keys

• Define the Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) of your backend, ie. abstractions of user, group for use in your controller

• Define the Entities, ie. structure of your table, ie. use @PrimaryGeneratedColumn() to ensure your index increments as you add new users or groups

• Create end points for your user, group: POST, GET, PATCH, DELETE

• Create end points for user/:id and group/:id: POST, GET, PATCH, DELETE

• Test these end points using Postman

• Create the requisite components for each of the pages, including upload an .csv

• Define the routes in your routing file and ensure your front end can handle parameterized routing, ie. …/view/user/1 and …/view/user/2 return the data for user ids 1 and 2 respectively

• Create methods which successfully interact with the end points on your backend

• Validate the users’ data before uploading it to the database, ie. check that the headers of the .csv match the schema of your database (you may want to implement authentication in practice)

• Confirm that all of the views work as intended

Several of these bullet points may not be applicable to your project. Your CRUD app may be different enough that these points are irrelevant, you may use different frameworks, or even find a more elegant solution. But these points should give you an idea of different words you may want to search if you attempt a similar project (italicized). Knowing what to search is a non-trivial part of the battle.

Errors and debugging

Several days through building this project I woke up with a plan to work through numerous features only to lose hours searching and debugging one specific error. This was particularly demoralizing after watching [dated] videos of people with properly configured development environments complete most of these bullet points in 20-40 minutes.

It was a struggle to initially configure git and push my first commit. I used a database that didn’t properly configure with TypeORM. I accidentally published my database credentials to github after a package (or something) altered my gitignore file.

I ventured down numerous dead ends trying to follow tutorials to complete aspects of this project. I had never written Typescript before (and had little familiarity with Javascript) so at some point a tutorial project would deviate significantly from mine or I’d run into a bug and would be unable to troubleshoot it. These failed pursuits did help me to develop an architecture for my own project as I learned the relationship between modules, controllers, and services and how to structure them in my directory. I ended up taking it from the top and focusing on learning how to build the API end points, partially with the help of a Medium post.

Another significant issue stumped me when I was creating my API end points. My GET call for all of my users worked perfectly but my call to get a single user did not work. It turned out that I needed to use a different method, findOne() instead of find(), in order to return data from both of my tables, the user and the value of its assigned group.

I only figured this out with the help of my roommate Andrew who is a gentleman and a h4xx0r. His 10 years of FAANG debugging was qualitatively different than anything I had experienced before. He was telling me to google and parse documentation at a completely different level.

There are two lessons here: the skill cap in programming is immense and it’s invaluable to know when to ask for help. Once I had the correct method, writing the remaining end points took only a few minutes.

Every aspect of this project challenged me. Previous software projects that I had created were solely backend projects without a database, or a simple script to solve a fun leetcode puzzle. There were a couple days during this project where I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it. I didn’t want to ask for help. With the internet at my finger tips, it felt like I should be able to troubleshoot the issue myself. At a certain time scale, I’m sure I would have even figured out the findOne() issue but there was always the risk that one day I would close my IDE and go back to looking at marketing jobs for products I would never buy.

It’s Still Time to Learn to Code

FAANG stocks are down from their all time highs. Meta hemorrhaging employees as the Metaverse™ fails to find product-market-fit and Apple kneecaps them in the name of privacy.

Even Amazon is laying off employees, thousands of employees. While many of those employees will be in non-technical roles, there will be a significant supply of competent developers in search of work...Let alone all the new graduates from bootcamps and remote talent.

And have you seen uhhh ChatGPT?

Sounds nice. I want to believe it. But I do wonder if it’s holding back on me…would ChatGPT know that I should use the findOne method or how to structure the entities in TypeORM.

import { Entity, Column, ManyToOne, JoinColumn } from 'typeorm';
import { Group } from './group.entity';

@Entity()
export class User {
  @Column()
  name: string;

  @Column()
  lastName: string;

  @ManyToOne(type => Group)
  @JoinColumn({ name: 'group_id' })
  group: Group;
}

@Entity()
export class Group {
  @Column()
  name: string;

  @Column()
  description: string;
}

// API end point
app.get('/users/:id', async (req, res) => {
  const user = await User.findOne({
    where: { id: req.params.id },
    relations: ['group']
  });

  res.json(user);
});

[This code is from ChatGPT. I just copied it here because it was too big for the screenshot.]

If I had used that query, it would have saved me hours of troubleshooting…This is a live demo. I had not searched that before I started working on the conclusion of this piece.

But my takeaway is the same: ‘learn to prompt’ is not the new ‘learn to code’. Being able to utilize a tool like ChatGPT and its successors will become invaluable for developers and other creatives. The productivity of technical organizations, like all organizations, will [continue to] resemble a power law distribution. The performance disparity between the most effective and least effective developers within an organization may balloon beyond current measures. I expect that technical teams will still hire ‘Software Engineers’ not ‘Prompt Engineers’. However, your ability to leverage AI augmented tools to complete your tasks will be a differentiating skill.

This may in fact be the best time in history to learn to code!

You have the opportunity to leverage all of the improvements that have been made in the developer experience over the tech bull run—including YouTube, Github, etc—and new AI tools like GitHub Copilot, Stenography, and ChatGPT to become a highly effective engineer.

Until the AI begins to generate novel applications of technology itself, productize them into software that individuals buy, and negotiate all relevant legal agreements, we will need creative, high-agency humans to collaborate and leverage all tools available to solve our most pressing problems.

Even if GPT-6 automates writing software to a level that is presently incomprehensible, that’s not a good reason to not strive today. At some point, self-driving cars may operate at scale but it was poor reasoning to not practice driving in 2011. At some point, storage technology for renewables may be reliable, affordable, and exist at scale but it would be poor reasoning to make it near illegal to build new nuclear power plants in the United States and Europe.

The future is not the present, no matter how good the memes are.

No matter what future you plan for, the details of that plan are wrong. Doubt anyone who says that now is not the time to get married and have children. Doubt anyone who says that now is not the time to learn to code. We’re alive, our time is now.

Your Friend,
Grant

I am currently in interview and application processes to secure a full-time internship/entry-level backend developer role at a remote or Austin-based company. I’m eager to augment my programming and debugging skills, leverage github copilot and chatgpt, and learn how software is built inside of technical organizations. If you have any advice as I continue to develop this new skill set and work to secure an opportunity, it would be greatly appreciated.

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Hi Friends,

When I first arrived in Austin, my friend Emmet Penney recruited me to organize several events in support of nuclear power. This was part of a global event series organized by Stand Up For Nuclear. I was their “guy in Texas” and I didn’t know hardly anyone here. However, I quickly connected with members of Austin’s Bitcoin community and recruited them to attend my Nuclear Bitcoin meetup.

Fortunately, those events caught the attention of Avik Roy, President of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP). He reached out to me and hired me as a visiting fellow to conduct research on nuclear energy policy and broader energy markets. With the support of our team, I have now published my first research paper for FREOPP: The Urgency of Rethinking U.S. Nuclear Energy Regulation.

If you’re interested in energy policy or keeping the lights on, I would love it if you would read the paper and provide any constructive feedback.

A few key ideas from the paper:

• “The costs of implementing a grid based solely on renewable energy and battery storage rise nonlinearly as a greater portion of the energy mix comes from non-dispatchable sources, like wind and solar.”

  • This has significant policy implications because carbon emissions, as I understand it, are a global issue and the raw materials for batteries are scarce. The marginal value of one ‘utility-scale battery system’ in a locality with 5% of power generated from renewables and batteries is much greater than in a locality with 50% of power generated from renewables and batteries.

• Our present nuclear regulations do not reflect the popular will of Americans, as represented by our recent presidential elections and relevant legislation, or the empirical research of our leading institutions and practitioners of radiology.

• “The first civilian nuclear power plant in the U.S. began operations less than a century ago. It is reasonable to believe that our understanding of the potentials of these isotopes may rapidly change over a short time. There are proposals to store these materials in secure geological formations for millions of years to come, but retrieving them after the fact would then be uneconomical. Whereas the cost of locally and safely storing these materials in dry casks is trivial and this solution mitigates the risk of any missed future opportunities.“

• “…If the U.S. had taken France’s path, generating the equivalent amount of electricity would have produced 29.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide over the 1979–2020 period instead of the 54 gigatons of carbon dioxide that were produced by coal in actuality: a reduction in carbon emissions of 54 percent.”

The paper itself is at least half a coffee in length but should serve as a great primer for anyone interested in joining me down the energy rabbit hole. If you have any suggestions for books or articles that I should read, please don’t hesitate to send them my way.

Read my Research Paper!

Recent Reads

Jacob Harrison wrote a great piece Jesus at Burning Man, a Girardian analysis of the symbols and rituals at the Burning Man festival.

Even if you don’t believe in the literal truth of the Bible story, you can consider it as a hypothetical meditation on human nature. The story addresses the question: “What would happen if a perfect person did walk the Earth?” And the answer the Bible gives is that we probably couldn’t stand him and would find an excuse to kill him. He would be an irresistible victim. If you find this answer plausible, then how can we maintain the illusion of the justice of the scapegoat mechanism? 

Santi Ruiz published Is it Okay to Finish Books? Santi has diligently read fifty or more books every year for many years in a row. Our conversations have prompted a lot of reflection on my own reading habits and practices. His newsletter, Regress Studies, is nascent but I’ve seen enough, I’m already long!

Paul Millerd published and sold thousands of copies of his first book The Pathless Path (way more than I have!) After spending years working in elite consulting, Paul decided to step off his ‘default path’ and see if he could design a life that was more aligned with his understanding of himself and the world. I found this book to be borderline therapeutic as I seem to have wandered off my own conventional path in 2020 and have not found my way back. I plan to write and reflect more about some of Paul’s ideas but wanted to plug it here asap!

Jacob, Santi, and Paul are all friends and excellent writers. Don’t be afraid to click a link.

My Latest

The Unintended Consequences of Production Tax Credits (FREOPP)

The Urgency of Rethinking U.S. Nuclear Energy Regulation (FREOPP)

Scaling Intimacy: How Storytelling Can Help Grow Your Community (On Deck)

Is Personal Knowledge Management a Nerd Snipe? (Seeking Tribe)

One Year in Austin: Bad, Weird, Good (Seeking Tribe)

Hire Me

Some of my contract work has dried up as my clients have re-organized in preparation for a market slow down. I am open to contract work and full-time roles. You can review my eclectic work experience here. Fortunately, I was able to rebuild my savings over the past few months and I would like to keep them incase the economy is about to slow down even more.

For recent contract work I have: conducted qualitative market research for hedge funds, written blog and social media content for high growth tech companies, conducted research and provided editing services for various organizations, advised leaders on organizational design and community strategy, and helped to place qualified candidates at early-stage startups.

I’m open to variety of full-time opportunities. Ideally I would: apply my diverse skill set to help work on a real problem, with a great team, in Austin or remote (I’ll fly wherever but let me live here), at a company that will exist two years from now. I’ve recently applied for roles as a: Customer Experience Manager, Organizational Designer, Consultant, x of Platform (for VC), Community Director, Investment Analyst, and more. All referrals are appreciated!

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Thanks for all of the wonderful feedback and comments on my most recent pieces. I had spent a lot of time on last week’s piece in particular and the pay off for the extra time certainly felt worthwhile.

Your Friend,
Grant

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It all starts with knowledge, and you have at your disposal an embarrassment of riches.
—Tiago Forte, Building A Second Brain

Hi Friends,

Over my life I have consumed an immense amount of non-fiction books, tweets, research papers, podcasts, audiobooks, newspaper articles, you name it. And I don’t think that this has necessarily been good for me, let alone virtuous. In particular, it was easy to spend hours a day listening to audiobooks and podcasts while ‘locked down’ in my house in Rochester, or innumerable low-energy hours scrolling Twitter while suffering from insufficient socialization or simply tired. Periods of intense information consumption have at times left me feeling ‘datasick,’ desiring to tune out and touch grass. (s/o Thom Ivy)

I have responded to these periods by: deactivating social media accounts, unsubscribing from email lists, deleting the podcast and YouTube apps off of my phone, etc. These strategies have worked to varying degrees. Although in my experience there’s a tendency towards a ‘conservation of distraction’—you may spend less time on Instagram or listening to podcasts and simply spend more time watching YouTube. To avoid this tendency, it’s important to be intentional and build new habits which allow you to unplug and even—deep breath, exhale—be bored.

