I want something.

The inability to verbalize a Want is often the first sign of a disordered relationship. Whenever I find myself in a social setting and hesitant to verbalize a Want, it’s almost always a sign I am in the wrong place. Either I am around people I do not trust, or I am in a dysfunctional relationship of some kind. Maybe even with myself.

Water Drowning in Water

The shoreline calls the sea
For simple words and company,
But words go on and on,
Till they collide and all is gone.
I dive into the deep—into the sea inside of me
To find another song,
To find a place where I belong

Last year I fell into the briefest yet most tumultuous romantic entanglement I’ve ever experienced.

On a couple of occasions I've expressed interest upon meeting someone for the first time but as of yet that approach hasn’t gone anywhere. My usual path to courtship goes something like:

Pre-existing friendship of many years —> Notice mutual interest —> Ask out

In the case of this relationship I noticed her interest the moment it manifested. We were dancing together for the first time and you could practically see the spark light up her eyes. I laughed in the moment and wondered if everyone else saw it too. One of the people who witnessed it later told me they did.

We were already in the habit of talking often so our pattern didn’t change much, only the subjects of conversation. A few weeks later she came to visit. During that visit the relationship abruptly ended.

I’ve had relationships end suddenly before. One time a partner realized I was serious about her and the idea of commitment so terrified her that she ghosted me for months. I ended another relationship the moment I realized I couldn’t imagine myself marrying her. This ending came about just as suddenly. Why?

It’s been a year now and I still am periodically flooded with grief over this experience and struggle to explain why when asked about what happened. Speaking about what literally took place moment to moment fails to capture its emotional weight. Especially since our threads were entangled so briefly. We would be talking. The art on the wall. The music on the radio. A film one of us had seen recently…

Spending time with her is easy. Natural. Effortless. I am on a walk through a forest in Southern Germany. I can smell the mustard fields. The unmistakable birdsong of the blue tit fills my ears. I step over the exposed roots of a silver fir, and—

—now I am in a glass box. The box is in the sea. The world around me is growing steadily darker. Above me there are already several meters of water. How did I get here? I’m trying to find an opening but the box appears to be solid. Somehow water is seeping in from all directions. It’s up to my neck already. I won’t be able to breathe much longer…

A punctuated equilibrium of serenity and terror.

Seeing the Face of God

“The universe unfolds in God,
who fills it completely.

Hence, there is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf,
in a mountain trail,
in a dewdrop,
in a poor person’s face.

The ideal is not only to pass from the exterior
to the interior
to discover the action of God in the soul,
but also to discover God in all things.”

It is not unusual for me to see the spark of divinity within someone but it usually takes me years to develop romantic interest. But when I saw her face for the first time I could see in her the face of God.

Today I am writing this because after speaking with her briefly for the first time in months, I realized I am no longer in love with her. And…

I want to see the face of God again.

When I look at my past romantic partners they have very little in common, but what they do have in common seems to be nearly universal. So consider this a request to help me play with Lachesis:

If you know a woman who has the following combination of traits please introduce us.

• Black hair

• IQ >130

• Gives more moral weight to Human Liberty than most

• Gives more moral consideration to children than most

• High conscientiousness

• High emotional attunement

• Low neuroticism

• Profoundly Present

• Identifies as an artist or a writer

• Wants to have children (and homeschool them)

Thanks in advance. May 2026 bring you Many Blessings!

In 1978 Astrid was awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (an international peace prize awarded annually by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels in Frankfurt). Upon hearing that she had received this award she informed the Association that she would only be willing to accept the prize if she was able to deliver an acceptance speech of her choosing. They begrudgingly allowed her to do so. The speech seems to have been almost entirely deleted from the internet (I suspect The Astrid Lindgren Company publishing an English translation of the speech in 2018 has something to do with that), but you can hear a snippet of it in the original German in this video. Since I suspect fewer than a dozen of my readers speak German, I’ve reproduced it in English in its entirety for you here. If you enjoy films that make you cry, I also highly recommend the film Unga Astrid, about her life from age 17-21. Without further ado, here is Astrid Lindgren’s famous speech, Never Violence!

My dear friends!

The first thing I must do is to thank you, and I do so with all my heart. The German Publishers’ Peace Prize radiates such a glittering aura, and having been awarded it feels like such an honor that actually holding it in my hands makes me weak at the knees. But here I am, on the very spot where, over the years, so many wise men and women have held forth and expressed their hopes for the future of mankind and the lasting peace that we all long for.

What can I say that hasn’t already been said in a better way than I am capable of? To speak about peace is to speak about something that doesn’t exist. Genuine peace is nowhere to be found on this earth, and has probably never existed except as a goal that we are evidently unable to achieve.

For as long as we humans have lived on this planet, we have been indulging in violence and war, and the fragile peace that sometimes exists is constantly under threat.

At this very moment, the whole world is in fear of a new war that will destroy us all. In the face of that threat, it is true to say that more people than ever before are working for peace and disarmament. That could be seen as a hope. But it is so difficult to be hopeful. Politicians gather in their hordes for summit meetings, and talk so animatedly in favor of disarmament; but only the disarmament they want other nations to undertake. Your country must disarm, not mine! Nobody wants to be the first to start disarming, nobody dares to start, because everybody is so afraid and has so little faith in the aspirations for peace of others.

And while one disarmament conference follows another, the reality is that rearmament is proceeding apace on a scale never before seen in the history of the world. It’s not surprising that we’re all afraid, whether we live in the east or the west, in the north or the south; whether we live in a country that is a great power, or in a small neutral country.

We know that a new major war would affect the whole of humanity, and it makes little difference if, at the end of it, I lie dead in a pile of ruins that is neutral or non-neutral.

After all these millenia of constant war, is it not time for us to ask ourselves if there is some inherent fault in the human condition that continually drives us to violence? Are we doomed to perish as a result of our aggression? We all desire peace. So is there any possibility at all of our changing fundamentally, before it’s too late? Of our learning to distance ourselves from violence? Of our trying quite simply to become a new kind of human beings? But how could we go about that, and where should we start?

I believe that we should start from the bottom. With the children. You have awarded your peace prize to a writer of children’s books, and that means you can’t expect from me any wide-ranging political visions or proposals for the solution of international problems. I want to talk about the children. My worries about them, and my hopes for them. The children of today will eventually take over the running of our world, if there is anything left of it. They are the ones who will make decisions concerning war and peace and the kind of society they want to have – if they want a society in which violence continues to grow, or if they prefer one in which people live in peace and brotherhood. Is there any hope at all that they will be able to create a more peaceful world than the one we have lumbered ourselves with? And why have we failed so badly, despite all the goodwill that exists?

I recall how shocked I was when it dawned on me at an early age that the people governing the fate of our countries and the world at large were by no means gods with superior capabilities and divine perspicacity. They were human beings, with the same human weaknesses as I had. But they had power, and at any given moment could make the most momentous decisions on the basis of whatever whim inspired them at the time. If things turned out badly, war could break out on the basis of a single person’s lust for power or desire for revenge or vanity or greed or – and this seemed to be the most common reason – an excessive belief in violence as the most effective remedy in all situations. Similarly, a single good and sensible person could sometimes avert catastrophe simply by being good and sensible, and refraining from violence.

There could only be one possible conclusion to draw: the fate of the world was decided by individual people. So why were they not all good and sensible? Why were there so many who wanted nothing but violence and power? Was evil congenital in some people?

I couldn’t believe that, and I still don’t think it is the case. Intelligence and intellectual powers are congenital, but children are not born with a seed that automatically sprouts to develop into good or evil. What decides if a child is going to become a warm, open, trusting person with a propensity for communal feelings or a callous, destructive lone wolf is up to those who bring the child into the world and teach it the meaning of love – or fail to bring home to it what love entails. “Überall lernt man nur von dem, den man liebt,” said Goethe, and so it must be true. One only learns from the people one loves. A child that is surrounded by love and loves its parents learns from them a loving attitude towards the whole of its environment, and retains that attitude for the whole of its life. Which has to be a good thing, even if he or she never becomes one of the few who decide the fate of the world. But if that child, contrary to expectation, does become one of those who decide the fate of the world, we can all be grateful if his or her nature tends to love rather than violence. The character of even our future statesmen and politicians is formed before they have reached their fifth birthday – it’s a dreadful thought, but it’s true.

If we look back as far as possible and consider how children have been treated and brought up down the ages, is it not the case that far too often the norm has been to break their will, physically or mentally, by means of some form of violence? How many children have received their first lessons in violence “von denen die man liebt”, from those they love, from their own parents? And then passed on the lessons learnt from generation to generation? “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” we were urged by the Old Testament. A lot of mothers and fathers have followed that teaching ever since. They have frequently wielded the rod and called it love. There are so many really “spoiled children” in this world of ours today, so many dictators, tyrants, oppressors, torturers – what sort of a childhood did they have? That is something that really ought to be researched. I believe that behind most of them is a tyrannical father or some other figure responsible for their upbringing, wielding a rod or a whip.

Children’s literature has no shortage of depictions of rancorous childhoods featuring domestic tyrants who have beaten their children into a state of obedience and submission, and more or less ruined their lives. But happily they were not the only kind. Thankfully there have always been parents who have brought up their children in an atmosphere of love without violence. But it is probably true to say that it is only in the twentieth century that parents in general have begun to regard their children as their equals, and given them the right to let their personalities develop freely in a family characterized by democracy, without oppression and without violence.

How can one avoid feeling despondent on hearing the current outcry advocating a return to old authoritarian methods? The clamor is coming from various places throughout the world at the moment. People are demanding “a more rigorous approach” and “tighter reins”, and believe this will help to eradicate the youthful vices that are blamed on too much freedom and too little strictness in their upbringing. This is in fact an attempt to drive out the Devil with the aid of Beelzebub, and in the long run can only lead to more violence, and greater and more dangerous gaps between the generations. The “more rigorous approach” being demanded might possibly have a superficial effect that its advocates could interpret as an improvement. Until they are eventually forced to accept that violence gives birth to more violence – as it has always done.

Many parents will no doubt be worried by these new trends, and may start to wonder if they have done wrong, if an anti-authoritarian upbringing is reprehensible. But it is only reprehensible if it is misunderstood. An anti-authoritarian upbringing does not mean that children should be left to drift along and do whatever they please. It does not mean that they should grow up without a set of norms – nor do they want to. Both children and adults need a set of norms as a framework within which to conduct themselves, and children learn more from the example of their parents than from anything else. Of course children should respect their parents, but make no mistake about it: adults should also have respect for their children, and not misuse the natural advantages they have over them. What one would like to see in all parents and all children is mutual loving respect.

