It’s been a year since my last post. I’ve been wrapping up Roote, which is officially shutting down.

Roote has been my job for the last 4 years, so I want to reflect on this chapter.

No pressure to read, of course. But maybe my reflection will help you reflect too! Reflect-ception.

Life is full of chapters. I’m curious why we move through them.

Four sections:

1. Why I’m Ending Roote

2. How Everything Evolved

3. The Roote Fellowship

4. Gratitude & What’s Next

1. Why I’m Ending Roote

Why end Roote? The simplest answer is that I’ve run out of money.

But the deeper answer is that Roote is no longer aligned with my life. This is a new thing. For many years, I loved Roote. But I have changed and the world has too.

There are two flavors of misalignment, social and financial.

First, social misalignment. Roote was isolating. Every day at Roote was just me and my screen. (And my cat.) Roote was built for a pandemic—Zoom fellowship calls and personal content creation. This solo dolo hermit life was lonely.

Especially because I live in San Francisco! A city! With people! My people!

Unfortunately, I moved here right before COVID. So I’ve done a 6-year detour towards isolation. I want to return to why I moved to SF in the first place. Ambitious nerd energy. In person.

It’s a bit embarrassing to have vestigial COVID isolation. The pandemic began more than six years ago. We got vaccines five years ago.

But I’m still a house cat. I want to be a Rhys dog. It’s like I have social-emotional Long COVID. Begone!

I’m curious what you’re still carrying from COVID. And I wish you the agency to release it.

Second, financial misalignment. Roote was great as a lean nonprofit, but I’m 35 now and could use a real salary.

As a CS major who was early to crypto, it’s both impressive and embarrassing that I’ve never made much money. I’ve been a do-gooder for a decade, so it’s (well past) time to switch.

This is especially true in the Bay Area. lol imagine me trying to outbid my OpenAI or Anthropic friends for a house here.

Thus far, I’ve been able to live a full, rich life without much money. I didn’t need much. I’m a bit late, but I’d like my next chapter to be my Dad Era. That requires money. I’m excited to make it.

I’m curious what your version of a rich life looks like. And how it’s changed.

***

This makes it sound bad. Like Roote sucked. It didn’t!

Roote was such a good container for me. (And hopefully for others.) To research everything and teach it. To coach young folks around the world. These things filled my cup. I’m grateful for them.

But now that Roote is dead (rip), we can give its eulogy. It wasn’t perfect, but I’m proud of the life it lived. What did it do?

Two main things:

• How Everything Evolved

• The Roote Fellowship

Let’s look at each.

2. How Everything Evolved

Roote made educational content on humanity's long-term trajectory.

I had moderate success with Marriage Counseling with Capitalism and The Wisdom Age. So I tried to create an illustrated book. This mostly failed.

2023 was an unpublished rough draft. 2024 was book proposal rejection. 2025 started with Ada & Locke, which never got above 100 subscribers.

The book wasn’t working. So at the end of 2025, I switched from a book to a YouTube series. Lean into my enthusiasm more.

Then I spent the last nine months creating 89 videos on How Everything Evolved (HEE). We got to 17,000 subscribers, so I’d give it a stamp of moderate success! (I’m a hard grader. Everything is a C+.)

***

Upon reflection, I think it’s the hardest work project I’ve ever done. There are three reasons why: understanding the content, teaching it, and then YouTubing it.

First, it’s difficult to understand everything.

A lot has happened from 14 billion years ago until today! There are so many juicy questions. How do stars produce the elements? Why did the Cambrian Explosion happen? Why did homo sapiens get big brains? How do machines learn?

It’s a lot to get right.

If I’m generous, I got 75% of it 75% correct. If I’m more realistic, I covered 10% to a depth of 10%. Reality has a surprising amount of detail.

But AI knows 99% of 99%. We’re lucky to have a world-class tutor in our pocket. One who patiently spends days teaching me about the Iron Age or the Industrial Revolution.

Why, as a puny human, even attempt to learn 10%? You cannot outsource your understanding.

So I tried to remember it all. Below is my Anki graph of 20,000 notecards I created over the last few years. Like Duolingo for books.

Studying this many notecards takes a lot of time. 722 hours to be exact. I had a love-hate relationship with Anki. Like a constant obligation for intellectual stimulation. A strange version of purgatory.

Second, it’s difficult to teach all this.

Take the origin of life, for example. It’s complicated. For books, there’s Nick Lane’s The Vital Question. And Eric Smith’s The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth. (One of my favorite books of all time.)

How do you collapse 1100 pages of abiogenesis into a 20-minute YouTube video? You can’t. But I tried, here.

It’s an ok attempt. Maybe a B. But the internet only rewards A+ content.

YouTube is a humbling place. Before this, I thought I was a pretty good teacher. But HEE showed me that I’m not a top 1% teacher. I’m not Hank Green or Geo Girl. I’m just a guy. Just a dog on the internet. Just Rhys.

In my quest to make better content, I physically printed images. 1500 of them.

Again, I had a love-hate relationship with this aspect of HEE. No one wants an 11x17 printer in their studio apartment. But also, I loved finding or creating that perfect visual.

Third, it’s difficult to be good at YouTube. Not just teaching the content, but winning at social media. Getting clicks.

As Mr. Beast says, “if they don’t click, they don’t watch.”

You get clicks with great titles and thumbnails. I improved at this, especially after going through Paddy Galloway’s accelerator. But I was never able to consistently produce viral videos like the one below.

***

Still, as difficult as it was, I made it all the way from 14 billion years ago to the present! 89 videos! It felt so good to ship that last video.

I could finally go Office Space on my printer.

All things considered, HEE was a moderately cost-effective use of funds. It cost $200,000 to produce. The series got 700,000 views and 60,000 watch hours.

That’s about $3 per learning hour. HEE is in the same range as a university MOOC but 10x less cost-effective than Khan Academy (donate here).

HEE is quite different from Khan though. Not SAT prep, but a theory on the Evolution of Everything. (In theory.) So it’s tough to compare them. Don’t be the best, be the only.

***

If you’d like to get started with the series, I recommend the most popular videos or checking out this playlist—the Full Timeline of Universal Evolution.

Grateful to have worked on this. Curious what you think.

3. Roote Fellowship

The other half of Roote was the Roote Fellowship (RF).

Aka Free Therapy With Coach Rhys. Aka shoving ambitious folks together into Zoom breakout rooms. (Giving water to dying plants.)

Like HEE, I think RF was a good thing but not a great thing. (Everything is a C+.)

We spent $200,000 to serve 250 fellows, around $1,000 per fellow. That buys you a strange distribution of counterfactually dubious outcomes, from Stanford full-rides to YC acceptance to homesteading in northern Canada.

Education is notoriously difficult to track. This was especially true for Roote’s wide age range (mostly 15–30). We couldn’t just track college acceptance rates.

Plus, I was focused on cultivating deeper habits of life success and wisdom. Things like self-awareness and self-belief. Increasing their surface area of serendipity and relating to others.