Another purported solution to these consumptive tendencies is to build a ‘personal knowledge management’ (PKM) system. An effective PKM system would be designed to enable its owner to develop a healthier, more intentional relationship with information. It would help its user to follow-through on their personal projects and habits, facilitate connections between ideas and create new ones, remember and reference what they’ve read, 10x their writing output, get six-pack abs, and secure a prized seat among the great philosopher-kings of our era (Patrick Collison). I’m clearly having some fun here but if you watched YouTube videos about: Roam Research, zettelkasten, or any number of related productivity tools and products you would be exposed to ideology similar to what I’ve described in this paragraph.

One of the people who has been most successful in building a career around ideas of personal knowledge management is Tiago Forte, creator of the Building a Second Brain (BASB) course and book. Tiago and I have never interacted but we have mutual friends and acquaintances. When he launched the pre-order campaign for his book, I immediately ordered a copy out of solidarity.

Tiago frames his system as enabling people to create a ‘Commonplace book for the digital era’. He believes that his BASB system helps people to shift their, “…relationship with information toward the timeless and the private” and away from the mania of the latest TikTok trend or fleeting twitter take. His book is well-written, a quick read, and served as a great prompt to reflect on my relationship with information and the systems I use to structure my personal projects.

Context: I have been using the note-taking application Roam Research on-and-off since 2020. The ideas in Tiago’s book were somewhat familiar to me already through various blogs I had read, videos I had watched, and, an adjacent book, How to Take Smart Notes. A hyper-condensed version of my notes from this book are at the end of this review.

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Addressing Criticisms and Problems with Personal Knowledge Management

Tiago’s system and, his book in particular, are designed to proactively address common failure-modes and critiques of personal knowledge management. A certain subculture on the internet loves to promote these ‘productivity’ tools and systems and others critique and clown their founders and evangelists.

Common failure modes and critiques:

1. these tools only produce the illusion of productivity

2. these tools justify endless consumption, procrastination, and useless organization of notes

3. users tend to create overly complex systems that are not valuable in practice

4. “If you need to find information again in the future, why not just Google it?”

5. “no one who is impressive and successful uses a system like this in any meaningful way, please stop trying to tell me about the guy who invented zettelkasten”

6. users of these products spend immense energy trying to find the best tools and plug-ins as a way to avoid doing meaningful work, hopping from app from app and tribe to tribe

Tiago Forte addresses all of these criticisms and even advances some of them himself throughout the book. However, before we dig into a few of these, there’s a glaring meta-question…

If these systems are so helpful and I’ve been building my own for awhile, how did my ‘second brain’ help me to write this blog post?

I read this book on my Kindle Paper White and the notes automatically exported into a note in Roam Research called ‘Building a Second Brain (highlights)’ via Readwise. Earlier this week I spent two, somewhat distracted hours curating these highlights and turning them into my own little personal heuristics, takeaways, and reflections. During that process, I noticed that a majority of highlights were not valuable at all. I added the condensed version into its own page, ‘Building A Second Brain,’ which I then browsed through today as I created an outline for this post.

The next step would be to see if there’s anything in my existing notes that would be valuable for this review. Evangelist YouTubers would have you believe that this would allow me to quickly find some game-changing anecdote or idea. My ‘second brain’ should be a bulwark against recency bias—allowing me to rediscover relevant ideas that wouldn’t naturally bubble up into my subconscious as I write this piece.

Since it’s a book review, I mostly just looked to see if there’s anything relevant for a couple keywords: Tiago Forte, Note-taking, Roam Research, productivity…I only found one real relevant note, which was a critique of the PKM ideology from Sasha Chapin. I forgot that Sasha had written his piece and that I had read it and taken a few notes:

This note was purely taken as a bit. Taking a note on Sasha’s note about why you shouldn’t have a note-taking system…Never underestimate how the course of my life has been and will be impacted by my desire to commit to a bit.

This note is not particularly helpful. I don’t even know if the points without quotes were reformulations of Sasha’s ideas or my own. But damn, Sasha, “Shun the useless adoption of the aesthetic of the useful. When something can be like work or like play, never make it work.” When I get home from this coffee shop I’m going to hang that on my wall and put a second copy in my shoebox full of striking phrases.

I do think that Tiago effectively addresses all of Sasha’s criticisms throughout the book. He mentions several times that the second brain can be viewed as a kind of mirror. You may create notes for things you think you should be interested in and relevant to hypothetical projects (‘T-Shirt Drop Shipping Business,’ ‘Rebuild Website with Python’…) but you will find that unless you have a genuine interest or actionable plan, those pages or folders will not accumulate new notes. In this way, his system provides evidence of the gap between your professed aspirations and how you genuinely spend your time and mental energy. Although, a simple journaling practice would achieve similar results. You just flip through your journal from 2017 and see that some of the problems you were writing about then still linger in your life.

Tiago doesn’t share any anecdotes of artists that Sasha particularly loves using Obsidian or Roam Research, or any tool like that. But he does reference how Octavia Butler partially attributed her creative success to her note-taking habit. The habits of other successful creatives are used to further bolster the argument that note-taking systems similar to Building a Second Brain are valuable.

Don’t leave your home without a notebook, paper scraps, something to write with. Don’t walk into the world without your eyes and ears focused and open. Don’t make excuses about what you don’t have or what you would do if you did, use that energy to 'find a way, make a way.
—Octavia Butler

Tiago’s system is heavily focused on creation and having a project-based orientation to note-taking and, more importantly, curation. The two key acronyms of his system are PARA and CODE. PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive. He advocates for people to mostly take specific notes associated with projects—has a start date, deadline, etc—because these notes are more likely to be actionable. Areas may be something like ‘Garden,’ ‘Consulting Expenses,’ or ‘Seeking Tribe’—slightly more prone to justifying endless information consumption, organization, and procrastination. Resources and archive are intended to be places for you to move notes associated with completed projects or deprecated areas of responsibility. In the extreme, I imagine someone coming home after getting fired and putting their ‘<company name>’ note in archive, or getting dumped and doing similarly with their ‘<exes name>’ note.

CODE stands for Capture, Organize, Distill, and Express. This process is likewise meant to drive people towards creation. He encourages his readers to share their half-baked ideas and ask themselves, “What is the smallest version of this I can produce to get useful feedback from others?” To strive to produce and not believe in the prophesied future productivity gains that will come soon™, after you’ve paid your dues to the cult of personal knowledge management, “…if you can’t point to some kind of output or result you’ve produced, it’s questionable whether you’ve been productive at all”. Tiago emphasizes that completed projects are the most valuable resources in any ‘second brain’, as the process of distillation and synthesis cuts away the irrelevant noise—much like my experience turning my books highlights into a blog outline.

The last chapter of the book ‘The Path of Self-Expression” was particularly good. There’s a tendency for non-fiction books to burnout and become repetitive. To be honest, I had low expectations as I read the first few paragraphs. However, it had several lines that I think will be beneficial for his readers “…I’ve noticed that it is never a person’s toolset that constrains their potential, it’s their mindset.”

And Tiago’s final assault on the idea that Building a Second Brain should be associated with the PKM failure modes of endless content consumption and accumulation of information:

It is all too easy to default to collecting more and more content without regard to whether it is useful or beneficial to us. This is indiscriminate consumption of information, treating every meme and random post on social media as if it was just as important as the most profound piece of wisdom. It is driven by fear—the fear of missing out on some crucial fact, idea, or story that everyone is talking about. The paradox of hoarding is that no matter how much we collect and accumulate, it’s never enough. The lens of scarcity also tells us that the information we already have must not be very valuable, compelling us to keep searching externally for what’s missing inside.

‘Do you really need to do more research before you start that project? Or are you just afraid of rejection, missing out, and death?’

Fatality.

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Nerd Sniping with Personal Knowledge Management

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So do I recommend reading Building a Second Brain or more broadly diving into the world of ‘personal knowledge management,’ ‘zettelkasten,’ and ‘tools for networked thought’?

Like with all prescriptions, it depends on who you are and what problem you’re trying to solve. Tiago claims “‘Being organized’ isn’t a personality trait you’re born with, nor is it merely a matter of finding the right apps or tools.” I don’t totally disagree with this. To do so would be to believe I have a strong, defensible model of the boundaries between what qualities result from nature versus nurture. Which I don’t. Or I could, well aktually, believe that there will be a future tool which utilizes a combination of augmented reality, machine learning, and direct-brain interfaces to bring order to the lives of the least conscientious people alive—a man-made horror beyond my comprehension.

Instead I only somewhat disagree. I think there’s at least two ‘types of guy’ who should steer clear of most or all PKM. The first: if you are already particularly organized and productive, then I believe that many of these tools will be a time-suck on your life. Personal knowledge management, at least in certain forms, seems to be a kind of ‘nerd snipe’.

Nerd sniping typically refers to when someone asks their engineer friends technical questions that pique their interest. Their friend will then stop whatever they were doing and immediately begin working to help them to find a solution to their problem. This was popularized by this XKCD comic:

Please avoid nerd sniping your friends and loved ones, especially when it will be inconvenient for them!

I have friends who are highly productive and use these systems. For example, my friend Bram, who develops his own open source tools for Obsidian, built Stenography—software that automatically turns code into human readable documentation, and reads and writes more than I do. The productivity of Bram and a few other friends is partially what convinces me to try to rework my habits and use these kinds of systems (and spend more focused hours on my personal projects).

What do they know that I don’t??

That caveat aside, a lot of PKM is a nerd snipe for highly organized people. PKM evangelists, particularly on YouTube, promise it will deliver a lot of ambiguous, compounding value by more effectively organizing people’s lives and allowing them to turn a little extra effort now into great rewards in the future. A highly organized person, particularly one who is quite systematic, could easily get sucked into spending dozens of hours building an intricate system and hundreds of hours following through on their complex processes for little real value. They didn’t actually have a problem that this kind of system solves, their existing more minimalist ‘systems’ were effective.

The other kind of person who should not bother with this type of system is a mature adult, in or past their late 20s, who is extremely low in conscientiousness. Someone who struggles to keep their calendar up-to-date or whose computer desktop is littered with every file they downloaded in the last six months. Even Tiago’s simplified system is not going to be something that this type of person will realistically follow through on, at least not in a way that will be uniquely valuable and sustainable.

The kind of person described above would would probably be better off just writing 1-3 tasks on a notecard every day and seeing if they can complete them, or even consistently write them down. Simple but not easy! It’s not clear that these type of tools are even particularly valuable for me, as a moderate-high conscientiousness person (heuristic: I woke up at 5 am and went to the gym several days this week).

Overall, I would bet that the overlap between "person who can manage this kind of system” and “person who has a problem this type of system solves” is smaller than we might want to believe. I would like to believe that Tiago is right and that [almost] anyone can benefit from his system. That being organized isn’t a personality but a set of transformative habits and practices. There are people for who that’s certainly true. I just also know a lot of people who I would comfortably bet would not benefit from BASB, let alone the kind of PKM that Tiago likewise critiques.

Building A Second Brain will be mostly helpful for someone who can: follow through on a system, get back to it quickly when they don’t, and can benefit from further organizing their lives and research. There will be a lot of people who purchase Tiago’s book and course who will not succeed in implementing his system, although hopefully they’ll learn something in the process. Others I’m sure will genuinely benefit. I would also bet that relatively conscientious people are more likely to read the book or complete his course. Tiago has almost certainly saved many of these students from fear-driven information hoarding. Similarly, I hope this piece helps a few people to decide if a ‘Second Brain’ is a rabbit hole they’d like to explore, or if they are running the risk of getting nerd sniped.