I should like to tell all those clamoring for a more rigorous approach and tighter reins what an old lady once told me. She was a young mother in the days when people still believed in the idea of “Spare the rod and spoil the child” – or rather, she didn’t really believe in it, but one day when her little boy did something naughty, she decided he had to have a good hiding, the first one of his life. She told him to go out and find a suitably supple stick or rod for her to use. The little boy was away for a long time. He eventually came back in tears and announced: “I can’t find a rod, but here’s a stone you can throw at me.” At which point his mother also burst into tears, because it had suddenly dawned on her how her little boy must have regarded what was about to happen. He must have thought: “My mum wants to hurt me, and she can do that just as well by throwing a stone at me.”

She threw her arms round him, and they spent some time crying together. Then she placed the stone on a shelf in the kitchen, and it stayed there as a permanent reminder of the promise she had made to herself at that moment: 

never violence

!

However, if we bring up our children without violence and on a loose rein, will we produce a new kind of human being who will live in a state of eternal peace? Only authors of books for children could be simple enough to believe such a thing! I know full well that would be a Utopia. And of course, there are so many more things in our poor, ailing world that must also be changed if we are going to achieve peace. But at this point in time, even though no war is currently raging, there is so incredibly much cruelty and violence and oppression going on in the world; and our children are most certainly not blind to it. They see and hear and read about it every day, and will no doubt end up believing that violence is the natural state of affairs. Is not the least we can do to show by example in our own homes that there is another way of living our lives? Perhaps it would be a good idea for us all to have a little stone on a shelf in our kitchens as a permanent reminder for ourselves and our children: never violence!

Despite everything, that might eventually become a small contribution to world peace.

I bear the name Astrid out of a desire to honor the legacy of this woman, one of the greatest storytellers and advocates for children who has ever lived. I hope I will live up to her name.

1. A different mindset creates a different experience.

My decision to attend last year was motivated primarily by the desire to find people with shared values and a similar cultural context. I went with the strategy of casting a wide net and meeting as many people as possible. By the end of the experience there were over 80 people whose existence became real to me and whose names and faces I could remember (by the end it even became a running gag with people asking me ‘how many are you up to now?’ or doubting my memory and challenging me to look around a group of people and say everyone’s names). Of those I met over a dozen who stood out as exactly the kind of people I was looking for and I decided that I needed to move to be near them, ASAP. So I did. Now I live in LA and get to see some of those people on an almost weekly basis and they have truly enriched my life. With my more immediate social needs met my goal for VibeCamp this year was different. I wanted to spend time intentionally with the people who didn’t live nearby. So spending time with friends living in Europe or on the East Coast was my highest priority.

My first two days of VibeCamp this year were disorienting. I had a couple of great conversations with friends from Europe but most of my time was spent being approached by people I didn’t know who were very excited to meet me. I’m no stranger to notoriety, though at times in the past I’ve tried to intentionally avoid it, but for some reason it hadn’t occurred to me until I was there that I had also developed a reputation among the cluster of people attending VibeCamp. Before showing up I already knew >1/5 of the attendees, but apparently being a Twitter power user + writing cultural dating commentary, warning people about FTX, and being a successful trader has also given me reputation among a significant portion of the attendees who I didn’t already know. I think if I expected it then being repeatedly interrupted or approached wouldn’t have shaken me nearly as much as it did, but it took me by complete surprise. And by the second day of a near constant stream of introductions I needed a midday nap to recover from it.

For the first few of these interactions I was merely surprised. But as it happened again and again that surprise was gradually overtaken by something else, annoyance. I don’t have an internal monologue but if I had to put the feeling to words it would be something like—

Can’t these people see I’m in the middle of another conversation right now? Is there something I need to change about my body language to signal less openness? Is there a way I can make them leave me alone?

By day 3 I had enough of a moment of emotional clarity to recognize what was happening inside of me and redirected that feeling of annoyance—

People are going to keep coming up to me, what a great opportunity to practice gently setting boundaries and expressing my own needs to people I don’t know!

Boundaries are the distance at which you can love someone and boy oh boy did I do a lot of loving people from a distance on days 3 and 4. Once I realized how much emotional energy not setting strong boundaries was costing me, the rest of the week became much easier.

2. Auras are real, and yours are beautiful.

I find myself irresistibly drawn to certain people over others for reasons that defy explanation. It used to bother me to no end that these people who had a gentle but relentless psychic power over me existed at all but several years ago I gave up on trying to resist the endless supply of oxytocin that drips from their lips. Now whenever I encounter them I just give in. Their nonverbal communication is easy to read, their words match their actions, their motives are obvious, their touch is healing. They emanate a sweet sticky sap that coats everything. When I’m around them my entire body relaxes into their presence and my brain can’t help but come up with ways to serve them. It’s a total body, mind, and sensory hijacking—I love it.

Last year during my trip to Austin I learned of the existence of one of these people. She attended again this year as well. In my reflection piece I said that seeing her for the first time made my heart stop and it continues to do so every time since. I’m not sure what place she has in my future but I look forward to finding out.

Earlier this year I met another person who made my heart stop when I saw her. Her aura is different. It doesn’t overpower me. I could resist it if I wanted to but it’s more fun simply allowing the tropical rain to wash over me. Most people would probably see a storm coming and run away but I revel in it. She is like an Ivan Aivazovsky painting that you just keep noticing things about and the longer you look at it the more things you notice that you had missed before and the more admiration you have for the artist. I don’t know whether the Moirai will see fit to entangle our threads but I will continue to admire her for as long as they permit.

3. My Reluctant Hero era is over.

I grew up playing sports. It was my entire life until the age of 14 when for whatever reason all of guys around me suddenly started saying disgusting things about girls and I couldn’t stand to be around them anymore. During my last year I had a coach who gave me a letter as a parting gift after our last practice. The letter’s message is something I would hear repeatedly from every mentor I’ve had since. In it he told me that he had never met someone who was both so obviously a natural leader but also so shy to accept the role. He called me the Reluctant Hero, always trying to set up others to succeed and only taking control when absolutely necessary. And he was dead right. That has been my modus operandi my entire life. I’ve intentionally avoided doing things that I thought would draw attention to myself or cause others to defer to me and continuing down that path will no longer take me where I want to go. It’s time to change my default mode. It’s time to become absolutely comfortable receiving and controlling attention. It’s time to make enemies. It’s time to embrace a new archetype. It’s time to become the Romantic Hero.

4. Postrationalism is no longer a scene, it’s a subculture.

Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?

One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death.1

Publications like The New Atlantis are talking about it, The New York Times has even taken notice, and I don’t remember the last time I had a conversation with my family about the news where they failed to mention something one of my friends had a hand in doing. Postrationalism has graduated from scene to subculture and VibeCamp is the first postrationalist social event. What is postrationalism? I’ll save that for another time; but it’s here to stay, and it took getting on an airplane to Maryland and dancing with postrats from around the world for me to realize it. Will it fall prey to the subcultural trap of being seen by outsiders as cool and get overrun by consumers rather than contributors? Probably. But VibeCamp attendees were almost universally paranoid about it so the subculture might survive for a while. In the meantime there’s much fun to be had and plenty of opportunities to practice playing a new role.

1. I didn’t realize how much I wanted to be around people with a shared cultural reference.

It’s something I was explicitly looking for (hence this trip) but almost immediately I felt at ease in a way that I haven’t in 12 years. There’s something deeply satisfying about being able to strike up a conversation with anyone around you and not having to self-censor or pause to explain the history or meaning of every tenth word out of your mouth.

I was home educated my entire life and was also verboten from most media consumption so I spent my free time reading. For several years in a row I averaged well over 300 books a year. As I got older and spent more time online, most of that reading shifted to blogs, internet forums, and economics and medical journals. Since leaving the religious bubble I grew up in I found myself practically having to learn a new language. People spoke in cultural idioms and memes that I had simply no reference for. Discussions about pop culture were a complete mystery to me. Who were all of these people, what were their relationships, and why did everyone around me care so much about them? One Halloween my friend Alex asked me to guess who he was dressed up as.

Alex: “Did the red suit not give it away? Michael Jackson, obviously.”

Me: “Who’s Michael Jackson?”

Suffice to say, it wasn’t until after leaving my religious fundamentalist house and community that I gained fluency in the dominant cultural memes. In contrast to this during my first day in Austin I was asked by someone at a party what thinker or ideas I found myself unable to get away from and I answered ‘Lao Tzu.’ The person who asked me didn’t need me to follow up my answer with introduction to wuwei, because they had already read more translations of the Tao Te Ching than I had. I could use economics and finance jargon without having to regularly stop and explain the words I was using, and if I did I often wouldn’t even have to finish because the idea wasn’t new to someone, only the word for it. When I said something and then followed it up with my epistemic confidence level and relevant experience, as I often do, someone listening thanked me for it. I’m used to getting eye-rolls for qualifying things I say, not receiving praise for epistemic humility. This experience was a revelation.

2. Above all else, I seek out novelty.

I can predict what most people think or will say very quickly after meeting them. I can identify the power dynamics at play within an institution or a social scene or a room almost immediately from body language alone. The systems, institutions, and people I find most captivating are all those that I don’t immediately understand. When people say things I don’t expect, or are working on problems I didn’t know existed, I’m immediately drawn to them.

During this trip I could talk with someone for thirty minutes and still have no idea how they make money. Most people’s domain of expertise is trivially easy to identify and correlates almost perfectly with how they make money because it’s usually the only area where they’ve spent enough time to develop a nuanced vocabulary and jargon from that field such that it slips into their regular speech (when is the last time you heard someone who didn’t work in medicine refer to their ‘esophagus’ rather than their ‘throat’ for example?) At Vibecamp I had no idea what most of the people I met did, because they used jargon from several domains. If I saw someone reading a 1930’s sexology book this gave me no information about the person other than it was a curiosity for them. If someone started using bio-pharma jargon it didn’t necessarily mean they worked in a lab, they were just as likely to have picked up the vocabulary from a curiosity about the field or from reading biohacking forums and blogs for fun.