In terms of rough outcomes, I’d say Roote had:

• Little impact on 50% of fellows
  life not meaningfully different
  

• Moderate impact on 30%
  raised ambitions, met great people, realizations in 1:1 coaching
  

• Strong impact on 20%
  large positive change in life trajectory

But these impacts never really scaled. 250 fellows is a lot, but it’s not really making a meaningful dent in human capital.

If nothing else, I think coaching for ambitious young people is still dramatically underserved. Roote gave its fellows executive coaching a decade before they could afford it.

I’m proud of that.

***

I’d love to highlight all the Rootie successes. But there are well over one hundred of them! I won’t force you to read that list. So here’s a gif of their headshots and their current impact.

Proud of every one of them. Amazing what a set of ambitious frontier people can do.

Plus, many Rooties are still in school. They’re finding their interests and their people. Finding their future entry in this list.

There are also many fellows focusing on non-work stuff. Caring for their health, their newborn, or their parents. Traveling. Resting.

All chapters in the book of life.

I’m excited to see Rootie Mafia’s impact in the decades ahead. 🫡

4. Gratitude & What’s Next

Thank you for reading.

Thank you to the fellows for your relentless energy and curiosity. To my video editor, Abdul, for speedrunning 89 videos.

Thank you to the other amazing grant programs that help young people. And to the other educational YouTubers who satisfy viewers’ curiosity.

A huge thank you to Roote’s donors for supporting this work. Thank you for your belief in me to try something new. For your patience with me as I tried to find product-market fit for the fellowship and the research. And for your understanding that I’m stopping even though we have momentum. Shout out Shingai Thornton, Yaniv Tal, Philip Stehlik, Protocol Labs, and The Graph.

Thank you to my Patrons for your support from 2017 to 2026. It gave me the freedom to follow my curiosity and search for impactful niches. Shutting the Patreon down now. (Full list of supporters here.)

Thank you to Roote’s full set of board members: Jasmine Wang in 2022, then Stephanie Bachar, Sophia Roman, and Taylor Want (2023–2026). Thank you for watching my overly long Loom videos and for your feedback on this very email. And rest in peace Vanessa Slavich, our first board member and a beautiful, thoughtful soul.

Thank you to all the Roote employees in 2022 for being game to jump on a weird ship. I’m sorry I sank it. Thank you for understanding as I figured out myself and what Roote should be.

Thank you to all my coaches. To my accountability coach, Rob. To my life coach, Nadia. To my health coach, Jill. To my PT, Jaimie. I need all the guidance I can get.

Thank you to my family for everything. To my dad & stepmom and to my brother & sister-in-law. For supporting me when I’m down and challenging me when I’m up. (And of course, love to the extended fam too.)

Thank you to my friends for laughter and vulnerability. I am so glad that playfulness begets playfulness and connection begets connection.

And of course, to my cat, Diego.

I am blessed.

…

I’m not sure what I’ll do next.

I’ve been working through a nerve pain saga for the last 6 months. It’s been intense. I could write a whole separate post, and I might. But suffice it to say, I do not wish chronic nerve pain on my worst enemies.

So I’ll start with my health.

Then I plan to start looking for a new job in July. Not sure what exactly.

Maybe I’ll invest with a VC firm or grant with a nonprofit foundation. Maybe I’ll help the societal impacts team or data team of a big AI lab. Maybe just cook with a cracked startup.

The most important thing is people. I want to work for someone I respect & admire and who believes in me. I’m looking to have fun too. Almost certainly in San Francisco.

Likely in an AI-shaped hole, with a large token budget, managing infinite minds with a thin harness and fat skills. Leverage.

I want to help my team win.

Excited to see where I can help. There’s a Rhys-shaped hole somewhere. Please reach out if you’d like to chat!

Thank you to all the teachers who came before me. To all teachers in all realms. To all beings in all realms. I give it all back.

ॐ ॐ ॐ गुरुर्ब्रह्मा गुरुर्विष्णुर्गुरुर्देवो महेश्वरः गुरुः साक्षात्परं ब्रह्म तस्मै श्रीगुरवे नमः

眾生無邊誓願度

Warmth,
Rhys ❤️

Books, music, graphs, and movies below. Also some o3 chats :)

Maybe you’ll find something that piques your interest! Lmk if so.

-Rhys

Books

Histories of the 19th and 20th century:

I’m overindexed on the universe’s first 14 billion years and underindexed on the last 200 years. So I’ve been reading more about the world from 1800-2000.

• Slouching Towards Utopia by Brad DeLong. Good deep dive into the role of monetary policy and inflation in the 20th century.
  

• The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 by Eric Hobsbawm. Just finished! It’s ok. It’s helpful as a reference of pointers to things I should understand better like Chartism, Corn Laws, etc.
  

• The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914, The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991. Hobsbawm again. The man can’t be stopped. I guess it’s the job of a historian to write history, and our job to read it :)

Education:

• The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein. Good overview of the teaching profession in the US. Cool political economy analysis of how teaching became a feminized profession, the rise of teachers’ unions, race relations after the Civil Rights Act, and data after NCLB.
  

• The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch. A bit polemic but an excellent overview of the accountability and school choice movement, plus why Ravitch eventually rejected it. Recapitulated with DOGE & ED today of course. Ravitch is rolling in her grave bed. (She’s still alive.)
  

• The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley. Interesting that Ripley wrote this a decade before her excellent systems book, High Conflict. Smartest Kids is a fine ethnography of high schoolers around the world. Nacirema energy. US schools are weird. Lots of sports, no freedom, and built to sustain class divides.
  

• The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan. Excellent analysis of the applause lights and expenditure cascades that lead to too much education.
  

• The Emotional Lives of Teenagers by Lisa Damour. Amazing book by the expert who helped Pixar with teen emotions for Inside Out 2. Read it if you are a teen, teach teens, have a teen, or were a teen ;)
  

AI:

Not reading many books on AI. Mostly just consuming real-time content like Daniel Selsam talking about compression :)

• Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick. Honestly didn’t love it. It’s mostly business studies on how AI is changing jobs. Stick to Ethan’s Substack, Dwarkesh, or Karpathy.
  

• Why Machines Learn by Anil Ananthaswamy. DNF. Interesting build-up from linear algebra but I found myself mathed out by the halfway point. Will likely pick up again.
  

How Everything Evolves:

• The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama. Ridiculously good synthesis of political evolution before the French Revolution. Probably my favorite political historian.
  

• Darwin's Conjecture by Geoffrey M. Hodgson. Good formalization of the evolutionary dynamics in social and economic systems.
  

• Darwin Turing Dawkins by Leonard M. Adleman. Very strange book by the A in RSA. Adleman knows there’s a there there (universal Darwinism applies to computers!) but unfortunately there’s no there here (in this book).
  

• Everything Evolves by Mark Vellend. Coming Aug 19, 2025. Likely to be an ecological biologist’s view of Universal Darwinism. I love ecologists. They’re “natural” systems thinkers ;)
  

• The Evolution of Everything by Brian Villmoare. I’m such a sucker for titles like this. Haven’t read yet, but salivating.
  