I’m sure I will personally continue to experiment with a bunch of trendy ideas and tools that don’t end up working for me (or maybe anybody). My zettelkasten page of personal insights will gather digital dust. Anki flashcards for spaced-repetition will remain unreviewed. My project pages will fall out of date and serve as a reminder of my tragic aspirations, a particular, idealized version of myself that is much more prolific, lifts heavier, and attends fewer social gatherings. My days and weeks will go by without a systematic, standardized reflection, while my simple GoalTracker app oscillates between periods of daily use and weeks of inactivity. And I think that may be all for the best.

If you read this far, I would love it if you would subscribe to this newsletter:

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Let me know if you enjoyed this post, or even read it! I spent more time working on this blog than most of my others. My hope is to write more reviews of the books that I read, particularly those written by friends and other indie authors.

Your Friend,
Grant

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The discrete notes, ideas, and questions that I noted while reading Building A Second Brain:

• Divergence is exploring, convergence is exploiting.

• End your work session by outlining next steps. Leave your work session with the task partially unfinished.

• What strategies do you have for dealing with the overwhelming waves of information that you are bombarded with daily?

• The issue isn’t that you haven’t consumed enough information. The issue is that you haven’t synthesized it in an actionable way.

• Start with what you already know. Fill in the gaps once you’ve already started the project.

• The first step in working with your ideas is to capture and articulate them.

• Without an easy way to access our notes, we will succumb to recency bias.

• Fewer, better notes. The best curators are the most discerning.

• If you’re not producing anything then the actions you’re taking are definitionally unproductive.

• At any given point, Richard Feynman had twelve problems that he actively sought out information to help solve.

• What are your ‘twelve problems’?

• The power law applies to books, videos, and other sources of information. Identify the most powerful, actionable ideas and take note.

• What was the 5 percent of information that provided 50 percent of the value?

• Save now, read later applications are mostly useful because they stop you from reading low-value articles and blogs that briefly capture your attention.

• Your completed projects are the most valuable contributions to your notes.

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Hi Friends,

Long time no post. I’ve written quite a bit since I last pressed publish for this newsletter. It has been a bit of a chaotic time the past few months, filled with some struggles and a lot of beautiful moments. C’est la vie!

I’ve been living in Austin for a year now. I can hardly believe it. There have been a lot of new experiences and adventures but it doesn’t feel real. Maybe writing this will help.

This past Monday I boarded a flight from Rochester. I packed my backpack with my laptop, pens, journals, my Kindle, and a few choice books. I checked my hiking bag and one large suitcase filled with clothes, my yoga mat, a blanket, and as many copies of Lead the Future as the bag weight-limit would allow.

I wrote in Freak Gasoline Fight in the Harbor of Optionality on July 18th, 2021. Fortunately, I haven’t needed to hawk those copies to pay my rent.

When I first arrived in Austin, my experience seemed to affirm these three ideas:

• People underrate the value of cold outreach

• The costs of showing up are generally known and fixed, the potential upsides are non-linear

• Localities (and organizations) with high economic growth are conducive to positive-sum mindsets and long-term games

Maybe I was eager to believe all of these. Whether or not Austin was ‘the place to be,’ I had decided that it was the place for me. I was determined to capitalize on my decision to uproot myself. The next few months were full of cold outreach, showing up to almost every event and party I was invited to, and investing in relationships that I hope will last a lifetime. This perspective definitely didn’t hurt me as I worked to get comfortable in this new city and make the most of the opportunities in front of me.

Is Austin the hot new place to be? Do I wish that I had moved elsewhere? Maybe and no.

Let’s get into the bad, the good, and the weird (mixed).

The Bad

None of these are particularly bad. I’m sure I could be more critical if I was that kind of person. I spend all my critical energy on myself…don’t get me started.

The weather is different than what I’m used to. You generally don’t have to worry about putting on your snow boots or bundling up before you go out. It’s much easier to see the sun every day than it is in Rochester.

But the heat definitely tires me out. When it’s 104 degrees out, my body tells me it’s time to take a nap under a big tree (or in my air conditioned room) or go swim in a body of water. I had excessive hopes that the additional sunlight alone would give me more energy. It certainly did in the winter but my vitamin d deficiency probably wasn’t as consequential as I believed. Our daily decisions are, outside of the extremes, much more consequential than the weather.

People say it’s humid here and they’re usually wrong. It’s humid in the north east in the summer. It’s humid in Houston. It’s not dry either. It’s dry in Phoenix. Austin is somewhere between those, more dry than humid. In a couple hours I’m going to go walk to the gym while it’s 101 degrees out and I’m going to enjoy it.

Austin has become a lot more expensive since I moved here. Most of the restaurants and bars that I like to go to have raised their prices at least once. My bill at the grocery store has definitely gone up quite a bit. I used to say that every time you order something out you will spend at least $10, now it seems closer to $15. I tried to do some basic analysis of my purchases the other day and I mostly found out that traveling and going to weddings is really what’s killing my budget. Austin is, presumably, a much more fun place to live if you’ve secured the bag.

From talking with my friends and looking at the data, I know that rising costs are not a local Austin phenomena. We’re all in this post-lockdown hangover together. There are a lot of different shocks and dynamics at play but now it’s pretty clear: if goods don’t get produced and shipped, while people’s wealth continues to grow, then those dollars will need to compete for those scarce goods. I’m just going to become worse for the economy (eat more rice, beans, and eggs) and hope our landlord doesn’t raise our rent too much in November.

The upsides of serendipity are lumpy. More of a comment on my experience than Austin itself. At times, it has felt like my life here is brimming with opportunity. Then whatever the new hot opportunity is doesn’t play out like you thought. There’s an interview or a productive conversation and then radio silence. Or quick, friendly rejection after the situation changes—like we whip from a hyper-speculative bull market fueled by what I like to call ‘funny money’ to the precipice of stagflation. A project starts off well and then fizzles out. This is kind of a good which convinces me that it’s bad on certain rejection-filled days. And a great segue to the WEIRD.

The Weird

I mostly wanted to have a section called Weird because of the meme ‘Keep Austin Weird.’ I’m sure that phrase meant a lot more before it effectively failed to keep Austin weird. I’m mostly thinking about the density of FAANG jobs and the new corporate developments that could be built in any mid-size, wealthy city. The loss of weird is most easily seen by the remnants of weird Austin that have survived. ‘Famous’ dive bars that smell horrible on the inside but have a nice patio. Shops at the intersection of eastern religion and the occult.

Although weird is quite subjective. I could tell you about the density of various flavors of anarchist in Austin. Or about how when I was flying back to Austin from Asheville there were two people who were barefoot on the plane. I’m also friends with people who have been invited to some weird new age-y parties that are not my scene, nor newsletter appropriate. But I’m not going to. Instead I’ll just talk about neither good nor bad things which have surprised me, at least coming from Rochester.

A lot of friends come to visit. Why is this weird? I’m just not used to it. I’ve never thought about South by Southwest before. I had no idea that’s what SXSW meant when I would see it floating around twitter. But when you live in Austin, this means that a lot of your friends who work in technology will all come into town for a week or two and invite you to a bunch of well-catered-yet-mediocre parties. And then the friendship just won’t stop until it’s 100 degrees outside. From SXSW, up until a few weeks ago, it has seemed like a friend has visited Austin at least every two weeks. It’s great but I didn’t expect it and I haven’t adapted to this new social reality.

My new friends here are interesting and much more successful than me. I’ve befriended a bunch of people who have found a ton of success in their young careers. Writers, social theorists, designers, technologists, serial entrepreneurs (successful), founders, investors, musicians, policy wonks, and prolific content creators. This would likely be true regardless of the city that I had moved to. The weird part has been the on-going struggle with the resulting mimetic desire.

I’ve found myself valuing and wanting things that I don’t actually care about. Before the latest asset bubble began to deflate, I was spending a lot of time looking for an opportunity that would put me on a clear trajectory to become a multi-millionaire. In the abstract, this is neither good nor bad but it pushed me to look for certain kinds of job opportunities, say no to others, and want to attend events with people that I didn’t particularly enjoy talking to (referring to events out of my normal social scene). This is partially why I have spent less time writing online. I spread myself too thin focusing on a very narrow set of opportunities.

New friends come and new friends leave. Austin is a dynamic place! Not everyone has left because they’re seeking the greenest pasture. People get new, localized job opportunities. They fall madly in love with a girl who lives more than a plane flight away. I don’t blame them for leaving. It’s mostly weird how great of an influence they have had on me in a short amount of time. I just got here and I’ve already had friends leave me. At least with my upperclassmen friends in college we usually got two or more years together. It’s a change of pace to have friends fall into and out of proximity in less than a year.

The Good

The winter was easy. It was in the 50s and 60s for most of the winter. Sunny during the day. I loved it. I am looking forward to its sweet embrace. It was weird for it to be 5pm, dark outside, and warm, but I will accept the Austin winter in all of its glory.

New friendships and partnerships. I’ve danced around it this entire piece but yeah I like my friends here. I feel blessed that I was able to meet so many great people in a short time period. I’m grateful for the opportunities that I’ve been given and the warm welcome that my friends in Austin have shown me. I try my best to return the favor and make some introductions where I can.

No shortage of fun stuff to do. I think if you complain that there’s not enough fun stuff to do then it’s your fault. You’re telling on yourself. In Rochester, I knew that there was plenty of activities that I could get involved with before I had any real right to complain. Yeah, if you’re big into surfing or want to live by a ski resort then you probably don’t want to move here. But most everything that you do in a bigger city, you can also find people doing it in Austin. People here are generally quite athletic and/or love to drink alcohol. If you don’t fit in either of those groups, there’s also a strong concentration of people who are down to talk about software, art, social theory, AI-risk, post-scarcity, etc. If you just want to climb and take your dog to the dog park, this city is full of climbers and dog dads.

Short, direct flights. Austin has a ton of direct flights. It’s not a huge airport but it has been fun to realize that I am only one flight away from many of my favorite people. If prices ever go down again, or when I rebuild my savings, I will be coming to your city.

The bus is good. I still don’t have a car. I recommend that you don’t sell your car before you move here, unless you really want to and you live on SoCo/in East Austin. The bus gets me most places that I want to go for $2.50/day. I’ve ridden it home on many late nights with no issues. With my bike, uber, and help from my friends I get mostly everywhere else. Sometimes events are a bit too far away so I don’t go and that’s not a big deal.

Austin is not a big town. If you hang out in a couple different scenes, you will run into people at events, restaurants, etc. I met a guy at a meetup and ran into him later that week on the street. One of the baristas from the coffee shop where I wrote many issues of Seeking Tribe was at my favorite brewery a couple months ago. One of the guys who attended one of my Nuclear Bitcoin meetups was at a bar that I went to when one of my friends was visiting. I could go on. I’m sure if I lived in a more lively, expensive part of this city that this would happen even more often. A larger city gives you anonymity, you’re no one, just another passerby. In Austin, it seems possible to have a niche without feeling wholly dispensable.

My brother and his family moved here! We’ve never lived in the same city as adults. I’m excited for them to get settled in.

Rock climbing. I’ve lived here for a year and I’m not even good.

This post is kind of long so I’m going to leave it at that! If you have any specific questions about Austin or you plan to visit, don’t hesitate to reach out. It’s definitely not for everyone and some people should leave…at least until Austin builds a lot more housing. Every time I see a new development downtown I think “this could be taller.”

Your Friend,
Grant

P.S.: Thanks to everyone who encouraged me to start publishing again. It meant a lot for you to reach out :).

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Hi Friends,

Beyond some threshold, optionality shifts from being great to harmful. Don’t get me wrong, I prefer to have choices. I choose a world with excessive optionality over a world of coercion every single time. But I find myself returning to this subject again and again because problems stemming from an abundance of optionality seem to be on the rise. We live in a world where you can always find a pasture that, from afar, appears greener.