Most people are profoundly incurious, and when they hear about something they don’t understand, they only feign interest for social reasons. During this trip, the people I met engaged critically with ideas as they encountered them for the first time and expressed sincere interest in the people they’d never met who were explaining them. I’ve found a few of these people before, and we quickly became fast friends, but I’ve never been in a social context where they were the majority. Not only did I meet a plethora of curious people, but my conversations with several people inspired novel thoughts. There were several conversations that not only took turns I didn’t expect but also required me to update my model of the world. Usually when I encounter ideas that challenge my worldview they come from books or listening to interviews. I’m used to going months between conversations with people that challenge my thinking, not mere hours. It was addicting, and I want more of it.

3. Beautiful people exist.

The last time I met someone beautiful enough to make my heart stop looking at her was 10 years ago. For a couple years I actually said “I’m asexual” as a way to turn people down who expressed a romantic interest in me ‘cause it was easier than telling people I didn’t find them attractive. Even when it comes to celebrities for most of my life I didn’t ‘get it’ when people called them hot. Regrettably, I even talked myself into two relationships with people I wasn’t attracted to (do not recommend). Well, during this trip I met not one but two people who made my heart stop upon seeing them the first time, and one of them is the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen in my life (and during our first conversation I had to update my worldview at least three times, which was an immense pleasure). Whether or not this means anything is as yet to be determined, but the knowledge that there are two more beautiful people in the world of whom I was previously unaware is just as Significant a development as the other things I learned during this trip.

4. Status obsessed people exist.

Regrettably I had extended interactions with two separate people who during our interactions appeared singularly obsessed with status. One spent thirty minutes detailing all of the ways they felt bad, lonely, or inadequate because of not getting invited to a certain party. I spent thirty minutes mirroring their feelings in hopes that they would feel Seen before I eventually gave up. I had three later interactions with this person and during all of them they expressed a desire to be more Known and Liked so they could be party to conversations with who they saw as the Cool People. I’ve met people who behaved as if their social status is all that matters, but I’d never met someone who verbalized it so explicitly before. The other person talked at length about how they felt like certain people at Vibecamp didn’t care about them, which they attributed to their own low Twitter follower count. They then asked me “which of the big accounts did you get to meet?” which I declined to answer. For how much some of my friends and I talk about Finite and Infinite Games, these interactions were a much needed reminder that there is still work to be done on this front, even in the highly self-selected social scene that was Vibecamp.

5. I need to move, ASAP.

The most important thing I learned on this trip is that I need to do whatever is necessary to spend more time around some of these people. During my time in Austin I met over a dozen people whose conversation and company brought me absolute delight and I hope to become close with them all. Luckily for me, the majority of them reside in four cities on the West Coast, and flights between them all are relatively affordable. I suspect I will be traveling regularly for the foreseeable future until I decide where to relocate.

Thank you to all of the gratious party hosts and the Vibecamp organizers! This experience was wholly unique and y’all introduced me to some truly wonderful people.

There is the man who wishes to be rich, but never thinks of discovering what means, actions and conditions are required to achieve wealth. Who is he to judge? He never made the world—and “nobody gave him a break.”

There is the girl who wishes to be loved, but never thinks of discovering what love is, what values it requires, and whether she possesses any virtues to be loved for. Who is she to judge? Love, she feels, is an inexplicable favor—so she merely longs for it, feeling that somebody has deprived her of her share in the distribution of favors.

There are the parents who suffer deeply and genuinely, because their son (or daughter) does not love them, and who, simultaneously, ignore, oppose or attempt to destroy everything they know of their son’s convictions, values and goals, never thinking of the connection between these two facts, never making an attempt to understand their son. The world they never made and dare not challenge, has told them that children love parents automatically.1

I have undoubtedly met an above average number of unusually happy, satisfied, and wealthy people, some of whom I am lucky enough to call friends. Perhaps it’s purely incidental, but without exception they all have three traits in common. The first is a value, the second is a mindset, and the third is a strategy. Today I will talk about the first of these, which I call the the Value of Wealth.

1. The Value of Wealth

Zero Sum games

It’s difficult to overstate how much the game of Texas hold ‘em has changed in the past two decades. These days if you are at all interested in playing poker for money and you haven’t studied Game Theory Optimal (GTO) poker strategy, especially for heads-up poker, you will leave a lot of money on the table—literally. If you don’t understand the optimal strategy and use it to your advantage by exploiting the play of the other plays someone else will, and they will take your money. It’s the equivalent to playing Monopoly and not buying the railroads, or failing to put three houses on New York Avenue, Illinois Avenue, and Tennessee Avenue. You may get lucky, you could still win, but the longer you play, and the less optimally you play (while playing with others who are aware of how to play more optimally than you) the more likely you are to lose.

The principles behind Game Theory Optimal play (known in mathematics and economics as Nash Equilibrium) haven’t been limited to poker and Monopoly, they’ve also been applied to other games like football (soccer) and baseball. What do all of these games have in common that allows the same mathematical principles to be useful for crafting a mathematically optimal strategy, no matter how complex the game, or how much of the game’s information is opaque? They’re all zero sum games. You can only win by creating conditions which ensure someone else’s loss. The most insidious variety of these zero sum games are known as status games.

Status games

Status games are the zero sum games we play in social contexts. The way to ‘win’ at them is relatively straight forward:

1. I can only win by ensuring you lose (or at the very least, ensuring you win less than me).

2. This can only be accomplished by lowering someone else’s social status relative to my own. By decreasing someone else’s status I am increasing my status relative to theirs. By increasing my own status I am decreasing everyone else’s status relative to my own.

All of politics is a status game. Politicians cannot create anything new, they can only redistribute what already exists from one person in a place and time to another. All taxes and penalties are a form of wealth redistribution from one class of people to another. All subsidies are distributions of wealth already stolen from someone else. Subsidies funded through inflation are no exception. Creating new notes does not increase wealth (that is to say: it does not increase standards of living, it does not innovate new products, it does not create novel solutions to existing problems, it does not increase people’s available leisure time) it only redistributes money from certain classes of people to others—while tricking people who can’t do math into spending more of it (the wealth effect). Most famously, inflation redistributes wealth from creditors to debtors by decreasing the real amount owed by debtors.

But political actors in power aren’t the only ones playing status games. Political activists are also playing status games. They’re vying for attention, praise, and social status at the expense of those who disagree with them. Political activism is necessarily destructive rather than constructive. Building new institutions takes work, moving up a social hierarchy by criticizing or shaming someone else as being wrong or evil is easy. Journalism, philosophy, and academia are all places where playing status games is normal, expected, and rewarded. But you don’t have to play.

Micro-Status games

Once you start to notice people playing status games, it becomes difficult to unsee. Most status games are not played at scale, they take place in everyday interactions with friends and family. I’ve taken to calling these micro-status games. In micro-status games the goal of ‘winning’ is less about climbing a social ladder by pushing someone else down it and more about control through emotional manipulation. The ‘win condition’ of these games is to change your behaviour in some significant way that benefits the person engaging in this kind of status game, usually through appeals to morality, reason, or liberal uses of guilt and shame. This is not even usually a conscious effort on the part of the person engaging in it, and more a product of the way they were raised that they feel the need to engage in status games in order to get their own needs met. They’re done by people who are trapped in the zero sum mindset and simply don’t know how to communicate any other way. One of the more common examples of this kind of micro-status game is demands to justify preferences or questioning of personal boundaries. These can even take place in a one-on-one social setting. The conversation goes something like this:

Person 1: Do you want to _____ ?

Person 2: Not really.

Person 1: Why not?

But the ‘why not?’ is rarely so mild. It’s usually accompanied by emotional coldness, pouty faces, or “please, please, please, just this once!” And occasionally the true intention behind the game isn’t masked at all: “If you don’t _____, you must not love me.” Whatever form it takes, the goal is the same. Person 1 is attempting to circumvent a boundary set by Person 2 using guilt and emotional manipulation. The strategic particulars vary depending on the subculture, occasionally this game also involves appeals to Morality or Reason (*cough* Objectivists *cough*), but the goal of changing your behaviour for the benefit of the other person (and at the expense of your own preferences and boundaries) remains the same.

Vivek Patel recently wrote about this on Twitter, and I find his method (and Nonviolent-Communication more generally) for disarming the people who play this particular game incredibly effective. It’s worth reading the whole thread.

Positive Sum games

When the author of Ecclesiastes wrote that there was ‘nothing new under the sun,’ it was very literally true. What could be expected then, as for most of human history, was a general sense of ‘sameness.’ You would live the same quality of life as your parents and would do what they did to survive, which for almost everyone was subsistence farming. Even as recently as 1790, when the first Census of U.S. states took place, 90 percent of respondents listed their occupation as ‘farmer.’ And that actually understates the number who had to engage in food production to live. Sailors kept chickens for eggs while at sea. Most doctors, merchants, and ministers in the new country kept cows for milk or raised chickens in addition to the occasional hog or pig for special occasions. Only the absolute elite were not directly involved in their own food production. It wasn’t until the 1880 Census that fewer than 50% of those in the U.S. identified themselves as farmers. Thanks to a hundred years of advances in food production efficiency some people finally had time to do literally anything other than worry about how to get enough food.

By the 1920s the majority of U.S. citizens were living in cities and fewer than 25% were directly involved in food production. Later still, thanks to the incredible abundance of a newly discovered non-human energy resource, oil refined by the Standard Oil Company, the internal combustion engine lifted tens of millions out of poverty. And then two world wars abruptly set back advances in standards of living by almost an entire generation. Many had to relearn the only life their ancestors had known, and the U.S. government engaged in a decade of farming propaganda efforts to nobelize subsistence farming to a generation who had previously been wealthy enough to focus their time and attention on other things. The War Food Administration’s ‘Victory farm’ during WWII is one of the more famous examples of this as most Americans were forced out of necessity to convert their yards into farms and learned how to feed themselves. By 1950 further technological advances had resumed the trend towards progress and out of subsistence poverty for most U.S. citizens. In the 1950 Census fewer than 13% of respondents identified as farmers. By 1980 that number was down to 3.4%.

In 1968, Alan Kay came up with the idea for what he later called the Dynabook, a portable tablet with a screen that children could use to learn about the world and share their ideas and creations with each other. He then spent decades of his life creating foundational technologies that we all rely on today in an effort to realize his original vision. A couple weeks ago I spent time at my aunt and uncle’s house with their two kids, who spent a not-insignificant amount of time using their iPads to play games like Duo Lingo and watch YouTube tutorials on how to speedrun Minecraft. They have never had to worry about having enough food to eat. They don’t spend most of their time helping their parents raise animals or growing food, hoping that there isn’t a particularly long drought or flood and that they will have enough to last through the winter months.