Other:

• Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charlie Munger. I have a love-hate relationship with this book. I love Charlie’s mindset on worldly wisdom and incentives. He’s a systems thinker through and through. But he’s built in the 20th century not the 21st. For example, he doesn’t see how selling Coca-Cola as a set of conditioned reflexes would lead to a global obesity epidemic. For someone so worldly wise, Munger is also prey to incentive-caused bias, just like the rest of us. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  

• Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (中国特色社会主义) by Roland Boer. Criminally underrated book to understand the ideology behind modern China. Many Western commentators just understand China by its symptoms: economy, military, politics. But they don’t look at ideology. It’s like trying to understand the West without understanding liberalism. Boer’s book is a good exploration of 求是, 社会主义市场经济, 四项基本原则, 共同富裕, and 四个现代化.

What are you reading?!?

Music

Best of 2025 Thus Far

• Who Let The Dogs Out by Lambrini Girls. All-women English punk rock. 9/10.

• EUSEXUA by FKA twigs. FKA combines her original left-field R&B with more hyperpop influences. 8/10.

• Foxes in the Snow by Jason Isbell. Good emotional songwriting. 8/10.

World

• Slowly making my way through Songlines’ top world music from the last 25 years.

• Tyler (Cowen ofc) recently had Joe Boyd talk about his new world music book And the Roots of Rhythm Remain. Here’s the accompanying playlist.

Classical

Been on a classical music kick recently, inspired by my brother.

• Bach’s cantatas (and Bach in general)

• Mozart’s operas

• I’m still before 1800. Have only made it through baroque (Bach, Handel) and classical (Mozart, Haydn, CPE Bach, early Schubert). Listening to the Romantic period now (Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner et al).

• Great find from my local classical station: Scottish Fantasy by Max Bruch

• Ben Nobuto is my favorite new classical artist.

Other

• Liminal Ambient: Gen Z's Answer to LoFi is a great video on GenZ ambient music. Sent me down the path of Minecraft C418 + slowed and reverbed. And the reverse—sped up.

• Anthony Fantano recently posted a good overview of Outsider Music. I’d already listened to the excellent Songs in the Key of Z. Fantano’s overview helped me further understand the (sad) cultural backstory of groups like The Shaggs. Plus it gave me new outsider music bangers like Pot of Macaroni.

• Elizabeth Mitchell’s children’s songs are great. Her Spanish collab with Suni Paz is especially good.

• Still hunting for AI music. Recent favorites are 10 Drunk Cigarettes and Daydreamin’. Don’t judge me :)

What are you listening to?!?

o3 & 4o

Some of my consumption comes through o3 & 4o now. I use o3 to guesstimate causal weights and quantify history. I use 4o as a tutor.

Trying to Think More™ not less, but it is hard :)

• Energetic prime movers from 0 - 1900 CE (o3). So much human muscle.

• Causes and solutions to demographic collapse (o3). Financial incentives don’t work.

• Golden Age of Islam vs. Political Fragmentation (4o). 750-1250 was a weird time for Islam.

• Understanding iodine’s role in steroids (4o). Iodine is the heaviest element used in biology.

• % energy Yersinia Pestis gained from its hosts (4o). A three-level hyperparasite. Human-rat-flea.

• Quantifying the GOAT across all sports and games (o3). Serena top. Flash second.

• Worst California propositions (o3). Prop 103 is bad but Prop 13 takes the cake.

• Debating the most important elements (4o). My final opinion are these 36.

• Center of population from 70,000 BCE to 2000 CE (o3). Map. Inspired by center of GDP map.

What are you using AI for?!?

Graphs & Images

1. Energetic prime movers over history. From Smil’s Energy & Civilization. Impressive shift from people to engines during 1800-1950.

2. Reminder to anchor AGI predictions. ~2034 is the current consensus. From Metaculus:

3. How university students use Claude. The rest of the report is excellent too. Somewhat interestingly, I use ChatGPT daily but think the analysis team behind Claude is world-class. See CLIO, Model Welfare, Economic Index, etc.

4. Genetic distance from Early European Farmers to modern day. Red is close, blue is far. Looks like the Yamnaya never made it to Sardinia, nor past Italian Alps.

5. Orion Nebula is the closest stellar nursery. Orion is the best.

6. mRNA is ~10x bigger than the protein it creates! From Niko’s McCarty’s excellent Biology is a Burrito.

7. We’re living through the Carbon Pulse but barely recognize it. Yes, we are in Peak Oil. From Nate Hagens’ excellent talk on Energy and The Superorganism:

What images have stuck with you recently?!?

Videos & Movies

• The Internet is a Machine That Devours Trust by Hank Green. Must-watch to understand the information ecosystem of the modern internet.

• The Deadliest Infectious Disease of All Time — Tuberculosis by John Green. Reminder to look at this OWID death chart once a month. I’m such a vlogbrothers stan.

• Why Cambodia & Laos Are Absurdly Empty by RealLifeLore. The US carpet bombed Laos & Cambodia, which led to the Khmer Rouge. I used to fully blame Pol Pot for the genocide. But now assign more causality to the US & Kissinger. o3 agrees.

• South Korea Is Over by Kurzgesagt and Japan's population is shrinking by 60 Minutes. Few kindergarteners in South Korea. 10M empty homes in rural Japan. Future demographic collapse is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

• No Other Land won this year’s Oscar for Best Documentary. Really good. Really sad. Not about Gaza but West Bank settlements.

• Will & Harper wasn’t nominated for Best Documentary but should’ve been. Good pluralist take on gender transitions. Sad to see the right-wing reaction by folks like Brett Cooper.

What have you been watching?!?

Other

• How to improve education outcomes most efficiently? (main graph)

• RenPhil’s annual report

• Why I think AI take-off is relatively slow by Tyler Cowen

• Trying out veganism so I’ve been eating this superseed mix of chia, hemp, and flex seeds.

…Everything gets Ankied of course :)

I’m curious what you’ve consumed this year that has resonated with you!

This work is possible through our generous donors Shingai Thornton, Yaniv Tal, Philip Stehlik, Protocol Labs, The Graph, and the dozens of Patreon members below. Thank you!

Doug Petkanics, Matt Lindmark, Daniel Friedman, Maciej Olpinski, Ref Lindmark, Jonathan Washburn, Patrick Walker, David Hanna, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Brian Crain, Colin Wielga, John Lindmark, Peter Rogers, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Jonny Dubowsky, Katie Powell, and Simon de la Rouviere.

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Humanity needs to incentivize better incentives. We need incentive infrastructure to beat Moloch.

We still live in a society with poor outcomes. We spend time, money, and energy on nostrums—ideas that promise to solve problems but have no real impact.

Why? Because we fix surface-level problems without fixing their underlying incentives.

As Charlie Munger, the patron saint of incentives once said, "show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome."

Or as Donella Meadows, the other patron saint of incentives, said: "The least obvious part of the system, its purpose, is the most crucial determinant of its behavior."