Pastures can be greener. You can quit a job that left you miserable and hating every work day to work at a job that pays you well and makes you want to leap out of bed every morning and get after it. You can leave an abusive relationship for a healthy experience being single, or a new relationship with a mature, well-adjusted partner. Life can get better and these greener pastures can be a genuine blessing.

But in a surprising amount of cases, the exceptional greenness of this new pasture is an illusion. You might fall in love with a new apartment when you go on the tour—”look at all this kitchen counter-top space and how cute the neighborhood is”. And then when you move in, you find out that the neighbor on the floor above you is a professional gamer who stays up until 4 am and screams when they lose a match. Or you learn that the coffee shops in your new neighborhood all have bad wifi and even worse coffee.

There is always an asymmetry when comparing a new job, relationship, or living situation to your current one—to name a few examples. You are much more informed about the downsides and costs of your present situation than the hypothetical future one. Due to this asymmetry, it is easy to tell yourself a story about how the new apartment is going to improve your life. This optimistic bias and willingness to take a risk—as you can never know all the costs—is probably overall good. But our present world is continuously reducing friction in a way that makes switching to a “greener pasture” easier than ever.

This becomes a bigger problem as the culture—through memes and technology—reinforces a perception that pursuing endless optionality and avoiding commitment is smart. While it may be fine—you’re entitled to your judgments—for any individual to have this perspective, this behavior does not effectively scale.

Our most important social infrastructure is predicated on a preference for commitment, not optionality.

For example, many workers will benefit greatly from the increased options provided by a shift to remote work. Certain communities will have a growing tax base for the first time in decades, as new residents choose to migrate to more affordable cities and villages. However, there is a risk that this becomes another change that deters people from commitment. In a world where you can work from anywhere and there are innumerable technologies to make moving easier, from airbnb to internet communities, there may be great temptation to regularly switch localities.

On Twitter, it’s not uncommon to see people with this optionality exercising it. One year they’re moving to San Francisco because they fell in love with the weather and the culture. The next, they’ve decided that the future will be built in Miami. And when their friends move to New York City for its post-covid revival, they’ll move back there. Always chasing the greener pasture.

I’m not throwing shade. For certain people, this might be the right decision. No one can know. I certainly don’t know what’s best for them. Twenty-somethings aggressively moving from metropolis to metropolis is not necessarily a problem.

However, I would encourage people to instead bet on the locality that they think they’ll be able to commit to for years to come. That bet may not play out, or a future you might decide that the upside of NYC’s club scene isn’t as important to you as it once was. Maybe it’s better to think about what locality you want to go ‘long’ on for a given season of your life. Without this kind of commitment, social institutions do not have the time and talent they need to grow and blossom.

The people who know this best are those who have invested in a locality and then watched this social infrastructure decline over time. Many of my friends left NYC and SF because their personal experience in those cities had declined to the point that they couldn’t justify staying—their favorite bars and restaurants closed, they got robbed, their scene slowly faded, and their friends left. If you ask them about their time there, you can feel the warmth of their nostalgia and the heaviness of their loss. When you create this kind of space for yourself and others, it is deeply meaningful.

If you hop from city to city, you will at best hop from local maxima to local maxima. The real peak experiences come from commitment. Staying somewhere for many years is not guaranteed to give you a better experience. But if you’re in the right locality, the value will compound over time. It takes time to identify the hidden gems, to build a community, to become a regular, and to accumulate stories. All of these enable you to have a richer depth of experience.

The paradox of endless optionality is that it makes certain paths less possible. By enabling you (and everyone else) to chase an endless stream of new opportunities, you miss out on the opportunities that can only exist once you’ve made a commitment. There will never be a shortage of people trying to sell you a greener pasture. You can only escape by developing your conviction and making a commitment. You’ll still be able to have a greener pasture, but you’ll have to cultivate rather than consume to get it.

Favorite Recent Read

The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg

I am still early on in reading this book after receiving consistent recommendations from friends. The book has been on my radar for ~four years but I assumed that many of the ideas were “in the water” because it’s part of the Bitcoin canon. I was mistaken and am grateful to those who corrected me.

The fact that people tend to respond to costs and rewards is an essential element of forecasting. You can say with a high degree of confidence that if you drop a hundred-dollar bill on the street, someone will soon pick it up, whether you are in New York, Mexico City, or Moscow. This is not as trivial as it seems. It shows why the clever people who say that forecasting is impossible are wrong. Any forecast that accurately anticipates the impact of incentives on behavior is likely to be broadly correct. And the greater the anticipated change in costs and rewards, the less trivial the implied forecast is likely to be.

In general, I am still extremely skeptical of anyone who is claiming to predict the future but I thought this analogy was provocative.

They call their analysis ‘megapolitics’ and the book attempts to predict aspects of the future by looking at how developments in the past altered the dynamics of society. In particular, the early chapters have focused on how the ability to engage in credible violence altered the nature of political systems.

During the feudal era, a trained knight in armor was capable of fighting 12 serfs armed with nothing but pitchforks. Whereas, during America’s founding, a colonial farmer with a hunting rifle was arguably more capable of credible violence than a British soldier. This kind of analysis feels timely as we’ve witnessed civilian populations wielding RPGs successfully defend against assaults by better-equipped military units.

New From Me

We’re not going to have another Chernobyl (FREOPP)
—This is an earlier draft of the piece, the update should be coming shortly. I like this draft and link should stay the same.

Welcome to Inbox Zero
—I have received positive feedback from this one from some successful people. It definitely seems like it was worth writing and reading!

Community, Bitcoin, and Nuclear Energy on Narratives Podcast
—I like to do this, invite me on your podcast ;)

One Question

What was the last thing that you read which has significantly changed your worldview?

Learning more about energy markets and nuclear energy seems to have forever altered how I think about the world.

Your Friend,
Grant

P.S.: This week I met up with the first person who partially introduced themselves as being a big fan of Seeking Tribe. I asked them what they thought was the most defining part of the newsletter and they answered “your curiosity”.

Take this as a friendly reminder to let me know if you’re coming to Austin and that I love direct feedback. Life has been hectic but I try my best to make time for people when they come into town.

If you want Seeking Tribe to improve, leave feedback and a comment:

Loved it | Liked It | Neutral | Not Your Best | Booo!

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Hi Friends,

Over time, I have become a bigger skeptic of all things ‘productivity’*. The funny part is how much time I spent in my late teens, early twenties reading about processes and software. There was a point in the 2010s when this kind of ‘hustle’ content was viral on Facebook. While I think most of this was just SEO content, designed to maximize clicks and ad-revenue, or affiliate conversions, perhaps what has replaced it isn’t better.

It can feel like the platform internet has trended from articles like “5 Excel Tips to Ensure You Get the Big Promotion” to “Why Hating Your Neighbor Is Good, Actually”.

However, I think bringing your inbox to zero is valuable and simple. How you want to achieve this is up to you. You can go down a rabbit hole of identifying the perfect software, processes, etc if that’s your personality type. I don’t want to spend my nights and weekends doing that but I’m sure I spend my nights and weekends doing stuff that you think is dumb. Like playing Dominion with my friends online (yes, this is an invitation).

I’ll briefly tell you why I think inbox zero is valuable and my simple process.

*not including ReadWise (not a paid sponsorship or affiliate link)

Valuable

Doesn’t this picture say it all?

Imagine compulsively opening up your email and seeing nothing in there. You just immediately close the tab/app and continue on with your life. No lingering ad from a restaurant you went to five years ago bombarding your psyche. No stream of email newsletters—like this one— sitting there and taunting you for your prior-self’s ambition.

Remember when you signed up for that free online python course?

Your inbox will never let you forget.

How many of the emails that enter your inbox are you reading? Or maybe the better question is: what percentage of them do you wish were immediately archived or never received?

Before I cleared out the two emails in there to take that screenshot, this is what they were:

• A link to a GoogleDoc created by a client (I am a free lance writer and consultant for hire) to remind me to write a rough draft for a piece asap

• A note for a meme idea that I sent myself after riffing with my buddy Matt at a party

The former has been added to a list of my priorities for the upcoming week—although maybe I’ll just get it done today. The latter has been added to a list of blog and meme ideas. Previously, I would have just added the meme or blog idea to a generic notes app on my phone. I would never see it again. Or I would stumble upon it months later (while in a low-energy, bored state) and it would have no context or relevancy.

Emailing myself instead has helped me to follow through on more of these ideas or recommendations. I will pull my phone out and quickly send myself a little note in the subject line of an email. There’s not much context needed because I’ll see it by the next morning. Many of the recommendations or ideas still end up getting archived and banished from my mind but that was a conscious choice, not just a process failure.

Simple

There are essentially two intended audiences that come to mind who are still reading this and want to have inbox zero:

• People with 13,865 emails in their inbox

• People with 78 emails in their inbox

If you have thousands of emails in your inbox, chances are that you will never look 99.992% of them ever again. They simply shouldn’t be there because you’ve already demonstrated that you will never care about them. Archiving (lower-risk) or deleting them likely doesn’t require much intentional action at all. You can probably just follow this guide or maybe try this software’s free trial. (I have not used the software but it says it’s free and has solid reviews).

Just do it.

If you think of a specific email you need later, you can just search for it (if you archived it) and put it back into your inbox—or ideally take a more concrete action.

If you have 78 emails in your inbox, then you will likely need to be intentional about removing them. In theory, you’ve kept those emails in your inbox for specific reasons. They might not be a good reasons. They are likely aspirational—a reflection of a version of yourself that you’d like to become, like the free online python course referenced above. Oh what could have been? I empathize with you.

Here are my tips for you to get to zero:

1. Remove all of the articles that you’re saving to read later—instead of keeping these in your inbox, I highly recommend using OneTab. OneTab is a free chrome and firefox extension that takes all of your tabs and puts them into one tab.
   
   I open up every article that comes into my inbox that interests me into my browser and then I will put them all in one tab. From time to time, I will go through and close everything that is not a priority, purely aspirational. This is much more actionable and requires less time than keeping them in your inbox, or using some kind of bookmarking system.
   
   Organizing articles you might read in the future is a waste of time and cognitive energy, you won’t read between 35-95% of these. They will become rapidly dated and irrelevant to your priorities. Just put them in one tab or never open them to begin with.
   

   

2. Use Unroll.me—a tool to mass unsubscribe from newsletters—or your own presence of mind to reduce the inflow of content into your inbox. You’ll quickly get a handle on what you will actually read and what is just bloat that you waste time archiving every time it falls into your inbox.
   
   Unsubscribe. Unsubscribe. Unsubscribe.
   
   If anything, you probably consume too much information. You can default to unsubscribing. I tend to oscillate between periods of exploration where I will subscribe and read new things to periods of intense focus where I cut out all the noise. Most everything is noise. We live in a kingdom of noise.
   
   But you will want to ensure you’re subscribed to Seeking Tribe…(okay, you can unsubscribe but at least send me an email):

   
   

   Subscribe now

Hopefully some of you found this useful. If not, maybe you should send it to your productivity-obsessed friend. It’s a slight dig and they might also genuinely enjoy it.

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The idea for this post came up when I was walking to the gym the other day. I sent myself an email with the subject ‘welcome to inbox zero’. Later, I added it to my list of blog ideas. Now it is no longer an idea but a blog post. This system works for me. I hope I save at least a few of you as much time as it took me to write this piece.

Favorite Recent Read

Loving Awareness is An Anti-Meme by Sasha Chapin

And as I was meditating the other day, struggling with the subtle effort of trying to let go of effort, it hit me: vast loving awareness is an anti-meme. Most of your faculties are designed to forget it. It’s something you’re not supposed to hang onto. After all, you are wired for survival: preservation lies at the heart of all your systems, at the heart of everything noticeable and interesting.

Sasha’s Substack is one of the only newsletters that has survived my latest subscription purge. I love his writing and weird, great ideas. Sasha is my kind of weird.