Today, thanks to the vision and dedication of people like Alan Kay playing positive sum games, we are among the first humans in history to live in a state of relative abundance. Progress and technological advancement are now the rule rather than the exception. That doesn’t mean that all problems have been solved, only that we have the opportunity to focus our time and attention on things other than our own food for the first time in human history.

Positive Sum games are games where by merely playing the game you increase the total amount of resources. At the end of the game, if you add up everyone’s resources the number is higher than total amount all players initially put in. They are games where it’s possible for everyone playing the game to win when anyone else does.

Building new tools that solve problems is an example of exactly this kind of positive sum game. As Bret Victor says, a new tool “addresses human needs by amplifying human capabilities. That is, a tool converts what we can do into what we want to do. A great tool is designed to fit both sides.”

By creating new tools that address human needs and amplify human capabilities, everyone is better off. Even if they aren’t the ones directly using the tool, because someone else is able to better solve a problem, we all have more time to do other things that we want to do. Fewer people have to worry about producing their own food because farming has become so much more efficient. By reducing the labor time needed to complete a task, we unlock more time for human creativity to solve new problems, like how to produce a portable touchscreen for children to learn about and explore the world that’s also cheap enough that every household can afford one (Alan Kay is still working on that part). This virtuous cycle is the reason that you’re even reading this right now!

There are lots of other positive sum games we can play at a micro scale too, my personal favourite is raising other’s aspirations. It costs me almost nothing to encourage friends to seek out greater ambitions and then chase them, but there is a huge payoff for both themselves and everyone else with whom they share the earth. Marriage is another example of a positive sum game (with compounding returns!), the longer it lasts and the more you put into the relationship the more you and your partner get out of it. Give away your best ideas and advice for free. Teach everything you know. Have children. All of these are positive sum games.

The important point here that I want you to remember is this: every person I know who radiates joy, whose cup runneth over with life, wealth, and life satisfaction is singularly obsessed with playing positive sum games. They don’t care about status games. Many of them don’t even respond to their critics. They care about building things and giving to others—repeatedly, relentlessly, and unconditionally. And I don’t think that’s an accident.

In short, if you want to build emotional and financial wealth, play more positive sum games. And when it comes to zero sum games, the unbeatable strategy is not to play.

The Pitch

A full service mechanical technology firm starts a new company to build a wind farm in Morocco, monetized by Bitcoin, then decides to sell their old business and go all in on monetizing the grid with Bitcoin and Cloud Computing. The leadership team of the company is easily the most transparent I’ve ever seen, giving monthly updates on a per project basis and they consistently over deliver on their longer term projections. The company is bringing stability and predictability to the grid (and increasing profit margins of green energy producers) by monetizing it through computing. Energy curtailment and stranded energy are effectively things of the past. Assuming Bitcoin averages ~$40,000 this year and the network mining difficulty increases by 70% or less in 2022, at a share price of $10.80 SLNH currently trades for a forward PE of <2.

The Risks

• 30% of SLNH is owned by private equity firm Brookestone Partners. 7.3% of the shares are owned by DOMO Capital Management. The current marketcap is <$150m and has incredibly low trading volume with large bid/ask spreads. I am used to investing in smallcaps where low liquidity is the norm. But for anyone who’s used to investing in tech, this is probably very much not what you’re accustomed to. If you’re not used to low trading volume and low liquidity, prepare to see the stock price jump up or down 1% on a single buy/sell order. Proceed with caution.

• The sale of SLNH’s legacy mechanical instruments business is neither completed, nor the terms of the sale yet disclosed.

• The price of Bitcoin is falling off a cliff and is increasingly correlated with speculative tech assets like the ARK Innovation ETF, making any Bitcoin related securities a spooky place to be if the Fed follows through with their stated plan to end QE and start raising interest rates several times this year.

  

• Assuming that other publicly traded Bitcoin miner’s current future hashrate projections are accurate, the Bitcoin network hashrate will go up at least 50% this year, putting a hard cap on the company’s margins.

• SLNH’s plans for financing their upcoming projects, and achieving their stated target of 233MW of Bitcoin mining infrastructure energized and operational by the end of 2022, remain unknown.

• The company does not have a common shareholder returns program.

• Almost every publicly traded Bitcoin mining company has engaged in significant share dilution over the last 2 years.

  

The Upside

• Unlike most of the publicly traded Bitcoin companies, SLNH isn’t speculating on the future price of Bitcoin. They’re not buying Bitcoin with their cash, they’re not ‘hodling’ the Bitcoin they mine (everything they mine is converted into cash daily), and their energy costs are the lowest in the business at under 2.5 cents/kwH. They only consider future projects which keep their cost of power below this threshold, ensuring they remain profitable in environments where other cryptocurrency mining companies can’t.

• SLNH isn’t an all-in Bitcoin bet. Bitcoin could fall another 50% from here and SLNH would still be incredibly profitable and continue to execute on their long term plans. Instead of building out huge static Bitcoin mining farms, they’re effectively pitching their mining equipment as a product to green energy producers (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal). Yes, they’re pitching energy producers the right to have SLNH’s equipment operating on their sites as a service. This is why their cost of energy is able to remain so low: they are providing a service for both energy producers and for computing consumers. By providing computing consumption as a better battery for the grid (allowing energy producers to continue selling their power to SLNH when normal power demand is low, eliminating energy curtailment) while simultaneously monetizing that computing using Bitcoin for now. The company’s long term vision is to build a distributed off-grid cloud computing network. That will always include Bitcoin mining, but in the future it will also include other compute heavy tasks like Machine Learning, AI, and Scientific Computing.

• Because the company isn’t singularly concerned with getting as much Bitcoin mining hashpower online as soon as possible, they are much less likely to use serial common share dilution to raise capital compared to other publicly traded Bitcoin miners. They already raised just under $16m through dilution as part of their merger last year and although I think another dilution this year is more likely than not (I’m assuming they will choose the easiest way to raise capital unless and until they publicly show another way to achieve their goals without dilution) I also think that this will be the last time the dilution lever is pulled for the foreseeable future. Bitcoin mining revenue alone will soon provide more than enough cash to finance future projects.

• As part of Mechanical Technology’s recent merger with Soluna Computing, they sold off their assets with more significant geopolitical risks in Morocco. The company’s remaining assets are now de-risked.

• I expect the sale of the firm’s legacy instruments business to be significantly accretive to shareholders, providing the company with significant capital that can immediately be used for their future projects, especially after receiving a $9 million USAF contract.

• The leadership team’s communication is phenomenal. Monthly updates directly from the Soluna Holdings CEO, Michael Toporek, with revenue and cost breakdowns on a per project basis, in addition to regular company projections and updates to both their 6-12 month plans and projected earnings potential. In the retail space I had to wait 6 months for leadership teams to even mention they were experiencing delays on anything due to supply chain bottlenecks, and sometimes that’s all the attention it would get, a brief mention on an earnings call. SLNH was early to talking about supply chain problems, they didn’t beat around the bush about what was likely to get delayed and by how long, and they shared their efforts to prevent it from being a problem in the future. This team has consistently over delivered on their timelines and projected profit margins. For their most recent project, they literally set up a camera and let everyone watch them build it out in real time. The Soluna Computing team has their own podcast where they explain their business at length and the CEO, John Belizaire, hasn’t shied away from answering questions on other’s podcasts either. I wouldn’t blink paying a premium for this level of transparency, and I can only dream of this kind of regular communication from the leadership of names in the commodity and energy space that I’m used to owning. (Imagine not having to model AMR or DAC, or having to guess about their contracts or 6 month plans, and instead having all of their updated numbers each month broken down for you per site/ship by the CEO… 🤤)

• This is an exponential growth story. As of December 9th, SLNH had around 50MW of mining equipment currently energized and operational. They plan to have 100MW up and running by the end of Q2 2022, 233MW operational and energized by the end of 2022, and a 700MW pipeline of future projects by the end of the year as well. That brings their expected Bitcoin hashrate over 4 exahash by the end of 2022.

• SLNHP (the company’s non-convertible Preferred shares) have a yield of 9% and are currently trading at a steep discount to their $25 par. At $19/share they have a present annual yield over 11.8%. I struggle to see any outcome for the company where they fail to meet their obligations to their Preferred shareholders. If you think the common shares give you too much exposure to Bitcoin price risk then the Preferreds seem like a no-brainer.

• The company’s common shares are priced multiples lower than every other publicly traded Bitcoin miner, on every metric. On an EV/Operating Earnings basis, on an EV/Hashrate basis, on an EV/Future Hashrate basis, on a forward PE basis… No matter which way you quantify it, this company is cheap. Like, cyclical commodity producer cheap. Like, I have been absolutely thrilled to own small Australian coal producers during the middle of Chinese bans on coal imports at higher prices than this. Part of why I’m sharing this idea is because when I ran the numbers on SLNH I didn’t believe it and I want more eyes on the risk/reward here to tell me I’m wrong.

The full Soluna story

Since most of my readers probably neither know or understand the ins and outs of Bitcoin or the grid, here are the most important bits to understand the risk/reward of SLNH.

Bitcoin

I won’t give a full explanation of Bitcoin here, feel free to read Satoshi’s Whitepaper if you want a more thorough explanation of the value proposition of Bitcoin. Suffice to say, by contributing to the Bitcoin network (‘mining’) participants secure the network by acting as transaction validators and in exchange are rewarded in both network fees and minting new Bitcoin (at least until all of the existing Bitcoin has been mined). For the purposes of assessing the risk/reward of Bitcoin for Soluna, the most important aspects of Bitcoin are the market price and the present mining difficulty. Because the price of Bitcoin is impossible to predict here I will focus only on the mining difficulty.

After every 2016 Bitcoin blocks are mined, the network adjusts the mining difficulty. This usually happens after ~14 days. When there is more processing power contributing to mining those 2016 blocks (a higher ‘hashrate’) the network increases the mining difficulty. When there is less processing power (a lower ‘hashrate’) the network reduces the mining difficulty. This all happens automatically according to a predetermined algorithm, so if we know the future hashrate, we can also predict the future mining difficulty. Well, one of the benefits of so many Bitcoin mining companies going public in the last two years is we now can project the baseline increases in future hashrate by adding up all of their projected hashrate increases.