Look at the problems of the last few decades. They're all incentive problems. The Great Financial Crisis was caused by bad incentives for bankers to underwrite risky mortgages. No skin in the game. A moral hazard. Meanwhile, the Climate Crisis was caused by companies that were incentivized to ignore the externalities of fossil fuels. No carbon tax. Just pollute.

Many of the problems of so-called late-stage capitalism and neoliberalism are problems of incentives. We live in an addiction economy. Where TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube are incentivized to addict us to screens. Where CPG companies are incentivized to addict us to food and cigarettes. More than 50% of deaths every year are commerciogenic, like obesity, smoking, and many cardiovascular diseases.

Sure, companies are known to be rife with incentive problems. But it's not like nonprofits or government are free of them. The nonprofit industrial complex is rife with corrupt, rent-seeking behavior—signaling impact while lining their pockets. Plus, many nonprofits form dependency relationships. In housing, rent control just subsidizes demand while restricting supply. In substance use, harm reduction often encourages local minima for users and their communities.

Government is no better. Around the world, we have voting systems that incentivize and give power to charismatic megalomaniacs. Social media, gerrymandering, and two-party systems all incentivize polarization. Meanwhile, politicians themselves are incentivized for Twitter likes, not policy. But even the best policy rarely gets done. Bureaucrats are incentivized to follow procedures, not drive outcomes. We're left with a multi-trillion dollar monolithic government that mostly just sits around until it brinksmanships its way to the next debt ceiling.

All of the institutions feed off each other. Companies lobby corrupt politicians for private gains. Nonprofits feed off government grant programs too. Meanwhile, governments decrease corporate taxes in a global race to the bottom. This causes brain drain and a loss of state capacity, which further decreases the trust in government and desire to fund it. The systems degrade.

Many of our biggest industries are plagued by incentive problems. Healthcare charges for treatment not prevention. Doctors are paid for expensive medicines not cheap ones. Education is incentivized for graduation rates not actual learning. Universities form cartels to price fix and restrict supply.

We often talk about Baumol's cost disease for healthcare and education. But it jacks up prices in law and finance too. Lawyers work on an hourly cost-plus basis, colluding against their clients to run up prices and force a society where everyone is lawyered up. Finance acts like a leech on the economy, pulling an ever higher percentage of GDP and corporate profits each year.

Unions can be one of the worst cases of incentive rot. Blue-collar workers strike against productive automation. Rubber rooms hold NYC teachers who can't be fired. During the pandemic, teachers unions held out on in-person teaching for nearly twenty-four months, causing at least two years of learning loss. Unions can be a good response to greedy owners or capricious politicians. But they can decay.

Science degrades when we incentivize proxies like the h-index, which causes endless grant cycles and only incrementally legible research. Meanwhile, our national debt is ballooning, caused by politicians buying votes now at the expense of our future children. In addition, oil companies find the cheapest way to greenwash their way into ESG funds, all while continuing to manufacture doubt about the harm from fossil fuels.

We need better incentive infrastructure.

In addition, we can view many of the problems of other idea machines as problems of incentives.

Effective altruism is focused on helping animal welfare, people in extreme poverty, and future generations. Why are these fields neglected? Because those people have no voice, no buying power. There's no incentive to help them. You can arbitrage impact by helping those without a voice. In addition to neglectedness, effective altruism is also focused on cost-effectiveness. Why? Because information asymmetries in donor-funder relationships optimize for cheap emotional signals of impact rather than quantifiable outcomes. Again, an opportunity for impact arbitrage.

The abundance agenda is focused on increasing the supply of public goods, rejecting state capture, and developing state capacity. The reason why we're mired in incapable states that just cater to niche interests is simple—they're incentivized to do so. Institutional economists have been studying this for years. There's the iron law of oligarchy (Michels), the dictatorship of the small minority (Taleb), indifferent majorities (Olson), and winning coalitions (Bueno de Mesquita). These works all tell us that in order to beat vetocracy, we need to construct political institutions which are incentivized for the provision of public goods.

Finally, incentive problems are at the heart of progress studies. Why don't we have progress? Because the NIH only funds entrenched boomers. Because solar buildout is stifled by NEPA permitting. Because nuclear is blocked by the NRC. Because people are incentivized to be conformist around a pessimistic view of the future. Because we're incentivized to anchor from a slightly better present, instead of dreaming about an abundant, ambitious future.

This isn't to say that incentives only cause problems. In fact, they're behind all good things too.

For thousands of years, humans were mired in a neverending conflict. Empires would pillage their neighbors until their neighbors got strong enough to fight back. War was normal. Peace was the exception. Humans remained in the Malthusian trap. We were stuck in a cultural fabric of conformism and precarity where new ideas and new children died early and often.

But we eventually escaped this trap with the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. Why? The incentives changed. The printing press made ideas cheap. Cheap ideas meant more ideas. Meanwhile, the incentives behind those ideas changed. Exploration and doubt were encouraged. This had far-reaching implications across all of European life.

New religious ideas like Protestantism spread. Protestant states had new parliamentary structures where political legitimacy came from the economic growth of the merchant class rather than Catholic decree.

Scientifically, the incentives were changed too. With the scientific method, the ideas that survived were those that withstood repeated doubt. We began a new process of cumulative knowledge creation.

Over time, theoretical knowledge became physical technologies. Fossil fuels powered machines. Living conditions rose. Economic slack created more scientists, more craftsmen, more abundance. Incentives for knowledge and growth.

Over time, these new capitalist incentives gave us the modern world. Competitive markets gave us divisions of labor, free trade, and abundant consumer goods. Life became much, much better. Meanwhile, the ideals of liberalism were applied not just to markets, but to people. Free people. Freedom of speech. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The greatest good for the greatest number. These ideals were implemented in a new form of politics—democracy—which gave us the modern welfare state, education for all, and consumer protection. In an idealized form, liberal capitalist democracy contains the institutional incentives for collective flourishing. Whig history is at least partially true.

But the power of positive incentives doesn't just lie in our past. It surrounds us in our digital technology today. Wikipedia incentivizes a global free encyclopedia. The incentives of Page Rank and Vickrey auctions give us free Google searches and the accompanying advertising business model. Online marketplaces like Uber, AirBnB, and Amazon have incentivized markets of cheap, useful goods. Bitcoin's proof-of-work incentives create a distributed database for a permissionless store of value, while Ethereum's proof-of-stake has incentivized a permissionless smart contract platform with 99% less energy use. Meanwhile, prediction markets incentivize traders to tell us what might happen and when.

Finally, at the risk of sounding Pollyannaish, our cultural fabric has improved too. The arc of liberalism has led to more rights for marginalized groups and generally more acceptance of the other. Gay marriage is legal in much of the West, mental health is less stigmatized, and more people care about the environment than ever before.

Although it was a rocky path, the positive incentives of the last 500 years have given us freedom, prosperity, and peace like never before. It's time to continue this for the next 100 years.

Our incentives are better than they ever have been. And still we need better incentives.