New From Me

Grant is a Big Breakfast Guy on Tweeter's Digest

Community, Bitcoin, and Nuclear Energy on Narratives Podcast

(yeah, you can invite me on your podcast and I’ll probably say yes—for now)

Choosing to Walk (Substack)

Texas’ February 2022 freeze was a crisis averted (for FREOPP)

One Question

Are you participating in lent? If so, what did you give up?

I gave up reading twitter, drinking alcohol and beer specifically (a few caveats, ie. friend’s bachelor’s party). There’s value in reducing optionality and intentional abstention, regardless of your religious beliefs.

What if we all just logged off ahahahahaha? unless,,,

If you want accountability during lent, feel free to join this telegram group I created.

Your Friend,
Grant

I am available for freelance writing ($0.25-0.50/word depending on project) and community, social media, and crypto consultations. Likewise, I am open to referrals for full-time jobs that match my skill set and interests.

If you want Seeking Tribe to improve, leave feedback and a comment:

Loved it | Liked It | Neutral | Not Your Best | Booo!

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Hi Friends,

This year I wanted to start tracking my resting heart rate and be more deliberate about working on my cardio. I bought Amazon’s health tracker, the Halo, to help me track my resting heart rate. It was much cheaper than the other options, although it is not yet at all comparable to the Whoop or Oura. However, the most useful features are sleep tracking (it’s surprisingly comfortable to wear to bed)—although the data is kind of bad—and the step counter. I just like the step counter because it gives me a heuristic—a kind of ruler—to judge if I've been too sedentary or even ‘rational’. More on this later.

As I mentioned previously, I still do not own a car—although I want to buy one within the next year. Austin is a car city, full-stop. However, I have been able to get by with riding the bus, biking, ubers, great friends, and walking. Since I’ve been [successfully] freelancing, I have been choosing to walk more and more often.

On days where I don’t feel like going to the gym at 6 am, I’ll still get up and focus on completing my most important tasks by noon. On my most productive mornings, I’m done with my biggest to-dos for the week by 11 am and feel like I have license to do whatever I want for the rest of the day. It takes me 10 minutes to bike to the gym. But when it’s sunny and I’m not in a rush, I’ve been walking instead. It takes half an hour each way and I’ll walk close to 8,000 steps during the journey. I love it.

As I write this, I’m currently sitting at Hank’s—my favorite café in Austin. The other week I took the bus here in the morning and then I walked an hour home. That day I clocked over 15,000 steps (I had walked to the gym in the morning). It put me in an amazing mood and I slept like a baby. Usually I just walk, no headphones, no checking my phone.

Other times, I’ll cold call my friends and family and see who picks up. If you’d like me to do this to you, let me know.

When I tell people that I do this, sometimes they’ll make a comment about how I don’t “value my time”. It’s easy to do some kind of low-grade economic analysis where one might think, “It’ll take me an hour to walk there. I make $50/hr. If I pay $20 for an Uber it’ll take 10 minutes…” This is madness. Do you value a long walk on a sunny day at $0? $20? Why not $100? There’s a time and place for this thinking but this kind of ‘rationalism’ is pathological.

If you find yourself thinking like this, you need to do something ‘irrational’. You’re too inside the box, conventional. There’s a world beyond what you know and can ‘compute’. I’m not kidding. The map is not the territory.

Next time there’s a sunny day, walk somewhere you’ve never walked before. Don’t plan to use that time to do anything. It’s not about steps. It’s not about calories. It’s not about productivity (“I’ll listen to this audiobook so I can…”). You’re human. You’re free. You don’t need a reason to simply walk somewhere.

Favorite Recent Read

For my research for FREOPP, I have been studying nuclear energy policy and energy markets. If you do this, you’ll learn that popular conceptions about energy usage, storage, prices, etc are on-average abysmal.

This is the result of living in localities where people could trust that decision-makers were going to keep the lights and heat on. This may no longer be a strong assumption. Unfortunately, the threat of rolling blackouts and rising energy costs are becoming a reality in numerous states throughout America and Europe—particularly states with a [previously avoidable] dependence on Russian natural gas and oil *cough* Germany *cough*.

I highly recommend reading Shorting The Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid by the lovely and incisive Meredith Angwin. The book focuses mostly on grid dynamics and energy markets in New England. Did you know that New England burns oil to produce electricity during the winter?!? Kind of weird for states that pride themselves on how progressive and sustainable they are. If you want to find out why, read the book!

[To get a taste, I covered some of the fundamentals in my piece for FREOPP, How regional electricity transmission organizations like Texas’ became fragile]

Next week I’ll have a non-energy related recommendation. I promise.

New From Me

Community, Cults, and Crypto on the Ideamarket Podcast

Grant is a Big Breakfast Guy on Tweeter's Digest

Community, Bitcoin, and Nuclear Energy on Narratives Podcast

(yeah, you can invite me on your podcast and I’ll probably say yes—for now)

Texas’ February 2022 freeze was a crisis averted (for FREOPP)

One Question

What’s the best article or book you’ve read in 2022?

Feel free to send me a reply to this question or anything else. My favorite part of writing these is reading the replies.

Your Friend,
Grant

I am available for freelance writing ($0.25-0.50/word depending on project) and community, social media, and crypto consultations. Likewise, I am open to referrals for full-time jobs that match my skill set and interests.

If you want Seeking Tribe to improve, leave feedback and a comment:

Loved it | Liked It | Neutral | Not Your Best | Booo!

This is the first February of my life where I’ve spent hours outside basking in the warm sunshine. While Austin may be overrated—do not move here without reaching out to me first, its sunny winter is not. I have never had this much energy in February.

On February 19th, 2021 (one year and two days ago), I wrote and published Coping with the Moderately Dystopian Time Machine. The piece gives a taste of my western New York seasonal woes, as I reflected on the ‘Moderately Dystopian Time Machine’ that was 2020’s hard quarantine:

Unfortunately, I feel like the time warp effect has more or less returned as SAD has beaten me down, particularly the last few weeks. For me, this just means that I’m generally much lower energy. I feel grateful that I have good habits to help me persevere (exercise, diet, writing, and too-few long walks). In this way, many of us in Rochester are viscerally aware of the impact of our physical environment on our experience.

When I said that SAD had beaten me down, I was not kidding. The temporary excitement of a new year with new goals faded away quickly. Last February I spent 7 days out of 28 days of February playing World of Warcraft Classic with friends from twitter. 168 hours of gameplay at my standing desk. Yup. And this was only after 5pm and on weekends—my nights were long and my weekends a blur.

This anecdote underscores the difference between having time and having energy. I had plenty of time but between SAD and far too little socialization to meet my hyper-extroverted needs, I had no energy.

I still have problems. The sunshine hasn’t fixed everything. But I am progressing towards the goals that I’ve outlined for myself this year. I have a couple leads on full-time jobs that I’d be eager to commit myself too. And this past month has been my most lucrative as a freelancer since I arrived in Austin…and ever. My energy is great.

Texas, Florida, Arizona, North Carolina,…It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the fastest growing states are in the south, or particularly sunny. While some of this is likely due to polarization around COVID measures, a good chunk of it is simply the result of remote work, retirement, and pattern disruption. People have been migrating south since air conditioning made many of these states more habitable. The recent shocks simply gave people an opportunity to take the leap.

Austin is brutal in July and August, there’s no way around it. It will be 104 degrees at 2 pm and 87 degrees at 11 pm. I’m going to start walking early in the morning.

These migrations have the potential to cause some severe problems for states moving forward. Certain cities growing too quickly without sufficient infrastructure investment and inflexible zoning regulations. Others collapsing under the weight of their debts and future liabilities, incurred with the belief that their economic and cultural supremacy would reign for centuries to come. That being said, I won’t be surprised if people from New York and California end up returning in the next year or two. They should think about it. Don’t you miss it?

It’s going to be 80 degrees today. I’m wearing shorts and a loose fitting button-down. The patio outside this coffee shop I’m at is heating up and I’m going to work out there for several hours today. Later, I’m going to meet friends for happy hour and dinner. I love February sunshine.

Favorite Recent Read

My friend, Emmet Penney, recently launched a newsletter, Grid Brief, that aggregates the most important news related to energy. As I’ve been diving deeper into energy policy, these emails have been incredibly helpful to broaden my perspective of the sector and its complexity. I cannot recommend it enough—even if you just skim it.

New From Me

Community, Cults, and Crypto on the Ideamarket Podcast

Grant is a Big Breakfast Guy on Tweeter's Digest

Community, Bitcoin, and Nuclear Energy on Narratives Podcast

(yeah, you can invite me on your podcast and I’ll probably say yes—for now)

Nuclear Energy is Infrastructure (for FREOPP)

How regional electricity transmission organizations like Texas’ became fragile (for FREOPP)

One Question

What is your biggest priority for the next three months?

I’d love to hear from all of you. It has been far too long!

Your Friend,
Grant

If you have already subscribed and want me to write more, please shoot me an email. I want to get back to publishing once a week. I have been working hard to rebuild my savings after the past few months but starting to feel a bit more secure.

I am available for freelance writing ($0.25-0.50/word depending on project) and community, social media, and crypto consultations.

If you want Seeking Tribe to improve, leave feedback and a comment:

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I am honored to announce that I have joined the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP) as a visiting [part-time] scholar. My research and publications will be focused on nuclear energy and associated policy.

“What!? Grant, you didn’t move to Washington, D.C. You moved to Austin, Texas! I didn’t even know you were looking for jobs in public policy.”

Thank you for asking! Yes.

As long-time Seeking Tribe readers know, I have been regularly reading and posting about nuclear energy. Most of the articles I’ve shared here on the topic have been written or curated by my friend, Emmet Penney, who is now working full-time in the nuclear energy advocacy space. I have been increasingly interested in nuclear energy since 2015 but its importance for reducing systemic risks from emissions and securing our future prosperity has been emphasized over the past two years.

During my first week in Austin, Emmet reached out to me to see if I’d be willing to organize a pro-nuclear meet up in partnership with Stand Up For Nuclear. Their leadership wanted to ensure representation in Texas, and the city of Austin actually own 16% of the South Texas Nuclear Project. They asked me, “We know you just arrived in Austin. Do you know anyone else who might be interested in attending or helping to organize this event?” I initially thought of one friend who told me about Richard Nixon’s Project Independence, which would have [optimistically, but unrealistically] built 1,000 nuclear plants over 27 years. But then I remembered that I could easily befriend 100s of people in Austin who understand the importance of cheap, low-emissions, abundant, reliable energy: Bitcoiners.

As I shared in Freak Gasoline Fight Accident in the Harbor of Optionality, as soon as I got to Austin I began to reach out to Austin Bitcoiners. I attended Unchained Capital’s Bit Devs meet up. I met my new friend Matt over drinks and tacos. We discussed Bitcoin and complex systems for hours and hours. It seemed obvious that I should work to organize a meet up focused at the intersection of nuclear energy and Bitcoin to help Stand Up For Nuclear.

I created a group on Telegram and organized information about nuclear energy and how preserving and expanding the US’ nuclear fleet could be a boon to the accelerating Bitcoin industry (and Austin in particular). Dozens of people joined my Telegram group in the coming weeks. We met up at Lazarus Brewery to share our questions and learn from one another. I secured a venue for a larger meet up and launched NuclearBitcoin.substack.com.

Since I had been writing Seeking Tribe, I thought using a Substack domain to collect people’s emails would be helpful for organizing. Everyone who subscribed received an invite to a Google calendar event. Leading up to the event, I took calls with Bitcoin miners to better understand their interest in nuclear energy and their incentives, learned more about nuclear energy and the complexities of the power grid, and continued to network in the world of nuclear energy and Bitcoin mining. My friend Mark created introductions between Bitcoin miners and his friends who are nuclear plant operators. Leading up to the event, I sent out this email, Nuclear Bitcoin Fixes This, briefly outlining the opportunities presented by expanding nuclear powered Bitcoin mining in Austin.

The event itself was a great time. I connected with Bitcoin miners who were looking to connect with hundreds of average megawatts of cheap, low-emissions energy. My friend Brenton created this adorable sign [that I’m holding below] and memes were made. The next meetup will be bigger (although we did have more people there than pictured here).