As of my writing this, the current hashrate currently mining on the Bitcoin network is 189.58 exahash per second. The present mining difficulty is 24,371,874,614,345T, and the mining difficulty is presently projected to increase to 25,352,917,461,610T at the next difficulty adjustment ~5 days from now. This would be a 4.03% difficulty increase. Based on the presently disclosed miner delivery and operations schedules for all publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies, the hashrate contributing to the Bitcoin network will undoubtedly increase (and therefore the difficulty of mining will also increase proportionally) by at least 50% by the end of 2022. In the above spreadsheet RandomInvestor also ads an additional 25 exahash to the projections of the public miners to account for additional private miners coming online this year. I think an additional 25 exahash is actually higher than we will see this year because of present supply chain constraints in semiconductors, but I am very confident that the difficulty will increase by 50% this year. A 50-70% increase in Bitcoin mining difficulty is therefore what we will use for our profitability calculations.

The Grid

The electric grid has a lot of problems, that I won’t go into here (if you want a small taste of the number of problems that the grid has, Meredith Angwin’s book Shorting the Grid is an excellent place to start), but one of the big problems facing the grid is that where energy is being produced isn’t always where that energy can be consumed. This inconvenient fact is behind many of the grid’s most difficult to solve problems. Even when energy is being produced in places with a lot of demand (like large population centers) energy consumption is highly variable. People consume less power at night. They also consume more power when the temperature is high (air conditioning), or when the temperature is low (heating). But often this demand variability doesn’t match up with the variability in available power. If you live in the PNW for example, Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) generates varying amounts of power based primarily on precipitation and snow melt due to their reliance on hydropower.1 Increased snow melt and precipitation have almost nothing to do with the power consumption habits of residents of Portland or Olympia. So what happens to all of the excess power generated during the times when people are sleeping, or when snow melts cause the Columbia River to flow higher than normal for weeks at a time? That’s called a power ‘oversupply’ and among other things it can cause power outages so what energy producers do instead of oversupplying the grid and letting it fail is what’s called energy ‘curtailment.’ This is especially true for wind and hydropower producers.

Curtailment is what happens when an energy producer is forced to artificially reduce their energy output below what is able to be produced because it’s above what the grid is able to handle. Going back to our BPA example, I’ll quote from a 2013 paper about this problem (emphasis mine):

In the past, this excess hydropower generated during high water flows was less problematic because there was sufficient capacity on the BPA’s transmission system to accommodate the increased generation. However, in recent years, a boom in wind power generation and its subsequent integration onto the BPA’s transmission system has stressed the transmission grid. Thus, there is not sufficient capacity on the transmission system for the excess hydropower generated during high water events, which can last anywhere from a few days to more than a month, and existing wind power connected to the BPA’s system. In order to accommodate the increased hydropower entering the transmission grid, the BPA reduces the amount of wind power it transmits on its system. Otherwise, the BPA claims that it would not be able to satisfy its statutory mandates to maintain transmission reliability, keep costs to its consumers low by not paying for wasted power generation, and comply with regulations protecting endangered fish species. To satisfy these obligations, the BPA implemented its Environmental Redispatch and Negative Pricing Policy (Redispatch Policy) in 2011, which mandated that other sources of energy connected to the BPA’s transmission system be shut down when excess hydropower was generated.

This is happening all over the world right now. Due to a plethora of robust subsidies, tax incentives (the US Energy Policy Act of 2005 providing $2.7 billion for renewable production credits is a great example), and renewable energy mandates, renewable power sources are being added to the grid by the truckload. Because these sources of power are generating variable rates of power (the wind doesn’t blow at a constant speed, the amount of sun hitting solar panels isn’t constant, and we’ve already talked about hydro) they often are producing too much power at the same time. This has both made the grid exponentially more fragile than it used to be, and resulted in a lot of energy curtailment. And that curtailment is expensive. Setting aside the mechanical and environmental costs of curtailment which are too complex to talk about here, curtailment often comes with significant legal costs.

In 2011 BPA lost a lawsuit from wind energy producers because it was determined that they were preferentially curtailing wind energy over hydro during times of energy oversupply. The Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission hasn’t been happy with BPA’s curtailment either. In 2006 Washington voters passed the Energy Independence Act which mandated that by 2020 15% of all energy production in the state of Washington come from a basket of renewable sources. By cutting wind energy production outputs BPA is effectively reducing the amount of consumable renewable energy available in the Washington grid, making reaching 15% more difficult. Curtailment also means that energy producers miss out on those afforementioned renewable energy subsidies and tax credits.

Soluna’s Value Proposition

SLNH’s primary value proposition is to eliminate the need for energy curtailment. No more wasted energy, no more stress on the grid. SLNH will buy every megawatt of available power from renewable sources. This means higher profit margins for green energy producers, and a more stable and reliable grid for consumers. No more worrying about curtailment lawsuits, no more pressure from states unhappy with less available green energy, and depending on the jurisdiction you might even get access to some additional subsidies or tax credits as a bonus.

Their secondary value proposition is to the Bitcoin network, where their computing power is currently being deployed to secure the network and validate transactions.

The third value proposition is in the not-too-distant future when SLNH will begin selling their green computing power as a product for applications like machine-learning, AI, and scientific computing. Because of SLNH’s absurdly low energy costs, I suspect that their margins for this product (or suite of products) will be the best in the business. If I were leading the SLNH software team my first priority would be to create a green computing product that could be sold to Big Tech. Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Disney would be very high on my list of ideal customers and I strongly suspect based on things that both John Belizaire and the Soluna Computing CTO, Dipul Patel, have said that this is the direction the company is currently headed. But for now, that’s pure speculation and should be taken with less than a grain of salt.

The Numbers

I won’t speculate on the company’s margins for selling a green computing product which doesn’t yet exist, nor will I pretend to know when that will aspect of the business will materialize (though they have repeatedly said we will catch a peak at it this year). Instead, let’s look at what’s already here and what’s most likely to materialize this year.

As of December 9th, SLNH had ~50MW of mining equipment fully energized and deployed contributing 623 petahash (0.623 exahash) worth of mining power to the Bitcoin network, making up 0.329% of the current hashrate of the network. The company currently expects to have over 1 exahash of mining power active by the end of Q1 of this year. If we simply ignored the company’s planned expansions and annualized their November revenues, the company would generate $23.3 million in FCF in 2022, which already gives them a forward PE under 7.2 (These numbers are coming straight from their December 9th update, I’m not just pulling numbers out of thin air.) If instead we assume that the company expands to their planned 1 exahash by the end of March and then stops there, assuming November’s Bitcoin mining profitability numbers and annualizing their forcasted March earnings at present Bitcoin difficulty rates and ~$45,000 Bitcoin gives them an annualized earnings of over $40 million and a forward PE of ~4. But obviously, they’re not going to stop building out the business in March. Additionally, let’s not forget that the price of Bitcoin has dropped since these estimates, and the mining difficulty of Bitcoin is probably going to go up by at least 50% this year. So let’s get more realistic.

Soluna monetizes their Bitcoin mining assets in two ways: Hosting, and Mining. Hosting refers to splitting the revenue of Bitcoin mining equipment with another entity while SLNH retains the ownership rights of the equipment. Mining is just that but without sharing the revenue, so SLNH retains all of the profits. As you’d expect, Hosting generates half of the profits that their Mining does: ~35% profit margins for hosting, and ~70% margins for Mining. Presently, the company is operating at about a 30/70 Hosting/Mining split and has given every indication that this will continue for the foreseeable future. This means that about 15% of the company’s future profits will come from Hosting, and 85% will come from Mining, making the company’s net profit margins ~65%. But these are December numbers when the mining difficulty was lower and the price of Bitcoin was higher, much higher.

If we accept the company’s numbers of $210 in revenue per petahash per second as of December 9th, how does the price of Bitcoin and the network’s mining difficulty compare to then? Let’s say the average price of Bitcoin in November was $60,000. As of today the price is ~$43,000 but let’s call it $40,000 for simplicity’s sake. Assuming that the mining difficulty since then has remained constant that brings their earnings down from $210/petahash/second to $140/petahash/second. If we multiply that by their hashrate as of December 9th of 623 that gives us an earnings of $75,358.08 per day, or $27,505,699.20 per year.

Now, to deal with that pesky periodically increasing mining difficulty… Instead of doing the work of adjusting each month’s earnings based on a projected network difficulty increase every two weeks, let’s make this absurdly simple. Let’s assume that today the mining difficulty has already reached wherever we think it will end up by the end of the year. I think 50% is a conservative number even the most bullish case has to assume, and 70% seems a little unrealistic but is still possible. So let’s say that it’s 70% to give ourselves a margin of safety. Assuming we believe the company’s estimate of bringing online 233MW of mining power this year, and we assume they’re using older mining equipment (supply chains aren’t about to magically manifest the latest and greatest after all) that will bring them up to ~4 exahash per second by the end of 2022.

Assuming that the Bitcoin network difficulty and hashrate increases by 70% from it’s current 189.58 exahash, that implies a Bitcoin network hashrate of 322.286 exahash. Which, given the company’s planned 4 exahash brings them up from 0.329% of the Bitcoin network to 1.241% of the network. Which means even with the difficulty increases they will still expand their net take home of Bitcoin by several times. Annualizing our revenue rate of $140/petahash/second gives us a new annualized revenue of $176,601,600, nothing to scoff at for a ~$150 million marketcap company. Even if we give their profit margins a healthy haircut from 65% down to 50% due to the increased mining difficulty that still gives us a December 2022 annualized EPS of $6.04/share which is a forward PE of just over 1.785.

If we give both their earnings and the profit margins another 20% haircut (let’s say not only does the Bitcoin mining difficulty goes up more than 70%, but the price of Bitcoin continues to drop significantly as well) we still end up at an annualized December forward EPS of $3.87/share and a forward PE of 2.79.

This is the most bearish case I can see for the company, without introducing some kind of a catastrophic failure at one of their sites that seems like such an improbable left tail risk that it barely merits consideration. If we don’t assume that everything that could conceivably go wrong will go wrong and instead accept SLNH’s own projections (which have historically been conservative), the company currently trades for a forward PE of <1 and will continue to expand their revenues exponentially for the foreseeable future. Given what I think is likely to be 2-3 years of exponential growth for them, I would be thrilled to buy SLNH shares if they had a marketcap of $600 million right now, and I am honestly befuddled that they aren’t.