Taking a step back, the incentives framing is so powerful because it is based on evolution and theories of universal Darwinism. Incentives are ubiquitous because evolution is.

Evolution is the selection of inherited variation. Fundamentally, selection is an incentive for survival. Over the last four billion years we can look at any pattern and ask: What incentivized this? What was being selected for?

The incentive framing has different terms in different fields.

In biology we call it selection. Selection for fitness. For energy consumption. For competition. Selection for bacteria and viruses and plants and animals and monkeys. For brain size and tool use. For co-domestication. As we begin to take more control over Earth's biosphere, we need to be mindful about what we're selecting for. If we don't incentivize biodiversity, carbon mitigation, and natural capital, we will lose these things. If incentivize our microbial world into an arms race, we will get more antimicrobial resistance. If we have incentives for low-cost DNA synthesis and drug design, we will get both the COVID vaccine but also bioengineered pathogens.

In the social sciences and in culture, we have many terms for incentives. Psychology is the study of behavior. What causes it? Incentives under another name. Biases. Motives. Our fast System 1 vs. slow System 2. Meanwhile, economics is explicitly the study of incentives. Microeconomics looks the incentives of individuals. This started with rational actors but eventually complexified into behavioral economics. Macroeconomics looks at the incentives of groups. Rent-seeking behavior. Tragedy of the commons. Adverse selection. Principal-agent problems. Ricardo's comparative advantage. It's incentives all the way down.

Finally, computation and AI can be viewed through the lens of digital evolution and incentives. Stochastic gradient descent selects for low loss functions. Backpropagation is a great way to find them. These systems are incentivized to succeed at whatever minimizes their loss function. Indeed, this is the worry of AI alignment. Can we iterative construct robust incentives that dodge instrumental convergence while maximizing corrigibility? I'm not sure. But it's incentives again.

Fundamentally, incentives and evolutionary selection answer "why" questions. Why does an organism survive? Why do humans act this way? Why do AIs produce these outputs? By focusing on the why, incentives get to the causal underpinnings and root causes of reality. It's a powerful frame.

I'm not sure the best way to create Better Incentive Infrastructure.

Many of the groups above are already doing great work on it.

But we should spend more time on it.

Perverse incentives are tricky, antimemetic beasts that hide in plain sight and are excellent at dodging our attempts at removing them. Positive incentives are hard to design but have long-lasting positive effects if done correctly.

To come back to our patron saint, Charlie Munger: "Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives."

This work is possible through our generous donors Shingai Thornton, Yaniv Tal, Philip Stehlik, Protocol Labs, The Graph, and the dozens of Patreon members below. Thank you!

Doug Petkanics, Matt Lindmark, Daniel Friedman, Maciej Olpinski, Ref Lindmark, Jonathan Washburn, Patrick Walker, David Hanna, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Brian Crain, Colin Wielga, John Lindmark, Peter Rogers, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Jonny Dubowsky, Katie Powell, and Simon de la Rouviere.

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Hey Rhys’ Pieces,

I’m starting to record a YouTube series on How Everything Evolved.

First, could our universe itself be the product of evolution—like some kind of cosmic organism?

Surprisingly, yes.

This 30min video takes you on a three-part journey:

• → From the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, which implies…

• → Cosmological natural selection—the theory that black holes birth universes. In each new universe, the physical constants have small mutations. Over time they maximize for fecundity—black hole-based reproduction. This implies…

• → That our universe would have lots of early black holes, which James Webb Space Telescope just found.

This might be one of the most important theories this century. We might live in a multiverse, not a universe. A Copernican Turn for the modern era.

Plus, if the universe optimizes for black hole creation, might that be the ultimate teleology of AI? idk

Here’s a review from Tony, a beta viewer:

The part about a lineage of intelligences making black holes was trippy af. Maximizing energy dissipation is such an interesting “reward function” for intelligent beings.

Video here.

Curious what you think!

-Rhys ❤️

Additional reading and watching:

• Blowtorch Theory by Julian Gough

• The Egg and the Rock by Julian Gough

• The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin

• Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees

• Julian Gough on Jim O'Shaughnessy’s podcast

• JWST & Black Holes on PBS Space Time

• JWST & Black Holes on Anton Petrov

• Cosmological natural selection

• Fine-tuned universe

• UHZ1

This work is possible through our generous donors Shingai Thornton, Yaniv Tal, Philip Stehlik, Protocol Labs, The Graph, and the dozens of Patreon members below. Thank you!

Doug Petkanics, Matt Lindmark, Daniel Friedman, Maciej Olpinski, Ref Lindmark, Jonathan Washburn, Patrick Walker, David Hanna, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Brian Crain, Colin Wielga, John Lindmark, Peter Rogers, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Jonny Dubowsky, Katie Powell, and Simon de la Rouviere.

Subscribe now

Hey Rhys’ Pieces!

I wrote 40+ Ada & Locke comics in March/April and wanted to share them with you below. Or just binge them starting here.

Here is what folks have said about it thus far:

• “Perfect for the XKCD / Sapiens crowd — highly online nerds interested in science.”

• “Very high ratio of hmmm per seconds of reading.”

• “Astounding ability to communicate complex & unimaginable ideas in simple terms & analogies.”

Also:

• One Google friend prints it out and shows his coworkers

• One reader replaced her daily lunch scrolling with daily comic reading. ❤️

All of the comics have links to contemporary research, sources, etc.

Enjoy and let me know what you think!

-Rhys

Patterns in Repeat

On how:

AI Does Homework

25% of all words are written by AI

Here are some longer comic series:

AI Religion

AI doubles Earth's brainpower

AI Consciousness

Robot Liberation — Episode 1: The Farm

This is the first of two episodes on AI welfare. In this first episode, Ada & Locke explore a factory farm to learn about animal welfare.

Robot Liberation — Episode 2: Monitors of Mind

Continuing in Episode 2, Ada & Locke explore a philosophical world where every mind is represented by a monitor.

…

I’m curious what you think! Subscribe to Ada & Locke itself for more regular updates. Will be writing Season 2 soon.

Warmth,
Rhys ❤️

This work is possible through our generous donors Shingai Thornton, Yaniv Tal, Philip Stehlik, Protocol Labs, The Graph, and the dozens of Patreon members below. Thank you!

Doug Petkanics, Matt Lindmark, Daniel Friedman, Maciej Olpinski, Ref Lindmark, Jonathan Washburn, Patrick Walker, David Hanna, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Brian Crain, Colin Wielga, John Lindmark, Peter Rogers, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Jonny Dubowsky, Katie Powell, and Simon de la Rouviere.

Subscribe now

Hey Rhys’ Pieces! (That’s you, the readers of this newsletter.)

It’s been a while since I last posted. I’ve been heads down on the Roote Fellowship and my book. Some quick updates on each:

1. Roote Fellowship (RF)

In the fall of 2023, I ran RF7 with 40 fellows. In the fall of 2024, I ran RF8 with 80 fellows.

I’m proud of the Rooties for all they’ve done—see examples from RF7 & RF8. They make me optimistic for the future.