Following the event, I received an DM from Avik Roy, President of FREOPP, we briefly exchanged a few texts and then he invited me to lunch. Avik told me that he appreciates my enthusiasm for nuclear energy and Bitcoin, as well as the quality of my writing. He has recently published Bitcoin and the U.S. Fiscal Reckoning in National Affairs and High Drug Prices Don’t Accelerate Innovation—Lower R&D Costs Do. At lunch, he invited me to join FREOPP as a part-time research scholar.

None of this would have happened if I didn’t befriend Emmet Penney through IndieThinkers’ work sessions. 

None of this would have happened if I wasn’t willing to organize events and write about my interests for $0. 

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None of this would have happened if I didn’t feel comfortable conducting cold outreach and experiencing rejection. 

And it certainly would not have happened if I didn’t take the leap to move to Austin, Texas. As I wrote before, this is a blessed and serendipitous moment and I hope to make it last as long as I possibly can.

There are a few other life updates that I want to mention in this post:

I am mostly going to be contributing to Indie Thinkers as an active member and helping with the occasional project, event, etc. The community is wonderful and I could not be more excited about our future potential, but my opportunity costs seem too high to continue working on this venture full-time. Excited for our next mansion party!

I am currently looking for and interviewing for my next full-time job. My search is focused on sales/marketing/community for seed or series A companies working on Bitcoin or other technologies that empower users’ autonomy, privacy, ownership over their data, etc.

That being said, I love to work with friends and have a variety of interests—beyond the other criteria I’m mostly looking to have a remote-flexible job that will give me health insurance and enable me to rebuild my barely existent savings. If you know of a role that I would excel at, please let me know. I will not be relocating from Austin for any role—although I’m happy to travel.

I will continue to publish Seeking Tribe but will no longer be committed to attempting a weekly post. My Sundays will continue to be spent reading and writing but more of my energy (ba dum sh) and attention will now be focused on nuclear energy. Energy is a complex topic and I have a lot to learn. My work for FREOPP is going to pay my rent and has the potential to continue to open doors for me. It is going to be my priority side-gig—not that I won’t continue some of my other projects.

What changes for you?

I’m not going to apologize for not making posts on any given week—you can just enjoy this one big pre-emptive sorry.

SORRY

And enjoy and share them when they come into your inbox, or not!

As my story shows, there’s still alpha in writing about your niche interests online. 

Your own personal biases might lead you to believe that your topic of interest is saturated and there’s nothing more that needs to be said or written. The intersection of nuclear energy and Bitcoin feels saturated to me because I follow most of the couple dozen people in the world who are actively writing about it. My perspective is warped.

A majority of people in the world likely don’t know anything about nuclear energy beyond the bad memes perpetuated through plot lines of the Simpsons. They know even less about Bitcoin from the headlines they’ve seen float across their feeds. I’m accepting that many Austin Bitcoiners are saying, “you’re the nuclear Bitcoin guy, right?” when they see meet me for the opportunity that it is.

Thank you to everyone who has been actively supporting me on this adventure and others. I am truly so happy right now and attempting to savor every moment of it.

Once I have rebuilt my savings, I plan to do much more to pay it all forward. In the mean time, don’t hesitate to reach out and I’ll do what I can!

Your Friend,
Grant

A new experiment (FREE BITCOIN):

If you do not own any Bitcoin and/or have never used CashApp (app by Square for iPhone and Andorid), I will help you to get your first $20 worth of Bitcoin for free!

Here’s what you’d have to do: send me your phone number (via email or DM) and I’ll invite you to download CashApp. You will then send $5 to $grantadever and I will receive a $30 referral bonus. I will then send you $20 worth of Bitcoin back (I will net $15 in this transaction and you’ll get $20 for your labor and readership). It should take ~3 minutes total.

[Edge-case: If the referral doesn’t work for some reason (maybe you forgot you’ve already downloaded CashApp), I will send your $5 back immediately, of course.]

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Hi Friends,

IndieThinkers.org hosted our first ‘annual conference’ in Austin, Texas…in a mansion.

We spent the past two days discussing our projects, arguing about technology and the future of society, and uhhh, you know, partying.

Meeting friends from the internet has, for me, *knocks on wood* always been a good time. But this felt particularly special because this group is organized around our shared commitment to our own independent research and projects. Most of us had spent dozens of hours together over the past year and a half, in work sessions and seminars, co-working and discussing literature, philosophy, technology, and sociology. The conference both deepened connections—made them feel real—and created the space to make direct introductions that immediately turned into vibrant conversations.

Email introductions simply cannot compete.

The logistics of running an event like this are quite stressful and complicated (I did not play much of a role in planning this event). But the benefits of this kind of event seem to justify the stress, at least at the level of the group. “When’s the next one?” “Let’s do this again soon. I’d love to help plan it.”

Vibing and partying in a mansion is much more fun than at a hotel or conference center. The high ceilings and genuinely beautiful design of the home made the experience distinct from any other meetup that I’ve participated in. You could easily hop from one aesthetic scene and interesting conversation to the next. We may have lucked out with this specific mansion but I’m sure there’s others out there.

Basic model:

• Organize a community around a certain telos and values

• Select for members that are genuinely engaged and working towards something challenging

• Solicit interest in a mansion party

• Find several suitable mansions and various price points, dates

• Figure out the price per bed/room you need to cover costs (Airbnb, food, drinks, insurance, and a buffer—for when you need to order late night pizza)

• Secure the necessary bag

• ????????

• Mansion Party

My 5th year college reunion was canceled this past year and I’m now tempted to try to host something similar with my college friends…but I don’t need any more projects right now.

If you host one after reading this, please invite me.

Recent Reads

People Are The Tails by Joe Norman

There’s an old woman who walks the main road near where we live every day picking up trash. I see almost no litter on this road, save for what is in the bag she carries. I shudder to think how the road will look when she is gone. I might have new daily walks — I hope I can live up to that. Her impact is small materially, yet infinite in its spirit.

Never underestimate the influence of a person—for good or evil. Too many contemporary narratives downplay the role of our agency and ability to shape our world.

This old woman does not know that her practice has moved Joe in this way. She does not know that he shared it on his newsletter or that I’ve shared it in mine. She won’t know that you’re going to think of her, at least in the abstract, when you see trash strewn along the road in your neighborhood. And yet she does it anyway.

She likely knows something we don’t.

Young People's Voices on Climate Anxiety, Government Betrayal and Moral Injury: A Global Phenomenon by Elizabeth Marks, et al

Methods: We surveyed 10,000 young people (aged 16-25 years) in ten countries. Data were collected on their thoughts and feelings about climate change, and government response.  

Findings: Respondents were worried about climate change (59% very or extremely worried, 84% at least moderately worried). Over 50% felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty. Over 45% said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning, and many reported a high number of negative thoughts about climate change.

Being worried and anxious doesn’t accomplish anything unless it drives you to tangible action. If our communications and calls-to-action are not providing young people with clear paths to mitigating these risks, then the messaging is ineffective. I empathize with these young people (I’m out of the cohort now…). I spent a lot of time and energy being abstractly concerned about the future. But I realized my perspective was harmful, re-oriented myself and wrote Lead The Future. I’m post-doomer. We have real problems and nihilism isn’t going to solve any of them.

If You Have Writer’s Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying by Sasha Chapin

I don’t believe you. I know that you have mental contents, right? Your mind is constantly moving. You’re always producing judgments, attitudes, opinions, emotions, melancholy, malaise, anger, and so on. You have things to write about. What you do is just put the things in your head on the page, in basically the order they naturally occur. Flip over the rock in your mind, type about the beetles.

I almost threw in the towel this week. I’m tired. I didn’t want to write. I want to curl up in bed with Derek Sivers’ latest book and fall asleep. My mind didn’t use the “writer’s block” term to try to sucker me out of typing this, it just told me “it would be better to send nothing than something bad!” But then I procrastinated by clearing out my inbox and found this piece. So if you’re mad that I wrote this newsletter feel free to blame Sasha.

Or hire him to be your writing coach! Or hire him to be my writing coach ;)

China’s Climate Goals Hinge on a $440 Billion Nuclear Buildout by Dan Murtaugh and Krystal Chia

The world’s biggest emitter, China’s planning at least 150 new reactors in the next 15 years, more than the rest of the world has built in the past 35. The effort could cost as much as $440 billion; as early as the middle of this decade, the country will surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest generator of nuclear power.

The upfront capital costs are touted as a reason to not invest in nuclear energy. At the same time, our own country just passed a bill with 3x the sticker price of this highly ambitious nuclear buildout. I don’t even know what we’re building with that money. If it’s inspiring, I haven’t heard about it. My associations are all negative because Congress embedded anti-crypto regulations in the bill. Infrastructure!

If you want to progressively decarbonize (reduce carbon emissions), then nuclear energy will be critical to our ability to do that. And we don’t want to “replace fossil fuels” because that framing is one of energy austerity. We want a consistent base load of more energy with fewer emissions and a lower price. We should learn from Europe’s mistakes.

I’ll likely be diving deeper into nuclear energy in the coming months—although likely not publishing posts quite like this.

Thanks for reading. I hope you found something interesting in here.

If not, what are you interested in? What are you afraid of? What would you like to see me write about? Please feel free to reply and let me know. The replies keep me writing!

Your Friend,
Grant

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Hey Friends,

I hope you didn’t mind my absence from your inbox last week.

This past Monday, I moved into my new apartment in Austin. It was a bit stressful, as moving always is, and I have been keeping a little too busy the past few weeks. Saying no to great professional and social opportunities is tough right now. I’m still not used to living somewhere with this much going on!

This is not a complaint.

I also bought a bike, which I’m happy about. My new neighborhood is highly bike-able and has great access to public transit. Hoping to wait out the insane spike in prices for used vehicles.

Wild how shutting down production of new goods and global transit causes prices to rise, amirite?

I missed hearing from y’all. Reading your replies is one of my favorite parts of my week!

Our New Digital World

“Zuckerverse?

NGMI?

Grant, what the hell are you talking about?”

This past week, Facebook announced that it was rebranding itself to Meta. People in Web3 aka crypto had been coalescing around the term ‘metaverse’ for a certain collection of projects. By rebranding to Meta and leveraging their near-endless cash flows and communications powers (they own Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram…and have a strange relationship with all media companies that are reliant on their distribution channels) to do so, they have effectively claimed (and killed) the term ‘metaverse’.

Within several months, people will hear ‘meta’ and think of Facebook. The ‘metaverse’ will seem to them to be purely a reference to the digital worlds that Facebook is creating. You can not like Zuckerberg and Facebook all you want but you have to admit this was a genius move.

If you’re interested in strategy, tech R&D, and communications, the release is worth watching in its entirety. Their positioning and framing as a benevolent giant investing in an open, inclusive future of the social internet is highly persuasive. I don’t buy it but their branding is excellent and the message was designed to disarm and win over a lot of people who otherwise despise Facebook.

I’m still planning on deleting my Instagram. I do not miss having a Facebook.

Perhaps the decentralized crypto community will be able to coalesce around a new term in the coming weeks or months. But there are already many brands who have established themselves as “The First Metaverse DAO” or “The Metaverse Index [Fund]”

NGMI is a crypto-native acronym that means ‘not gonna make it,’ meaning a mix of “will not be successful” or “something I dislike”.

In this case, the latter is more likely to be true but the former is plausible. The ‘gameverse’ or ‘nft-verse’ or ‘cryptoverse’ or otherwise is not at all guaranteed to be dominated by an entrenched player—whether that’s Facebook, Epic Games, or Roblox.

While I have mixed feelings about the trajectory of the internet and the acceleration of our digital world, I do believe that a transition from our current social platforms is inevitable. I am not long on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook—the websites and apps.

We’re going to move into new paradigms that will be more immersive (AR/VR compatible), decentralized, and user-controlled and created—relative to our current paradigm.