The Conclusion

By using Bitcoin to increase grid reliability and make renewable energy viable SLNH finds themselves at the intersection of a lot of right tail factors that will likely carry them (and their stock price) for the foreseeable future. I happen to personally think that ‘renewable energy’ is a meme that has been disasterous for the grid, but SLNH solves one of renewable energy’s biggest problems. The sheer number of ‘green’ investment funds these days is staggering and I would be shocked if SLNH isn’t soon included in many of them (for example, Changebridge Capital added SLNH to their holdings in November). Heck, their currently in development green cloud computing suite could’ve easily been a $150 million SPAC on its own this year. For me, there is simply too much about this company that could go right that I’m willing to accept the risk of owning a tech stock, even one that gives me Bitcoin price risk in a higher interest rate environment. If that still seems like too much risk for you, then the company’s preferred shares seem like a way to collect a very high yield with very little downside.

Disclosure: I have a beneficial long position in the shares of SLNH through both stock ownership and options. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with Soluna and merely stumbled across them because I have a curiosity with the Bitcoin mining space and have been following the company since early last year.

I grew up in family that emphasized the importance of goals, but over the years I became less interested in long term goals beyond my more immediate sense of “this is an interesting problem; how could I solve it?” The first problem I noticed with setting long-term goals is that most (if not all) implicitly relied on predicting my future knowledge, which I was hilariously terrible at predicting. Sometimes as soon as six months after setting a goal I would have to completely scrap it because I had learned something new that completely upset the assumptions of the goal I had made. After realizing this, I started setting shorter term goals instead. But as time went on, I’ve found that even setting short term goals is a less useful framing than I was raised to believe. Instead, every time I notice the seasons changing, I do what I call a Values Reflection or a Self-Knowledge Inventory. This is an introduction to the basic process I’ve been refining over the last 4 years to better know and understand myself. If you, like me, have a strong desire to know yourself then maybe you’ll find this Self-Inventory a useful tool too! To this day, almost every time I do this exercise, I learn something new about myself that then improves my future decisions and this exercise is one of the things I credit most with improving my ability to live a high-agency life where Wonder and Joy are the rule rather than the exception.

1. What are my Values?

Before doing anything else, spend some time writing down the things you believe you hold most sacred. Ask yourself questions like: What are the relationships I most Cherish? What do I most Fear? What are my Greatest Needs? Describe your ideal romantic partner. Describe your ideal friend. How would someone who’s just met you describe you? How would your closest friends describe you? Write a list of words that you believe best represent your current values. (e.g. Liberty, Security, Knowledge, Peace, Community, Joy, etc.) Take as long as you need, there’s no rush here! I’ve spent half a day on this part of the process alone before. The more times you do this exercise, the easier this step will become.

2. Document My Feelings and Decisions

The second part of the Self-Investigation process consists asking yourself a series of questions about your feelings since the last time you did this exercise (or, if this is your first time going through a reflection process like this, just pick an arbitrary length of time like 6 or 9 months. The length of time isn’t as important as the questions. If arbitrarily changing the time frame, even on a per-question basis, leads you to better answers: do it.) Once you’ve documented your feelings, ask yourself about the decisions you made that lead to those experiences. Add, subtract, and modify the questions as needed to lead you to more interesting answers. Let yourself get caught up chasing rabbit-trails. The point of this exercise is to grow your knowledge about yourself, not follow a predetermined path.

What were my emotional highlights and lowlights?

What did I truly enjoy? When did I experience seemingly ‘effortless’ Joy? What experiences allowed me to experience childlike Wonder? When was I most engaged with what I was doing? When did I feel in touch with my Best Self? When did I feel closest to those around me? When did I feel most disconnected from those around me? When did I feel isolated/lonely? When did my Worst Self manifest? When was I upset, disgusted, or disturbed? When did I feel the need to self-censor?

What decision(s) did I make that lead to these experiences?

When did I prioritize my own needs over those around me (and vice versa)? What tradeoffs did I consider or fail to consider? What predictions or estimates did I make in the moment that were (in)correct? What surprised me/what did I fail to predict? Did I trust my gut instincts in making this decision?

What were the value judgements I made leading up to these decisions?

e.g., I made X decision because I valued the opportunity to spend more time in shared Joy and Wonder with Y person. OR I made X choice because it felt right and I trusted myself, despite social pressure. I encourage you to frame your answers as “I chose X because Y.” If your goal is to learn about yourself, focusing on what you decided and were in control of is usually more useful than focusing on what others did.

What commonalities do I notice in the emotional highlights/lowlights?

Specific people? Similar situations or social dynamics? Similar activities or problem solving (or lack of acknowledgement of a problem)?

What commonalities do I notice in the times I made Good/Bad Decisions?

Which part of myself did I most trust to make this decision? Was I around specific people? Similar situations or social dynamics? Similar activities or problem solving (or lack of acknowledgement of a problem)? Similar state of mind?

3. What do I Actually Value?

The purpose of the this entire Self-Knowledge exploration is to learn about and better understand your actual self and values. Before regularly doing this exercise, I had a self-concept that turned out to be completely wrong. Remember the values you wrote down in Step 1? Well, it’s time to revisit them. Based on your answers in Step 2, are these values still reflected in your revealed preferences? (Are the decisions you made and the times you experienced joy and fulfillment in alignment with these values?) Are the experiences you enjoyed the most shared with the people you expected them to be with? As a bonus, ask a few friends what they think your values are. Spend time reflecting on what you spent time doing that you most deeply enjoyed or disliked. Were the decisions you made in alignment with these values? Consider both the Good and the Bad experiences and decisions. Most critically, are these your actual values or is it time to come up with a new theory of who you are and what you value?

This is an incredibly meta exercise, but you don’t have to get caught up in a personal crisis of “AHHHH I THOUGHT I WAS A GOOD PERSON WITH ALL OF THESE WONDERFUL HIGHER VALUES BUT I’M ACTUALLY NOT.” (Though that’s basically what I went through the first time I did this exercise.) You also have agency, and a huge part of this exercise is intended to bring clarity to the decisions you’ve made so that you can keep making Good decisions and fewer Bad ones. Over time, as you get to know your True Self, your Deepest Fears, your Highest Pleasures, you will naturally begin to make more decisions that you look back on favorably. It’s also important to not forget: the Self is not stable or static. You always can create a better Self. But the first step to creating a better you, is to acknowledge who and where you are now. Hopefully this process is as useful to you as it has been for me!

Laissez-faire Taoism (~400 B.C.-400 A.D.)

Lao Tzu (~4th century B.C.)1

“The more artificial taboos and restrictions there are in the world, the more the people are impoverished; the more useful implements the people possess, the more the state becomes disorderly; the more artifices and clever skills men acquire, the more harmful things they will produce. The more that laws and regulations are given prominence, the more thieves and robbers there will be.”

“Therefore the Sage says: I take no action yet the people transform themselves, I favor quiescence and the people right themselves, I take no action and the people enrich themselves, I am without desires and the people are themselves pristine.”

Lao Tzu’s philosophy of Taoism is the first surviving written record we have of a liberal philosophy. The foundations of Taoism have to do with only taking actions which are in accord with the natural course of the universe. Foundational for Lao Tzu is the idea that the universe is constantly evolving, moving, or transforming. And wu-wei as used by him is the way of acting and moving with the flow of the universe, rather than attempting to force your own will upon things. Water is the symbolic embodiment of wu-wei in this sense, as water acts without motive. The phrase ‘non-doing’ (the English word for wu-wei) has recently begun to re-enter the Western lexicon thanks to a recent resurgence in the popularity of both Taoism and Alexander Technique. Lao didn’t believe that acting on the world around you or having an independent will was bad in and of itself, rather he advocated for placing your will in harmony with the universe, rather than going against the flow of life. But he did believe that this would inevitably lead people to have fewer desires. He also applied this philosophy to government, and therefore advocated for a government that governed through inaction. “By doing it without taking action, there is nothing that is not well-governed.” He believed that all forcible interventions into the natural state of affairs by governments would lead to what he called the ‘evil harvest’ that an activist government was destined to reap. He believed that the most injurious actions the State could force upon people were taxation, war, and punishments.

Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou, 369-286 B.C.)2

“The common people have a constant nature; they spin and are clothed, till and are fed. This is called 'the natural capacity, te, which they all alike possess.' They are as one in this, and not so because of conscious inclina­tion; it is what may be called their 'natural freedom.'”

“Good order results spontaneously when things are let alone.”

Master Zhaung is the author and namesake of the Zhaungzi which remains perhaps the single most influential work of Chinese literature, and one of the foundational texts of Taoism. He expanded upon Lao Tzu’s laissez-faire ideals of non-interventionism and espoused the earliest written theory of natural rights, which included at its foundation the belief that all things were equal and that all people had the natural capacity to act which implied a natural right to the freedom to do so. Applying his philosophy to government he believed that if one did not “permit them [people] to follow freely the course of their natures” that chaos was inevitable. Even well-intentioned attempts to instill higher values in people like benevolence, righteousness, and knowledge, would inevitably result in hatred and war; and “the blame for it all must be put on working on people’s minds.” Zhaung’s writings are therefore not only the first written record of a theory of natural rights, but also mark the first formal critique of forcible knowledge acquisition, something that would later become a focal point of the liberal project for thinkers two millenia later including Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, and John Holt. Zhaung Zhou strongly believed that all people had an incalculable and absolute value, that all men were chen-jen or ‘true men’ already without the need for education or outside intervention. He believed in the innate goodness within all people, saying that men were “upright without knowing about righteousness, all have concern for each other without knowing about benevolence, they are genuine without knowing about loyalty, reliable without knowing about trustworthiness.”

Sima Qian (145-90 B.C.)3

“Society obviously must have farmers before it can eat; foresters, fishermen, miners, etc., before it can make use of natural resources; craftsmen before it can have manufactured goods; and merchants before they can be distributed. But once these exist, what need is there for government directives, mobilizations of labor, or periodic assemblies. Each man has only to be left to utilize his own abilities and exert his strength to obtain what he wishes. Thus, when a commodity is very cheap, it invites a rise in price; when it is very expensive, it invites a reduction. When each person works away at his own occupation and delights in his own business then, like water flowing downward, goods will naturally flow forth ceaselessly day and night without having been summoned, and the people will produce commodities without having been asked. Does this not tally with reason. Is it not a natural result?”

Sima Qian, with the help of his father before his passing, produced the first written chronological historical record of China: Shiji or The Records of the Grand Historian. The work is considered the foundational text of Chinese history and mythology and many consider him to be the first historian in the modern sense. Though it would be flatly incorrect to label him a Taoist, the early seeds of his laissez-faire Spontaneous Order Theory (what would later famously be called the ‘Invisible Hand’ by Adam Smith) which Qian was the first to formally espouse were undeniably influenced by Zhaung. Unlike the Taoists of his day, Qian believed that it was both natural and good for everyone to desire to accumulate wealth, and that it was to the benefit of everyone else that they do so. He believed that prices were a natural reflection of the availability of both resources and money. And he also provided the first historical record of a currency debasement and the resulting price inflation.