As part of RF, I wrote articles on building self-awareness, being smart with people, and navigating college admissions. Plus, I outlined Roote’s vision.

• If you have an ambitious young person in your life who is looking for guidance, please have them apply to RF9. I’d love to help.

• I’m organizing a Future of Education event for early 2026. Reach out if you’re interested in participating.

• I’m looking for donors to scale Roote’s impact in 2026+. Donate here or reach out if you’re curious about making a larger gift.

2. Book

As anyone who has written a book knows, it’s not easy. In fact, it’s actually quite hard :).

In 2023, I created a rough draft after extensive research and experimentation with illustration tools.

In 2024, I sent a book proposal to agents but received 11 no’s. :(

In 2025, I’m releasing daily comics. Starting today.

Ada & Locke is a daily webcomic where a robot (Ada) and a boy (Locke) explore AI's impact. It's inspired by Calvin & Hobbes.

First post is here. I’m curious what you think! It’s just beginning.

Ada & Locke

Welcome to Ada & Locke!

Read more

2 years ago · Rhys Lindmark

Subscribe at adalocke.substack.com for daily posts. I’ll plan on keeping Rhys’ Pieces to ~weekly.

As always, I’m curious to hear from my readers. How are you doing? How was your 2024?

Warmth,
-Rhys ❤️

This work is possible through our generous donors Shingai Thornton, Yaniv Tal, Philip Stehlik, Protocol Labs, The Graph, and the dozens of Patreon members below. Thank you!

Doug Petkanics, Matt Lindmark, Daniel Friedman, Maciej Olpinski, Ref Lindmark, Jonathan Washburn, Patrick Walker, David Hanna, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Brian Crain, Colin Wielga, John Lindmark, Peter Rogers, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Jonny Dubowsky, Katie Powell, and Simon de la Rouviere.

This post compiles my top tips for college.

I. The application process is not built for your enjoyment

The college application process is brutal. This isn't because a given admissions officer wants to induce pain, but because the system incentivizes dehumanization, comparison, and rejection.

a. Education is signaling

Why? I think it's helpful to start with Bryan Caplan's Case Against Education. He argues that only 50% of education is building human capital. The other 50% is just signaling for traits that employers want: intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity (ICC).

This is the game you're playing. Your K12 education and college application signals ICC to college. Your college degree signals ICC to employers. And then, finally, you get to work as a productive member of society.

Each part of the college app signals ICC. SATs, grades, essays, ECs, and letters of rec. They're all different ways to get at the question: is this a smart, detail-oriented person who will fit in?

b. Highly selective colleges are die rolls. Roll lots of dice.

In addition to being excellent learning ecosystems, highly selective universities are a cartel. They restrict supply and increase demand to drive up admissions rates. The most selective universities accept less than 5% of applicants. For example, Stanford had 56,000 applicants and accepted 2,000.

This drives dehumanization (you're judged as one of 50k apps), comparison (it's a zero-sum game vs. your friends), and rejection (statistically speaking, you're likely to get rejected from 10+ colleges).

Just like the power law dictates everything in venture capital, supply restriction dictates everything in college applications. Let's play it out, using Stanford as an example.

56,000 applicants applied to Stanford. They accepted 2,000 students. That's a 3.5% acceptance rate. So you just need to be in that top 3.5%, right? To start, it would be helpful to get a perfect SAT score. Wrong. 70% of students with perfect SAT scores were rejected. The implication here is actually that, as long as you're above a certain threshold, it's a crapshoot. I can't find the source, but I remember hearing/reading that, for Harvard, they could construct seven "ghost classes" after the actual accepted class and they'd all look the same. High SATs, top ECs, great essays, etc.

Here's what that looks like with Stanford, just looking at SATs:

With 56,000 applicants, you could create 27 2000-person ghost classes. What do the SAT scores look like across those classes? Universities don't share the SAT scores of their applicants, just their admitted students. But we can reverse engineer it a bit.

Stanford's SAT scores by percentile are:

• 25%: 1500

• 50%: 1550

• 75%: 1580

We can bucket the 2000 students into those quartiles, including the top 500 students who got a perfect 1600. That gives us the "Accepted Class" in the graph above. But we know those 500 students were just 30% of all students who applied with a perfect SAT. We can take the remaining ~1700 students and divide them among the next 7 ghost classes. Then we can do a similar thing for the 1500, 1550, and 1580 buckets.

What is the implication of this? Yes, the bell curve moves slightly to the left as you get less perfect scores and more <1500s. But if you get a perfect score, you might still be in ghost class 2, 4, or 7. Same with a 1550.

Yes, if you apply with a 1000-1400, you're unlikely to get into Stanford. You're probably somewhere in ghost class 8-27. But even 1550s are just a die roll.

Instead of thinking of an acceptance rate of 3.5%, I think it's more helpful to think of Stanford as having a "top student" acceptance rate of 12.5% (1/8). You can convert acceptance rate to top student acceptance rate by multiplying by 3.5. Pomona? 7% acceptance rate, 25% top student acceptance rate. My alma mater, Carleton? 20% acceptance rate. 70% top student acceptance rate. (If you're a sharp student who somehow learns about Carleton and applies, you probably get in.)

The power law makes VC a bit of a shotgun business. YC funds hundreds of startups a year, then has a couple of outsized winners (AirBnB, Stripe) that pay for the rest.

College applications should be shotgunned as well. Achieve a certain signaling bar. Put your name in the hat. Then roll the 8-sided dice. Each application is another role of the die. To be in the Accepted Class rather than a ghost class.

If you apply to eight colleges, each of which has a top student acceptance rate of 1/8, you get eight die rolls. Eight chances to get a 1. Even here, the odds you get rejected by all of them is (7/8)^8 or 34%.

This dice framing is helpful because it stops you from applying too much causation to your application. Yes, it would be better to have a 1600 than a 1500. But mostly it's just how the die rolled that day. Understand what you can and can't control. You can control your mindset when crafting a great application. But you can't control the pure statistics of highly selective, supply-constrained colleges.

c. Rejecting rejection & comparison

The college selection process forces rejection and comparison. Getting rejected over and over again is painful. There's no denying it. But it's helpful if you: 1) anchor on getting rejected and 2) remind yourself of Churchill's famous quote (and the Unlimited Pursuit song):

Success is failure over and over again without a loss of enthusiasm.

College apps are also tough because they force you to compare with others. What SAT score did you get? What GPA? What college did you get into?

College apps force a one-dimensional stack ranking of us multidimensional humans. It's a one-time experience. Much of the rest of life you are differentiating yourself from others, following your own path, and being happy for others on theirs. In this forced comparison remember:

• "If you compare, you despair."

• "Comparison is the thief of joy."

• Instead think about your own goals (and things you can control), then just compare yourself against your bar, not others. (See How To Find Your Path.)

d. Play a different game

In some ways, the Ivy admission process can be summed up as: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Instead, look for ways to "beat the system" by finding less used paths.