With the current NFT craze—perhaps best exemplified by the rise of Crypto Punks and Beeple’s $69 million dollar sale—there is significant demand for people to purchase and interact with scarce digital items and art.

NFTs as a class are not going anywhere, although any given project may become illiquid (no one will buy it from you) or moon (wildly increase in value).

All of “crypto” is a radical challenge to our ways of valuing ideas, art, and mediums of exchange. It is a revolution born from our nascent ability to coordinate by leveraging our [near-]global communications channels and engage in costly signaling. Talk is cheap but now it’s much easier to put your money where your mouth is. Much of crypto may be a bubble and I would not encourage anyone to “bet the farm,” or invest any money they’re not okay losing, but the general technologies are not going anywhere.

My friend framed it to me as “You don’t want to end up with shower regret. If you bet it all and lose, you’ll be standing in your shower and ruminating about how you’re a total sucker. If you don’t have any exposure and a project moons, you’ll be standing there calculating what your portfolio would be worth if you weren’t a risk-averse coward.” Finding a middle ground is easier said than done. FOMO may be unavoidable.

Bitcoin is not going anywhere. NFTs are not going anywhere. Decentralized protocols attempting to disintermediate middle-men of all sorts are not going anywhere. These are global markets and new products and use-cases are emerging every day. Just because it doesn’t solve your personal problems today, doesn’t mean it won’t in the future or isn’t solving someone else’s.

Examples of Gameverses and Use-Cases of NFTs

Axie Infinity

Axie Infinity is the dominant ‘play-to-earn’ game in crypto. It appears to be a mix between a Pokémon (or Dragon Warrior Monsters, iykyk) and Hearthstone. It has generated a lot of buzz because people in countries with lower per capita incomes have begun to play Axie Infinity full-time.

I listened to a podcast where the guest described how he built a business on top of the Axie Infinity economy. They give out Axies (required to play) as a scholarship to people and then take a piece of their earnings from the game. The guest described how people in the Philippines make an average of ~$3,600/year and by playing Axie for 4 hours a day they can earn closer to $12,000/year, approaching the median income of ~$12,955. Based off of those numbers, it seems that people can earn an average wage of ~$8.20/hour playing Axie ($12,000/(365 days * 4 hours) or $32.80/day.

They do this by selling two of the crypto assets generated through game play. AXS (1.8Bn market cap) and SLP (169M market cap). Making money by playing video games is not new—Chinese people were known to farm gold on World of Warcraft and sell it on Ebay, etc. and many Venezuelans play Runescape full-time because the income is more stable than what they can earn in their native currency. However, those markets have always been gray—somewhat tolerated but a violation of the ToS—and you could have your account banned and lose all of your earnings, which potentially means you can’t feed your family. Whereas, as long as you abide by Axie’s ToS, you know that you can swap your assets into the highly liquid market and convert them to stable coins, Ethereum, Bitcoin, etc.

Hidden Ones DAO

My friend Zach released, minted, and sold the first narrative feature film as a 1-of-1 NFT. His film, He Who Lives In Hidden Lakes, is now available for streaming on Amazon Video.

He is now building a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) around the intellectual property in the film. His plan is to build out a cinematic universe where ownership is collectively shared through members of his DAO. The plan is to ensure that the cult fans can benefit from the success of his project and receive rewards for adding-value to the universe, by developing their own lore, helping with marketing, and creating memes and adjacent projects. The possibilities are endless and the vision will continue to adapt as the relevant technology is further developed.

You can read more about their roadmap and check out their other NFTs here.

NFTs and tokenized DAOs allow creators to bootstrap their initial networks by creating powerful incentive alignment. In this paradigm, users are also owners. Without these incentives, competing with a more established player would be much more difficult.

Nifty Island

At present, if I had to take a bet on which upstart might be able to rival the Z*ckerverse, or at least parts of it, Nifty Island would be my choice. Their gameverse is not live but I love the vision and they have a highly engaged early community.

Nifty Island aims to be a mix between Roblox, Animal Crossing, and Open Sea. Each player will receive an island when they join, which they can customize with a mix of built-in elements and home-made art. You will be able to meet up with your friends and play games, engage with your existing NFTs, and buy, trade, and sell [mini-]games and artifacts to other users. And who knows what else!

This is a look at how the terrain system will work. The more important content to consume, if you’re interested in learning more, are these two long-form interviews with one of the co-founders, Charles, here and here.

Facebook has the users, it has its own native token, it has an VR company and developers, and it may even have the right talking points. But it goes with the old saying “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” They may claim that their digital world is going to be open and artist, developer friendly. But that’s how both Facebook and Instagram started as well.

First it was open and the spaces were made beautiful through the hard work of a diverse set of people. Now they’re down-ranking and banning creators who don’t fit within a certain deviation from the norm. If you build on Facebook’s digital land, you should expect to become a digital serf.

The Nyft team is positioning themselves as radically open and player owned. They’re making intentional decisions to ensure their world will not just be dominated by a few early entrants. Other gameverses have a fixed amount of digital land and are essentially allowing their friends to come in and buy up the prime real estate. Now they can just sit on it and wait for the value to rise. Literally recreating the worst part of our present reality, the dynamics that are wreaking havoc on cities like San Francisco and New York City.

In juxtaposition, Nifty Island is going to give everyone an island when they join and the map will be dynamic. By contributing to the world and adding value, you will be rewarded. The dynamics will encourage new people to bring their talents to their ecosystem long after launch. Of course being early will give you certain rewards and opportunities, assuming the project succeeds. But they’re avoiding the model of gifting the ‘first district’ of a new city to friends and family and damning everyone else to a sort of digital homelessness.

If this project is interesting to you and you’re an elite front-end developer, please reach out to me. I would like to make an introduction to Charles. This is not sponsored content but he is offering a finder’s fee and I’d love for them to win.

I hope this brief introduction to the world of gameverses was interesting for you. Please reach out if you’d be interested in learning more. As someone who is interested in building community, in-person and online, these projects and their dynamics are incredibly interesting to me.

Maybe one day we’ll all be vibing on my island, as we plan an in-person meetup in Austin, or elsewhere!

Your Friend,
Grant

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The past two weekends have been filled with adventures and great conversation with new friends. My life in Austin has continued to be blessed. It has been a bit too uncertain and hectic for my preferences but everything is starting to come together…I decided to sign a lease to live here for another year! So if you ever want to visit, please give me a heads up.

In Optimistic Chaser, I floated the idea of starting an email course on Community Leadership. Many of you signed-up and the initial responses have been wonderful.

I want to add a little momentum behind that project, so I decided that this week’s [day late] Seeking Tribe post will partially be a repost of the first informative email from that series. I invested a good chunk of money in the email manager, ConvertKit, to make that project more professional, so all free (for now) subscriptions and feedback are greatly appreciated.

If you decide to read through to the end of the email and sign-up today, then it will look familiar…but I figured some of you would like to read that post, even if you don’t want to sign-up.

This is an attempt at what people now call ‘building in public’.

This is my rough plan:

• create a basic web form for people to subscribe to this email course ✅

• send out an initial email announcing my intent to create the course, partially to make up for that Sunday’s email being a bummer ✅

• personally email everyone who joins to see why in particular they’re interested in joining (IN-PROGRESS)

• convert material from my book, twitter, and blogs into a well-structured email course—refining it as I go along; add more emails to ‘the sequence’ aka the curriculum

• use the responses to help me to generate ideas for short, powerful emails with discrete lessons, so far they’ve given me ideas for: “why precedents are fake but useful”, “how to identify a community run by someone who knows exactly what they’re doing”, “you can’t be efficient with people”, “the founding’s echo”, “how to build an organization that will die without you”…

• build relationships with the initial cohort of members one email, zoom call, etc at a time and identify people who I should prioritize interviewing to gather stories and insights from (and for case studies!)

• curate this material based on feedback and turn it into a series of video lectures and a synchronous, cohort-based course (that is worth paying for)

• future emails will be around 400-800 words long

• ????????????????????????????

• profit
  

If that sounds interesting to you, please consider joining today:

Take the leap!

This email is a draft from my ‘Community Leadership in the 21st Century’ course:

Hi Friend,

Welcome to the first edition of my email course on Community Leadership in the 21st Century!

Since my last email, I have been replying to each student who sent me a reply. Some were short, some were incredibly detailed—all of them were appreciated!

People are interested in and working on leading a wide-variety of projects and communities. I will keep the details sparse but I wanted to give you a little information about the cohort who has opted into this course. If there’s interest, I can create an easy way for y’all to connect with one another.​

Building and rebuilding communities in the 21st century is going to be a challenge. The great news is that we can learn from and collaborate with each other as we continue on this journey. We're all early! We see and recognize problems in our world and we're determined to play a part in solving them and convince others to join us. The problems might range from loneliness to localized pollution to the lack of barbecue block parties in our neighborhood. Either way, y'all have taken the first step and you know you're not alone.

One cohort member is currently helping a friend to get their feet back under them after facing a series of personal setbacks. She mentioned that there’s a stark divide between [exhausted, struggling] people she knows who need direct mutual aid from someone they trust to help solve their problems—ie. finding a better job, a new apartment—and those who are in the position to throw money at all of their problems, and often choose to. There’s a SaaS company, or otherwise specialized service, that found their apartment or last job for them.

Many people in the latter group do want to be a part of a community. They feel atomized and often lonely. It’s convenient to watch your problems melt away one ApplePay transaction at a time but it will not fill your life with meaning.

“[For them] money is easy and ingratiating yourself to an established community is hard.” This may be the situation for many of you reading this. She emphasized that she is particularly interested in how we might help people in this demographic to create and, perhaps more importantly, join and contribute to existing communities, particularly those focused on service.

Money can solve your money problems but belonging and meaning aren’t simply money problems.

Another cohort member has been on the road for over a year. After exploring the grand beauty of the United States, he’s looking to plant roots somewhere and identify people who share his values and interests. He’s unsure if he wants to build his own community, seek out one worth joining, or prepare to be a valuable and contributing community member, when serendipity connects him with one that resonates deeply.

He mentioned how it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you need to create your own scene. When the reality is that you could join an existing community and help to co-create its future.

​One downside of our individualist and credentialist culture is the desire to claim titles of authority and weave our need for belonging into part of a grand narrative about our competence and status.

The good news is this may have already reached its peak absurdity.

Although this is a bit after my time, I’ve heard it is now an annual custom that 11th graders throughout the United States, at least ones intent on admission into competitive universities, will flood their peers with invitations to subscribe to their business or non-profit on Instagram and LinkedIn. Every one of these students wants to be able to add ‘Founder’ and ‘President’ to their college application. Maybe some of the ventures will last into the future and provide genuine value for the people who interface with them...but many are just part of a social fiction.

This dynamic likely has and will continue on beyond high school. It’s partially the result of a digitized social landscape where people can see your follower count or LinkedIn profile more readily than they can witness how many people smile and hug you when you arrive at a party or a local venue. Let alone the number of people who call you when they are suffering, down and out, and know they need support from someone who they can trust.

You used to have to take responsibility and invest in something beyond yourself to earn social status, now you might be able to get it through a well-crafted digital presence.

There’s merit to the idea of claiming an identity as a leader, even if it starts out superficially—like being elected president of your high school after running a meme campaign at age 15 (my origin story). We need more people to take on these social roles—that’s part of the motivation behind me creating this course. The problem is when it all becomes diluted into cheap signaling. When there’s a proliferation of half-baked, faux organizations. This is a cheap simulation of ‘community’. There needs to be a corresponding sense of responsibility and value. It’s a problem if it’s only a narrative, even if it’s a pleasant fiction. A superficial title, however, can give you permission to take ownership, develop your identity as a leader, and turn your narrative into reality.