“It had been over forty years since Emperor Wen changed over to the lom-shu copper coins. From the beginning of Emperor Wu’s reign, because revenues in coin had been rather scarce, the district officials had from time to time extracted copper from the mountains in their areas and minted new coins, while among the common people there was a good deal of illegal minting of coins, until the number in circulation had grown beyond estimate. As the coins became more numerous and of poorer quality, goods became scarcer and higher in price.”

The Poets: Juan Chi (210-263 A.D.) and T'ao Ch'ien (365-427 A.D.)4

Though neither Lao Tzu or Zhuang Zhou shied away from critiquing the state both merely advocated for a state that avoided interference into people’s daily lives. These two poets took things a step further and advocated explicitly for no rulers. Both T’ao Ch’ien and Juan Chi often expressed a nostalgia for a time before rulers when man was in his ‘naturally free’ state. Juan Chi believed that the only way to achieve true contentment was to eliminate all desires and aspirations. The desire to gain fortune too would inevitably lead to one to ruin. He believed that politics was evidence of man’s degeneration from his natural state of delighting in nature, being fully free to act in harmony with the flow of the universe. T’ao Ch’ien in his most well-known fable The Peach Blossom Spring describes his protagonist’s encounter with a people who had long since escaped from a tyrant, and had been thriving free from rulers in secret.

Pao Ching-yen (sometime between 200-340 A.D.)5

“The Confucians say that heaven produced the masses of the people and erected the ruler over them. But is it likely that August Heaven ["Nature"] in its earnest words would have declared such an intent? Rather, the strong coerced the weak, and the weak then submitted to them. The intelligent deceived the simple-minded and in consequence the simple-minded came to serve them. From that submission arose the way of ruler and servitor; from that servitude the people, being devoid of strength, were brought under control. Truly, then, that submis­sion and that servitude result from the contest of strength and the match­ing of wits and have nothing to do with a vast and distant heaven.”

Nothing is known about Pao Ching-yen’s life except his writings. Among them are blistering attacks on the Divine Right of Kings and repeated assertions that all people are naturally born both free and equal, both of which would later come to define the liberal tradition in the West. He believed that government was never instituted to benefit people, but instead was created to steal from and control them. Pao Ching-yen’s belief that ruler’s authority came from neither divine will, nor the consent of man is the earliest record of an explicitly anarchist tradition within liberalism that would not gain popular recognition for nearly two millennia. Though many of his writings critique the State, his work was undeniably building upon the Taoist foundations of Lao Tzu and Zhuang Zhou, taking their ideas about nature and wu-wei to their logical conclusions.

The end of the Beginning6

As Confusionism fell out of favor with the ruling class of China for the new Taoism of thinkers like Wang Pi (226-249 A.D.) who didn’t universally condemn rules and rulers, Taoists began to reject the liberal laissez-faire ideal towards governance espoused by Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi. Later Taoists, most notably Ge Hong (or ‘Ko Hung’, 238-343 A.D.), also believed that the anarchist expression of this ideal espoused by Pao was unreasonable. Ge Hong believed that the establishment of hierarchies and rulers was a natural state of the universe, which also benefitted the common people. He rebuked Pao’s belief that the State arose from a struggle of the strong against the weak, saying instead that “the sage ruler receieved a mandate from heaven to carry on his work… The common people gladly supported, upheld them and venerated them. How then can one speak of cheating the ignorant or abusing the weak?” Ge Hong proposed a different vision of life before rulers than the poets did too, believing instead that the institution of rulers was neccesary to bring people out of both chaos and destitution. As one might imagine, Ge Hong’s romantic view of governments remained wildly popular with the ruling classes of ancient China for centuries until Buddhism arrived, presenting a new competing cultural and religious force. By the early 4th century and the end of the Jin Dynasty, the liberal chapter in Taoism had been mostly closed and the original laissez-faire form of Lao Tzu’s philosophy would not see a popular revival for over a millenium.

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Semester 0: I took note of the opportunity cost

Before I started school, I told myself three things:

1: I’ll graduate in 3 years or less.

2: My cumulative GPA will never drop below a 3.7 GPA (for my international friends, this means that my average score in each class will remain persistently above a 90%).

3: I won’t pay for any of it.

I resolved that if any of these 3 statements ever became untrue that I should drop out. I figured that if it took me longer than 3 years, I was either wasting my time or no longer interested in the experience; if my average grades ever dropped below a 90% then I was clearly bored and wasting my time; and the opportunity cost of school is already high enough for me as to only be worth it on the margin if I wasn’t also paying for it. If I ever didn’t receive enough scholarships to cover books and the cost of tuition, I should drop out. After getting accepted to attend the school I wanted to (again, if I didn’t get into that school, I figured I wouldn’t bother) I applied for a variety of scholarships and landed enough to more than cover my first year’s cost of tuition and books, and each successive year I received more. The third year I received enough scholarships that the school started denying me access to scholarship money I had received and sent me an e-mail saying I had received ‘too much’ financial aid, which wasn’t something I was aware they had the ability to do. If a foundation or trust wants to give someone money, why do schools have the authority to stop them? I don’t remember the school being party to that contract. :thinking-face:

Semester 1: Rules, rules, and more rules

I completed 30 credits of course work. Technically students at Boise State University aren’t allowed to complete more than 19 credits in a single semester (12 is considered ‘full-time’, and 8 consecutive semesters with an average of 15 credits/semester are what’s required for ‘on-time’ graduation in 4 years), and even then, every credit above 15 in a single semester incurs a $200 financial penalty (yes, seriously). The Registrar’s Office, which is an entity that exists solely to enforce this and other arbitrary rules, most of which limit who can take which classes at the University and in what order, didn’t find out about my flagrant disregard for their course load limitation until the semester was nearly over. Once they did it took 3 meetings with people successively higher up the bureaucratic chain (each of whom where incredibly confused judging by the number of times they all said ‘I’ve never encountered something like this before’ and their eventual deferrals to their bosses) until I eventually met with someone who worked directly under the person known as ‘The Registrar’ who told me that the only person who had the authority to grant me an ‘Extra Special One Time Exception’ which would actually allow me to receive credit for the classes I’d taken was The Registrar themselves. Fortunately for myself, The Registrar’s Underling also didn’t immediately dismiss me out of hand and brought my situation to the attention of The Registrar who granted me this elusive ‘Extra Special One Time Exception’ without penalty, but not before telling me at least 8 times that this had never happened before.

Semester 2: Everyone is illiterate

I only took 14 credits to get an idea of what a ‘normal’ semester was like for everyone around me. I was shocked both by how little was asked by teachers, and by the volume of complaining I heard from fellow students. My first semester didn’t allow me much time to socialize and I really didn’t notice the conversations happening around me until this point. I was often the only person in a class of 40 who read the ‘required’ reading materials. In fact, without exception I could have easily maintained above a 90% in every class without reading a single book, article, or study. Essay prompts in English classes either had nothing to do with the readings or the prompts were written such that anyone of average intelligence could have inferred what they were supposed to ‘learn’ from the readings anyway. The English and writing classes were the most egregious in this respect, the first of which I took this semester, only because both the Registrar’s Office and the English department wouldn’t let me test out of English 101 and 102. There were three occasions during English 101 where we read other student’s essays and had an opportunity to give them feedback. Until this point, I’d taken it for granted that everyone who had completed the equivalent of U.S. 6th grade (age 12) had the ability to coherently organize their thoughts and make a logical argument. Au contraire, apparently my home education and friend group selection bias had blinded me to the fact that everyone around me was functionally illiterate. Of the nine essays I read, only one understood the basic mechanics of the English language well enough for me to give any substantive feedback.

Semester 3: Bureaucracy stifles innovation

It turns out that 200 and 300 level classes were easier and less time intensive than 100 level classes. Almost all of them consisted of busy work that could be completed in under an hour per week. I took 18 credits but finished most of the work for my classes in the first two weeks. Finding myself with a lot of free time I decided to explore what was happening on campus. I went through a list of registered clubs on campus and started showing up at weekly meetings for 13 University clubs. I decided to create a reliable source of food for the food pantry on campus (it always seemed to be out of food) so I organized regular meetings between the local foodbank and various University administrators to create a formal partnership between the two which would allow us to have a reliable source of free food to give out to students in need. I planned and advertised ‘free food’ days on campus where the local food bank came and dropped off pallets of free food which was then given out to students and staff. Despite students being vocal about wanting these things, and the local food bank’s donors being vocal about it too, both required months of meetings and approvals before the university allowed either a formal partnership or any events on campus.

Semester 4: YouTube is better than class. DEI is a meme.

17 credits this semester. I had a media class which made me realize I had no cultural frame of reference when it came to movies, so I started reading a lot about the history of film and made a point to watch some historically significant movies. I took an animation course, the entirety of which could have been gleaned in a single 20-minute YouTube video. Instead, the professor created his own series of (very poor) hour long Youtube videos (which he keeps private) in addition to his 1.5 hours of lecturing each week. There were 4 Word Processing classes I had to take this semester that I could test out of but testing out of them would mean that I wouldn’t receive any credits for completing them and that I couldn’t receive my declared Minor. Yes, you read that right; FOUR Word Processing classes. An entire class on how to use a Windows Operating System and Microsoft Word. An entire class on how to use Microsoft Excel. An entire class on how to use Microsoft Access. An entire class on how to use Microsoft Power BI. Apparently, these classes are required for all business and accounting students at the University and the reason I had to take them was entirely political (the department I was taking them from had lobbied for them to be required). I spent most of this semester finishing the bureaucratic football that I started the prior semester (it took nearly a year to get all the appropriate permissions to be able to hand out unconditionally free food when all relevant parties were enthusiastic about doing so). In addition, I started a new adventure, understanding student government. I was a member on every committee that student government had. By far the most interesting committee that student government had was the Inclusive Excellence Student Council (IESC). The IESC was the only student government committee for which all members were paid out of taxes (mandatory student fees) to fulfill their stated purpose. The IESC’s primary purported purpose was to: ‘offer suggestions on behalf of marginalized student populations’ and to ‘respond to national/state/local dialogue that may pose threats to students’ or ‘may disrupt a student’s ability to engage in their educational attainment.’ This purpose was immediately suspect to me. It implied that this group of students was being paid to decide who counted as a marginalized student, and then to offer suggestions on their behalf. Who appointed you the arbiters of justice for people fully capable of speaking for themselves? It’s also worth mentioning that the IESC is a group of 5 students, one of whom is voted on annually by the entire student body and the rest of whom are appointed by prior IESC members. This year the IESC decided that there was not enough Diversity Training for staff. They set up meetings with the Deans of every college to tell them how their lack of Diversity Training was perpetuating White Supremacy. At their private weekly meetings (usually only the 5 IESC members and a couple staff showed up but this year I joined them for every meeting) I was often asked to leave the room in odd ways. Sometimes rather than simply requesting that I leave the room they would make an Announcement as if we were at a conference or something instead of a mere 6 people sat in a room. “We’re going to talk about things which White People don’t need to be hearing now. All White People, please leave the room at this time.” Seeing as it was clear they were referring to myself and I didn’t want to hear anything they wouldn’t want White People to hear anyway I would smile and leave. The self-identified ‘White People’ in this group of 5 never left whenever this was announced. I witnessed many other oddities by this group of people purporting to act under the name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion including advocating for the firing of the only vocal Conservative professor on campus (their ‘activism’ included making up stories about him being racist) for having opinions about feminism they didn’t like.