1. For example, remember that Ivies aren't the only way. Twitter (and generally increasing your luck area) is a better way. Play long-term games with long-term people there.

2. Relatedly: remember that there is spaciousness around the first-year of college. You can get all rejections and that's ok. I know people who took three gap years. Work. Apply for grants. Build something. It's not a one-shot game.

3. "Don't be the best, be the only." Charting your own path instead of playing the rat race that others play.

No matter what, remember that you are more than your college application, or the college you get into.

Still, let's try to play the game and give yourself the best chance of getting in.

II. Roote College System

I'm not a college counselor. Just a guy on the internet. But here's my recommendation. It's the 5, 5, 5, 15 model.

a. Take 5 SAT practice tests

b. Write 5 essay drafts

c. Follow 5 passions

d. Apply to 15 colleges

These are the main buckets of a college application: academics (SAT, grades), personal (essays, LoR's), and extracurriculars.

It's easy to get down on the college process. But it's actually kind of a cool thing. Learning is fun. Writing is fun. Building things you're passionate about is fun. Enjoy it!

Let's look at each aspect.

a. Take 5 SAT practice tests

The main way to do well on the SAT is deliberate practice. Over 2-3 months, take 5-10 practice tests, fixing your mistakes each time (use Anki?). You'll get better, faster, and more comfortable. Then take the actual test once, maybe twice. Here's Joy's overview:

Here's an amazing self-study guide from r/Sat:

b. Write 5 draft essays

For your Common App personal statement, I recommend an iterative process:

• The summer before your senior year, spend ~2 hours brainstorming topics and sharing 3-5 options with others for feedback

• Choose one direction. Write a very rough draft and get feedback. Then write 2-5.

For the brainstorming: Use a formula but don't be formulaic. I've synthesized the advice from Elevated School and College Essay Guy:

• Brainstorm 20 essence objects (exercise)

• Brainstorm 20 values/themes (exercise)

• Then combine them with object + theme + secret theme. That should give you 3-5 essay options to get feedback on.

When writing, here's my piece on How To Write Well.

When looking at your topics or drafts, grade yourself with the VSPICE rubric. Look balanced & agentic, not one-sided & pessimistic.

Two final links I found helpful:

• What should I write about in the Common App Essay

• Tips and Tricks from a Peer-Reviewing Senior

c. Follow 5 passions

ECs are trying to signal conscientiousness and curiosity. Choose a few things you're excited by, do them for a few years, and try to do them well. It's pretty simple. Tenure and impact. Then describe them concisely and with numbers, like you would a resume.

Here are my favorite links on this. From r/ApplyingToCollege:

Look to do ECs that demonstrate genuine passion. Where you can showcase and write about the impact you've made vs simply only doing it for college apps.

ECs should also be quality over quantity. You don't have to do everything, but pick a few where you truly enjoying doing the activity and try your best to stick with it. Longevity displays stability and perseverance, which is what colleges like to see.

Same reddit thread, different comment:

Longer answer: basically anything at which you worked across multiple years, displayed ingenuity/insight, changed gears at some point due to difficulty/new information, produced quantifiable results, and had your efforts evaluated by an existing, trustworthy entity.

But the important thing to remember about ECs is that it's NOT about what you did, but rather why you did it and what that drive says about you.

From College Confidential:

OK, so, first, do what you love. Second, do try to challenge and develop yourself within what you do, whatever that means for that type of activity. And third, think about whether this is just a thing for you–which is fine sometimes–or whether this shows some sort of community engagement that could translate in some way to an active college community.

d. Apply to 15 colleges

Once you have a good application, apply to 15 colleges. Try 3 safeties, 5 targets, 7 reaches.

Or, if you don't want to apply to that many, just apply to a handful of safety and target schools. That's fine too. All of the supplements can be overwhelming.

Remember that you can ask for an application fee waiver. 575K+ applicants received a fee waiver in 2021-2022. $100M in Common App fee waivers were granted in 2021-2022.

e. Other & Scholarships

I don't have great tips for letters of recommendation. Just choose people who know you well, love you, and can write well.

Here are some scholarship links for low-income students:

• https://blog.collegevine.com/scholarships-for-low-income-students

And international students:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/IntltoUSA/comments/c19x7s/honest_advice_for_internationals_needing/

• https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/scholarship-advice/international-scholarships-study-us

• https://www.edupass.org/paying-for-college/scholarships/databases/

• https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/articles/a-guide-to-scholarships-for-international-students

• EducationUSA

Also see Cal Newport's book, How to Win at College.

Hope this was helpful. If you'd like more guidance, apply to the next Roote Fellowship and I'll give you feedback on your essay :).

I. Me

This mission starts with my own story—as a young person who wasn't living up to his potential. Growing up, I was a moderately precocious kid. Sharp kids take one of two paths. Some are pushed by their parents and develop anxiety and perfectionism. Others are left alone so they feel bored and tired. I was the latter. For 18 years, I was just another student in a 35-person classroom. I slept. A lot.

It wasn't all negative of course. I played sports. I played games. I laughed with friends. I traveled around the American Southwest with my loving parents and brother. It was good.

But I wasn't being challenged. Luckily, along the way, a variety of mentors pushed me. My high school physics teacher. My godparents. A friend's dad. They said "Rhys, you're sharp. But lazy! Please, live up to your potential."

I studied computer science at a selective liberal arts school, Carleton, which began to remove my lazy tendencies. After school, I founded a music education startup and finally began to work hard. But I could still feel that I wasn't living up to my potential. I was living in Denver, which increasingly felt like a cow town. Meanwhile, after Trump's election in 2016, I could feel technology and geopolitics moving more quickly. I was becoming aware of the world and couldn't just watch it all go by. I needed to do more.

So in 2017, I left my old startup in Denver and started hanging out on Twitter. That was the spark. I found other friendly ambitious nerds like me. I felt less alone. I fell down rabbit holes, read a non-fiction book a week, started a podcast, co-founded ETHDenver, taught tech ethics at MIT, moved to San Francisco in 2020, and founded Roote in 2022. Finally, home.

Now I'm mostly satisfied with my work life. There's still a ton I want to do of course. My book's not done and Roote is still small. But I'm working on interesting problems with good people.

It only took me 30 years to get here.

Sometimes I wish that I had found my path earlier. When I was 25. Or 20. Or 15. Or 10. But I didn't. And that's ok.

Still, I can give that gift to others. To help them find their path at 15 instead of 30. To tell ambitious young people "you are allowed". You can be ambitious. You can be weird. You should have high standards for yourself and others. You don't need to feel alone. Find your people. Meditate. Breathe. Make a dent in the universe.

II. Education Matters, But We're Falling Short

My story is not unique. There are 600 million high schoolers in the world. We should help all of them live up to their potential. On a personal level, this is self-evident. Every child is a person in the making. Every parent wants their child to succeed. Young people deserve a chance.

But education isn't just for do-gooders. It drives progress. Education enables us to research fundamental science, which is commercialized through technology, which creates economic growth.