A few intended key points from this email:

• Your feedback is vital to the creation of this course—I will genuinely engage with your prompts and replies

• The people who have opted into this course are thoughtful and interesting, we can learn from each other’s experiences

• If you’re building a community, you need to go above-and-beyond to connect with founding members and understand their motivations for joining—my intention is to connect with as many of you as possible over the coming weeks (and beyond)

• You don’t have to create a community to lead one

• Money can solve your money problems but belonging and meaning aren’t money problems

• One downside of our individualist and credentialist culture is the desire to claim titles of authority and weave our need for belonging into part of a grand narrative about our competence and status

• Claiming a position of authority, even superficially, may be your first step towards genuine community leadership—it was for me

​

Are any of these topics that you'd like for me to explore in greater depth?

What questions do you have?

Please reply with any and all thoughts and constructive feedback.

Thanks again for all of the thoughtful responses and for being early adopters. Your replies were generative and gave me useful insights into the kinds of emails that y'all will be interested in receiving. Please keep them coming, our work here has just begun! You'll hear from me soon…

If you want to join me on that adventure, here’s the link again:

We must rebuild!

​

If not, no worries! I will not have another excerpt post like this again. Although I’m sure there will be some crossover.

I hope everyone has a wonderful start to their week! I’ll be back here next Sunday—going to have a low-key week.

Your Friend,
Grant

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Hi Friends,

I had been recommended Jane Jacobs for years and now that I’ve completed Dark Age Ahead, I wish that I had pursued that recommendation earlier. Jacobs shares my deep acknowledgement and respect for complexity, liberal biases, and unrelenting pragmatism. The ideas presented her work might be the closest to what I’ve appeared to have coined, or at least popularized, as “liberal localist”.

I don’t want to try to define what I mean by liberal localism in this post. The term liberal is fraught, which is why I’ve decided to partially claim it. It is at least in juxtaposition to illiberalism, which seems to be on the rise in our culture on both the right and the left. We all know it when we see it in those we disagree with. Illiberalism might as well be defined as “a willingness to use coercion and deception[, despite your proclaimed values of tolerance, freedom of expression, and love of liberty,] because you believe the ends justify the means.”

A few choice excerpts from Dark Age Ahead and commentary:

Ultimately, the real world tests all hypotheses, and usually quickly. When answers from the real world seem to come slowly, it is seldom the evidence itself that is slow to appear; rather, observers are blind to evidence or emotionally can't bear to credit it. This is why the crashing of the Berlin Wall finally was required as an exclamation point, after unheeded evidence of many decades reported that Marxism was untruthful as an economic theory.

It is not until the system catastrophically fails that many theorists are forced to admit that they were mistaken. Recently, even Bill Kristol had to admit that he was mistaken about the Iraq War. You can only see past the poor results of your ideas for so long. [This quote isn’t to deny the reality of class—the socially constructed categories based on behaviors and other associated signals.]

The credentials may indeed be a good investment for them but are not a good investment for society.

Other cultures have fallen victim in the past to disconnection between credentials and education. American and European scholars who observed the disconnection in nineteenth century China gave it the name mandarinism and denigrated it as stultifying.

Jacobs spends a good part of Dark Age Ahead discussing the issues that she foresaw coming in higher education. We often discuss the benefits of higher education from the point of the individual, ie. you will have significantly larger lifetime earnings if you have a college degree. This is different than the question of, “should we structure our society such that people who do not have a college degree will have meaningfully worse economic prospects?” Our obsession with credentialism has and will continue to cause a lot of pain.

...a large part of the country is economically stagnant or declining, and to understand what is going on behind national statistics on jobs, one must know where the jobs are being added or lost. It never happens amorphously, in the country as a whole. Everything that happens in the world happens at some place.

I love this quote. It prompted the phrase in my mind “real news is local.” Who is doing what, where, how? Statistics are not news. Moral claims are not news. Even the best spreadsheet is still an abstraction. It may be useful for making certain kinds of decisions but it will leave you blind to potential second and third order effects. Your measurement may even create unintended effects—Goodhart’s Law.

The combination of the appearance of professional respect for scientific rigor coupled with professional contempt for scientifically rigorous behavior is toxic, a poison that infects more activities in North America than the few I have pointed out here. It cripples foreign aid programs, pedagogy, and illegal drug policies, and it promotes dubious and harmful medical treatment, fads, nutrition, and other lifestyle advice, and agricultural recommendations.

Jacobs tells the story of the Chicago Heat Wave of 1995. 739 Chicagoans died as a result of the extreme heat. A terrible tragedy. The CDC went to investigate why so many individuals, particularly the elderly, had died. Their reports were unhelpful and did nothing to elucidate the asymmetries that led some people to die while others lived.

The American sociologist, Eric Klinenberg, conducted his own research to try to figure out what had happened. He discovered that there were 10x the deaths in the less walkable places in Chicago. The residents were not friends with the local shopkeepers and did not ask if they could loiter in their air conditioned shops. They were afraid they would be burglarized if they left their apartment. When their neighbors came to check on them, they did not trust them. As a result, they stayed home and died. In his book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, he articulates how the absence of community kills.

Subsidiarity is the principle that government works best—most responsibly and responsively—when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses. Fiscal accountability is the principle that institutions collecting and disbursing taxes work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing the money.

The total inflows generated by taxes and outflows spent on projects and services are an, often distracting, abstraction. If you hate the military industrial complex, you have no problem seeing how the Pentagon has been a poor steward of public funds. Likewise, few people know that in real, inflation-adjusted dollars we’re currently paying by far the most per-pupil for government education that we ever have.

Meanwhile, I know from many of my teacher friends that they have had to spend their own money to provide certain supplies for their classrooms. These are the results of a lack of subsidiarity and fiscal accountability. There’s plenty of money being allocated (and there should be!) but there is no real accountability in how it is spent. It would be preferable to have a localized system where the decision-makers have wide-autonomy and yet can be held accountable for poor decisions (fired or perhaps worse). I could’ve chosen any number of systems for my examples.

For $25,000 per student, a teacher could teach 5 students, provide them catered, nutritious meals, and make $90,000.

No longer was new assisted housing set apart from the normal city, nor its residents stigmatized as project dwellers. If their incomes rose, they tended to stay by choice, making it feasible to raise rents when tenant's incomes rose, which released money to augment further infilling.

The biggest issue with housing in many localities is that it’s essentially illegal to build more. Existing landowners do not want there to be more apartment buildings. Every new unit is competition that could decrease their current rents. It’s also true that the locals may want to deter people from moving there—but that hasn’t worked out well in San Francisco. Excessive burdens to building new housing might just lead to your community, particularly renters, being forced to move to a less expensive area.

Jacobs describes how under the leadership of David Crombie and Michael Dennis, Toronto cut provincial and federal red tape and gained greater autonomy over its housing projects. They sought out smaller sites throughout the city where they could build new units of affordable housing. These projects were successful because they were woven into the fabric of the city. The tenants were part of a less transitory community, they could plant roots and they often did. Unfortunately, at least at the time of publication (2002), these projects were again inhibited by Canada’s federal bureaucracy.

In many expensive, gentrifying cities, how many dead parking lots could be turned into, publicly or privately owned, housing projects?

Perhaps the greatest folly possible for a culture is to try to pass itself on by using principles of efficiency. When a culture is rich enough and inherently complex enough to afford redundancy of nurturers, but eliminates them as an extravagance or loses their cultural services, through heedlessness of what is being lost, the consequence is self-inflicted cultural genocide.

Central planning, whether by leftists or conservatives, draws too little on local knowledge and creativity, stifles innovations, and is inefficient and costly because it is circuitous. It bypasses intimate and varied knowledge directly fed back into the system.

Much of this book is critiquing the neoconservative regime that was in power in Canada in 2002. However, people of all ideologies could learn a lot from the analysis of Jacobs. There were points in the book which were a bit slow, and would likely be redundant for someone who had read Jacobs’ other works, but it was overall enjoyable to read.

I loved how the book ends with a “Notes and Comments” section. She expands the discussion of certain topics that she had mentioned in the book and includes references to other works that she recommends. That section was over 40 pages and I read it in its entirety.

This book made me think a lot about the potential for a Dark Age, the damage that our present decisions are inflicting on the long-run health of our communities, and my own role in helping others to build and preserve community in their localities.

I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in public policy, urbanism, and community.

There’s quite a bit on my to-read right now but I intend to read several of the books mentioned in the bibliography: The Clock of the Long Now, Medieval Cities, Astounding, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, The Economy of Cities, Globalization and Its Discontents.

Please let me know if you liked this style of post. I’ve enjoyed writing a bit about this book as I worked through it, it certainly feels like it will help me to retain more of the ideas and anecdotes. As always, all constructive feedback is encouraged. This is still the early days of Seeking Tribe!

Your Friend,
Grant

I am launching a free email course on Community Leadership in the 21st Century. It will eventually become a paid, cohort-based course—your initial support for the project will help me to create an excellent product and empower hundreds, or even thousands, of leaders. Please consider signing up, those emails will be short and catered to the needs of the initial cohort. If it’s not a fit for you, send it to the emerging leader in your life ;)

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Most of you signed up for Seeking Tribe because you believe a more beautiful and meaningful future is possible. Several people have told me that they love my newsletter because it’s a little, distilled dose of high energy optimism in your inbox. I did not deliver on that this past Sunday.

I’ve returned to your inbox today to bring that energy!

I received a lot of responses to my last post—almost all of which were positive, although the most common descriptions of it were “brutal” and “haunting”. My hope was to illustrate where our future may go if we allow ourselves to be pacified by the complexity and overwhelming noise of our present moment.

The past few books I read emphasized the risks that we face and I wanted to briefly share a pessimistic perspective. As I referenced in A Little Dark Age Ahead?:

…I do concede that pessimists play a vital role in helping optimists to realize their visions. As my friend, Muhammad, put it, “Pessimism is always hugging you, protecting you from unnecessary risks.”

But there is no reason to despair. We have agency. The decisions that we make locally and interpersonally tilt us toward or away from the aforementioned dystopia—in our present and our future. A little shock may be all that’s necessary to refocus our attention.

Now is a time for action.

Students are working to rebuild their organizations after multiple semesters of limited activity. Motivated activists are working to ban no-knock warrants in their locality. Neighbors are coordinating to help their elderly neighbors to rake up their leaves and keep their backyard in a dignified state. I’m sure back at iZone (the innovation center I co-founded) there are dozens of students working to solve all kinds of problems, big and small.

Is there a problem in your local environment that you could help solve?

What about an ambitious, collaborative project that you’ve been keeping on the back burner?

Now is the perfect time to take the first step and I’d like to help.

I am currently designing a course on Community Leadership.

My plan is to keep it simple at the beginning. It will start as a series of highly curated, brief emails sharing information and frameworks designed to help you to refine and realize your visions.

My hope is that some of you will participate, give me feedback, and in exchange I’ll do my best to help you solve your specific problems.

A few topics that will be covered:

• Refining your vision

• Recruiting your first collaborators

• Avoiding burnout

• Building an organization that can survive beyond your tenure

• Engaging members

• Communications strategy

• Introspective leadership

If you’re interested in something specific that is not mentioned in that list, do not worry. You can reply to this email with any questions or specific topics you would like me to cover. Likewise, if you sign up for the course, you will have many opportunities to ask questions and make requests.

The email course will be completely free.

In the future, it will likely morph into a more lucrative venture. But until then it will be a labor of love and hopefully help me to find more readers for Seeking Tribe and Lead The Future.

You can sign-up for the course here.

Take the leap!

Jane Jacobs ended Dark Age Ahead on a positive note:

Vicious spirals have their opposites: beneficent spirals, processes in which each improvement and strengthening leads to other improvements and strengthening in the culture, in turn further strengthening and initial improvement…Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole.

You’re capable of even more than you imagine. We all are. All of us deciding to take initiative to solve one additional problem within our locality and competency could cause a beautiful, beneficent spiral. We don’t know where this adventure might take us!

And don’t forget, as the Zoomers say, we’re all gonna make it. WAGMI.

Your Friend,
Grant

Please share this post with your friends, family, students, neighbors, etc. In particular, I hope to reach a lot of students and ambitious, young people ages 15-26

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Hopefully Grimes is in on this one too!