Summer ‘accelerated’ classes: Professor’s expectations are Low

I took 6 credits over the summer. Something I was explicitly advised not to do (apparently many students find the 5-week summer course schedule too heavy a workload for taking more than one class at a time). One of the classes consisted almost entirely of watching daily YouTube videos and writing a 300 word ‘response’ to them. The list of videos to watch was not available from the beginning of class so there was no possibility of working ahead. The class ended by reading an Arbinger Institute book. The whole thing felt like a waste of time. The other class I took this summer was an English class which consisted almost entirely of collaboratively writing a single 5-page paper, something which we spent three weeks talking about doing before we were allowed to begin and then given two weeks to complete. My partner and I did ours in about 3 hours and based on my conversations with other students the longest it took to complete for any group was under 7 hours.

Semester 5: Good Teachers Do Exist

18 credits again. I had perhaps the only good teacher in my entire university experience this semester. He taught a geology class in a way that I was excited to show up each week because he treated us like we were capable of thinking, and whenever I asked questions about where I could learn more about subjects he’d mentioned he always had book recommendations at the ready. I interviewed him to learn more about his history and how he became a professor, it was fun.

The professors in the program I was majoring in allowed me complete flexibility both this semester and next to define both my research objectives and what my senior project would be. I decided to learn about GPU programming and game dev tooling, the results of which can now be seen on my website.

Semester 6: Tackling Bureaucracy out of Boredom

15 credits. Because there were no classes offered during times that didn’t overlap during other classes of mine, and because the Registrar would not allow me to be in two Zoom classes simultaneously, I had to take one more class the following summer before I was allowed to graduate. This semester was probably the most bored I was throughout my entire university experience. It consisted of being harassed and threatened by Administrators for Constitutionally protected speech (to the point where I got lawyers involved), going through the University’s student fee collection records and realizing the University had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from students (did I mention I was bored?), and reporting the previous student body president for sexually harassing two of his previous employees after they told me about it. The first one resulted in the school sending a lot of e-mails back and forth, no one taking responsibility for the illegal behaviour in question, never apologizing, and doing absolutely nothing to change the illegal policy in question. The second resulted in the school deciding that they didn’t in fact do the things anyone with basic accounting knowledge and the ability to do simple addition can verify for themselves. And the third resulted in a 6-month incident which involved three university administrators failing to perform their legally mandated Title IX duties, and me getting investigated for sexual harassment instead. The guy who I reported decided that my reporting of him was itself a form of sexual harassment, and then I talked about how hilarious that was on my personal Instagram account which resulted in him filing a further charge that I was retaliating against him for reporting sexual harassment, which he then took all the way to a Title IX trial where we both had to have lawyers present (even though by this time I was already graduated and therefore not under the school’s jurisdiction). And none of these have yet to find a resolution. If I don’t receive an e-mail notifying me of the results of the hearing within 5 days of my publishing this, then the school will be in violation of Title IX yet again. And if they rule against me then we’ll go to a real court because, as I said, the school doesn’t even have jurisdiction over me or my personal Instagram account now that I’m graduated. Did I mention I was bored this semester?

Summer finale: Propaganda called Science

I took the final class required to graduate, which was a ‘science’ class that consisted of almost no science, and we instead memorized the UN’s 17 so called ‘Sustainable Development’ goals. During one of the tests there was an actual question that asked what the ‘solution’ to Overpopulation was (why are we assuming that overpopulation is an inevitability, and why is this question in a ‘science’ class, and why are there only two options, and how is one of these ‘correct’ ???) and our options were either A or B:

A.     Go full Malthusian and embrace some form of eugenics. (Seriously, the answer referenced both Malthus and eugenics)

B.     Use media to idealize and normalize smaller and non-traditional families including families with same-sex couples. Subsidize hormonal birth control and abortions for lower income families who are likely to have more children.

That isn’t a hyperbolic characterization of the ‘answers’ to this ‘question’ either. It was literally presented as a question with only two possible answers and the first option was Heil Hitler, while the second one seemed deliberately engineered to make every libertarian, social conservative, and pro-natalist lose their minds. I’ve never encountered such blatant propaganda before in my life than I did in this class. The whole thing had nothing to do with science and everything to do with Scientism. There were dozens of examples of loaded questions like this one with similarly loaded answers. Another favourite from this class involved responding to an argument where someone is arguing for veganism on the basis that cow farts contribute to climate change and their manure and the fertilizer for grazing land is a water pollutant. The so-called ‘correct’ response was a deflection of the question that boiled down to “BUT IF WE DON’T KEEP EATING COWS, ALL THEIR GRAZING LAND WILL GO TO WASTE AND COWS WILL GO EXTINCT.” It felt like I was reading a Facebook comment thread. There was a point near the end of the class where I got to talk to some of the other students in the class (the whole thing was online and pre-recorded, by this time school was remote-only) and I spent a lot of time asking people about their experience in the course and the content. No one seemed to be as disturbed as I was by either the content masquerading as science or the way that so many questions were framed. For everyone there this was just a required course that had to be completed to graduate and they didn’t think about it beyond that. The whole thing was eerie.

Conclusion/What I learned:

One of the books I read before my first semester of classes started was Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education and I think overall his signaling model of higher education is correct. Honestly, I am grateful to the one wonderful teacher I had for sparking my interest in geology, but the same effect probably could have been achieved by an article or interview on one of the dozens of blogs in my weekly readings. I basically treated the whole experience as a kind of extended cultural anthropological study. I think that American conservatives who talk about liberal arts education as a kind of cultural baptism into the church of Social Justice might actually be on to something (especially after talking with my roommate about her Sociology undergrad experience), which wasn’t something I expected going in.

I was honestly shocked by the constant babying of students by staff and the obsession to avoid making classes and assignments ‘too difficult,’ the flagrant disregard for the law by faculty and administrators, and the constant encounters I had with Bureaucracy whenever I wanted to do anything remotely off-script. Supposedly, if the Title IX decision maker decides that me laughing on my Instagram about the fact that someone reported me for sexual harassment for reporting them for sexual harassment is retaliation then I might not even have my Magna Cum Laude degree next week. The whole thing is an elaborate performance, almost entirely divorced from, and often not even pretending to be, an education. In hindsight I can’t say I recommend university to anyone who wants to learn. Instead of an undergraduate degree, I think simply reading 10 books that were foundational in their fields (On the Origin of Species, The Wealth of Nations, etc.) will easily provide anyone with a more valuable education than an undergraduate degree. The only things I directly learned in school could’ve been more readily learned on YouTube or from podcasts. Heck, the content of the entire introductory economics course I wasn’t allowed to test out of could have probably been learned in a day reading Marginal Revolution. What I actually learned from this experience is that I was:

1.      Severely overestimating the average intelligence of people with undergraduate and graduate degrees. Apparently even after completing an undergraduate degree most people don’t read books, don’t understand basic logic, and can’t write intelligibly. Graduate degrees also don’t appear to mean anything beyond having the patience to complete an additional 2-4 years of bureaucratic football. Maybe physics and biology are an exception here? Please someone tell me that the hard sciences are an exception to this. Experiencing school for the first time while also witnessing a lot of anti-scientific nonsense propagated by people with PhDs in medicine and immunology has severely undermined my trust in the expertise of people doing The Science™.

2.      Severely underestimating the bureaucracy of schools. Why did it take 4 people’s approval to take the number of classes I wanted to take? Why was I not allowed to take classes from other majors? Why wouldn’t anyone take responsibility for any action or policy, even when they themselves wrote the policy and did the action? Title IX law appears to be a total meme. There is so much money floating around the university that even verifiable embezzlement is dismissed with a mere hand wave. On the other hand, a friend told me about similar embezzlement in another department that was a matter of hundreds of dollars rather than hundreds of thousands. That was apparently small enough to be acknowledged and the person responsible got a slap on the wrist but still works for the institution.

3.      Underestimating the amount of propaganda in schooling. I learned no history, apart from the geology class and a History of Jazz class, and I was required to take what amounts to 2 Social Justice propaganda classes that I didn’t even talk about here, in addition to the UN policy propaganda class masquerading as a ‘science’ class. Even in seemingly more generic classes like English we were asked to write essays responding to things like Mom’s Demand Action ad campaigns. The economics class focused on cap-and-trade and completely skipped over demand curves, barely mentioned incentives, scarcity, etc. Classes went out of their way to frame things in terms of the currently in-vogue brand of identity first American politics, even when it didn’t make sense to do so, or it distracted from more foundational principles.

4.      Education in school is purely incidental. When I encountered Dr. Luna’s geology class it felt like a miracle. It was the exception, not the rule. Schooling is clearly not maximizing for learning, by my read the only thing being maximized for in school is Compliance. At the end of the day, it’s a zero-sum status game, and the more people play the harder everyone has to try to signal they’re better at it than everyone else. In 50 years will PhDs be job prerequisites instead of undergraduate degrees? Any educational byproduct of this system of ‘education’ is incidental, a happy accident. And my experience was probably less bad than most since the major I was in allowed me to make my own path during my last year (though probably worse than most on the bureaucratic front as most of the people I know wouldn’t have made various rights violations that took place by the school a big deal).