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My son taking regular naps and going to bed earlier has super charged my ability to be productive
A Moment of Compassion for Elon
I often wonder if being rich is the same as being big. I’m a big guy. I was shaving by late fifth grade and I was six feet tall by the time I graduated from sixth grade. Lifting up heavy things came easy to me, so that even —no matter how much my wife disbelieves— IKEA butcher block countertops don’t pose a significant challenge. During my entire developmental period, and growing up in a poorer county where we just all fought with each other as a form of recreation, I could always count on being able to fight at least three or four of my peers simultaneously. We even had comical battles where everyone would jump on me all at once and I would throw them off me across the yard one at a time. This is a form of rough-housing that has almost entirely disappeared from our culture. No one ever got hurt for more than a few minutes. It was fun. Everyone laughed.
One of the things I hate about being big is the increased responsibility whenever someone gets rowdy in a public space. People immediately look to you to do something. I’m pretty good as deescalating stuff like that and, apart from a very few times, I have never had to take things to a physical level. The other part I hate about being big, which I think is probably similar to being rich, is that there’s a certain type of person who feels free to use tenuous connections to you to start shit and then expects you’ll back them up.
I wonder if this is something close to how Elon Musk feels whenever someone is stands around saying “If only someone with a large enough fortune could fund a scientific magazine…”
I think we should all take a moment to feel gratitude to Elon for showing up to kick the asses of these problems because he exposes himself to a very real level of risk that we do not. Even if you would do it differently, he’s the only one of us actually in the arena.
TWITTER OVERALL
I’m very proud of Elon Musk on a human level. It makes me proud that we have humans that do stuff like actually lay foundational changes to the energy infrastructure or build space exploration companies. I feel extremely grateful he’s bought Twitter and I think the company is pushing in the right direction. It also seems like he’s been quieter the last few weeks and that things are going well.
Whatever he’s doing to sustain himself emotionally to keep distant like that, I pray to whatever gods read substack that he continues to do it. I also hope in the coming months that the turbulence may die down a bit so that he can make an exit.
Again, not to be the crazy person who thinks the president is talking to him with his choice of ties, but I think there’s a widespread energy about what the right thing is to build. The only thing I haven’t seen specifically is a Decentralized News Editor but the bit about user rights seems to be bubbling up in the right places. Whether it’s the All-In Podcast, Sriram Krishnan on Twitter, or even Curtis Yarvin it seems to have become a vibe.
If I were Elon, I would now focus on getting Sriram Krishnan to take over at Twitter and making an exit from active day to day leadership. I have exchanged exactly one email with Sriram but have since listened to a few of his podcasts and… I can just smell a winner. You know how you meet someone who is just all around better than you? I don’t mean they can do everything you can do but better, but whose soul is just fundamentally more well put together than yours? That’s Sriram Krishnan. He just exudes focus, dedication, loyalty, and goodness.
He’s also the kind of person I think it would just be very very difficult for even the most lunatic blue-haired SJW or staunch high and tight hair-cutted pseudo Nazi to be mad with. He could make a decision you didn’t like and nothing in his body language or mannerism would give you anything to latch onto and wail about. He exists in a state of captivating, emotionally healthy, totally spiritually well maintained, boredom. He also led some very successful product teams and product transformation is what is needed now at Twitter.
More on the Yarvin Stuff
Yarvin seems to have all the pieces of an algorithmic republic and what’s more, he seems to understand them. Or at least he does from his worldview. I had not been at all aware of this until a comment was dropped here the other day.
So, I have a slight tenuous connection here as well. I won second place in a writing contest on which he was a judge, but in a category he didn’t judge. I have been trying to send soft feelers out here and there just trying to get the ideas into popular culture. Also I wanted money to buy a live edge slab to build a table. I have no idea if it’s the case the he picked up some of my ideas or if he’s been thinking along parallel lines for a while, and to be honest don’t really care. I just want to see the future change for the better. I really wasn’t fully aware of Yarvin or what his thoughts were on the world at large —I’m probably still not— until I listened to a few podcasts, but I figured since he was associated with Peter Thiel who is associated with Mike Solana that he had to be okay.
I do sense some general edge-lordiness and a couple of things that make me perk up my ears a bit when he talks about kings. Then again, I’m a bit of a buffoon and can’t stop making jokes. I don’t think internal to his worldview I find a lot of problems, except I would say that all kings bow to the ultimate king, meaning the rules of reality or God to those of us who are less bashful about such things.
There were a very few particulates in his write-up linked a few posts ago that I don’t think are quite right but I also don’t expect any plan of action to survive first contact with reality intact.
I arrived at where I arrived at with my answers by thinking of civilizations as basically Voltron like constructions of many people, both productively performing tasks AND more critically not performing certain other tasks, but in a very deliberate and coordinated way. The goal here is to not have to spend a lot of your time thinking about all of this and to just have it quietly work in the background. The better than any group of people do this, the more extelligent they become, from which I take the name of this substack. Any civilization has certain feedback loops in it that I call an Intellipode which has to be optimized to make this occur. It has to connect to the real world, it has to provide clean signal, it has to find right actors and reward right behavior. The better it can do all those things the healthier the civilization becomes. The Decentralized News Editor is part of the Sense Making Intellipode. It’s the primary thing we need to fix that will enable us to fix all the other ones. It’s the thing that fixes things, and right now it’s broken.
I’m glad he’s spreading it to his audience and I am hopeful that others will start to do so as well. If the appeals, voting, and news structure end up in the popular conscience I can finally sit down on my couch and watch MacGyver re-runs like I’ve wanted to all of my adult life.
Peter Theil? No man, just no. Have you read Whitney Webb and seen how and who Theil is connected to? Are you into the ‘altruistic’ stuff, like SBF?