There's lots of data to back this up. For example, test scores are correlated with GDP growth:

Another example: Education (in light blue) is a leading indicator of empires, just like reserve currency status (in dark blue) is a lagging indicator.

Anecdotally, every successful adult is the result of teachers who believed and challenged them. Here are three examples of teachers, all in the fourth grade!

Steve Jobs on his fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hill:

Before very long I had such a respect for her that it sort of reignited my desire to learn. She got me kits for making cameras. I ground my own lens and made a camera. I think I probably learned more academically in that one year than I’d ever learned in my life.

Bill Gates on his fourth-grade librarian, Mrs. Caffiere:

She stoked my passion for learning at a time when I easily could have gotten turned off by school. She pulled me out of my shell by sharing her love of books. She started by asking questions like, “What do you like to read?” Then she found me a lot of books—ones that were more complex and challenging than those I was reading at the time. It’s remarkable how much power one good person can have in shaping the life of a child.

Oprah Winfrey on her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Duncan:

One of the defining moments of my life came in fourth grade—the year I was a student in Mrs. Duncan's class. For the first time, I wasn't afraid to be smart, and she often stayed after school to work with me. It was in her class that I really came into myself.

So yes, teachers matter. School matters. Education matters. We should help those 600 million high schoolers. We should raise the floor—50% of kids still can't read by the end of primary school—and the ceiling.

For now, Roote is focused on raising the ceiling. (For all young people, but especially high schoolers.) Think about the top 1% of high schoolers. 6 million students. That's a lot of latent capability. We should unleash it.

Unfortunately, talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not. The vast majority of those high-potential students aren't being challenged enough. 70% of high schoolers are stressed, bored, and tired. Anxiety rates among young people have doubled. In San Francisco, teaching algebra to advanced middle schoolers was illegal. PISA scores in OECD countries recently plummeted by 20 points—one full year of schooling.

I see these students every day in Roote. They have sky-high potential but are under-resourced and under-stimulated. There's the physics whiz who is living in Poland as a refugee. There's the rural Indian girl who is smarter than her teachers, and so is learning C++ and biotech from the internet. There's the Nigerian law student who takes calls from the public bathroom when the electricity is out. And so many more.

So much hunger, so little support.

III. School

What would it take to help these sharp young people live up to their potential? To start, let's look at existing organizations that are already helping. Here's a simplified market map:

Educational organizations can operate during the school year, over the summer, or after school. They teach in-person or online. Let's look at each.

• First, in the bottom left, there are traditional schools for gifted/rich high schoolers. These are places like the 150 top private boarding schools, IB programs, Chinese Key Schools, and the United World Colleges. Imagine Hogwarts.

• In the top left are online schools. This has grown massively in the past decade, especially after COVID. Perhaps 1-5% of high schoolers attend online school.

• Over the summer, universities often host in-person programs for gifted youth like the John Hopkins Center for Talented Youth or MIT's Research Science Institute.

• After-school programs are another meeting ground for sharp young people. The International Science Olympiads attract STEM students while speech and debate attracts lawyers and economists. They're both great.

• Finally, there are online after-school programs like The Knowledge Society and Roote. They take kids seriously and let them explore their passions. Less factory vibes. More internet. This is also true with the grant programs I've highlighted here: Emergent Ventures, 1517, and Rise.

What can we learn from this market map?

First, we can estimate how many high-potential high schoolers go through one of these programs. Of the six million top high schoolers, around 200,000 do IB programs and another 200,000 go to top private schools. It's tough to know how many students go through Chinese Key High Schools. Maybe another 200,000. Meanwhile, summer programs like John Hopkins CTY have 30,000 students per year, while International Science Olympiads have around 3,000. TKS has had 4,000 students, while Roote has had only 200.

Altogether, it seems like less than one million students have been accelerated in one way or another. That leaves five million ambitious high schoolers who we're failing. Many of them are in the Global South—high-income countries spend 150 times more on education than low-income countries.

1 million high-potential students are living up to their potential, while 5 million are underachieving.

Second, so much of the current educational infrastructure is focused on college admissions. For students and parents, it's 18 years of life leading to one application that will determine your next four (and forty) years. It's an alphabet soup. GPA, AP, IB, SAT, ACT, A-Levels, JEE, and 高考. Extracurriculars, sports, and volunteering.

Everyone is focused on doing anything they can to get into a top 20 school. They'll do anything to signal correctly to colleges. Here are a few screenshots showing this—the stress of getting into top universities:

Students aren't following internal passions, but looking for ways to signal to college. (Which is itself a signal for employers.) Roughly 50% of education is signaling. It's too much.

This all sucks. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. Show me the cartel and I'll show you the price-fixing.

Third, because the need to signal to universities is so strong, most of the programs in the map above are focused on signaling. It's one big STEM competition, with a bit of debate thrown in.

From my experience at Roote, students could use a lot more socioemotional support. The college application process is brutal. It stack-ranks kids against their peers in a competition that determines the next four years of life. It forces comparison which breeds contempt, anxiety, and low self-esteem. We don't do any tests this impactful later in life, and would never willingly put ourselves through something like it again. But high schoolers don't have a voice.

Besides socioemotional learning, colleges also don't check for self-awareness or success spirals. At Roote, we teach both, even if they're not tested for.

Fourth, the current set of high school programs doesn't funnel students toward impactful work. In fact, it's mostly unaware of the real adult world. That's because high school is shielded from the real world by the barrier of college. In high school, kids only want to be doctors, nurses, lawyers, or teachers. They don't know other jobs. Only after college, and an unhelpful trip to the university's career center, do young people begin to understand how the adult world works. It's much too late.

This disempowers young people and makes them fatalistic about our future. More than half of them think "humanity is doomed" due to climate change.

Yes, things will be hard. We'll have 2.5C of warming by 2100 and hundreds of millions of climate refugees. But there's tons of optimism to be had. Many countries have substantial carbon taxes. We're injecting trillions into the green transition. Solar is cheaper than coal. We will make it. And we need young people to get us there.

It's not just climate of course. Here's a dashboard that shows the other impacts we want to have by 2100.

We can make abundant clean energy. We can stop factory farming and species loss. We can eradicate infectious diseases and eliminate poverty. We can create safe, abundant intelligence.

Fifth, what role does technology play in educating young people?

The internet has already changed education. Students can access the world's knowledge in their pockets. Khan Academy, YouTube, Wikipedia, and other edtech products account for roughly one trillion minutes of learning time each year. This is an impressive 1% of all learning time, most of which occurs in classrooms. Even in those classrooms, tech is playing an increasingly large role. 10% of K-8 students use DreamBox for math, and 50% of K-8 schools use Mystery for science.

Fundamentally, the internet changes the cost structure of lectures. Khan Academy has around a $30M budget, which is the same as a large high school. But they serve 120 million kids, not just 2,000. This means Khan Academy costs $0.25 per student vs. $15,000 for high schools. With the internet, you can record once but teach forever. Plus you have access to the world's best teachers, not just those in a 10-mile radius. Finally, it's personalized—you can follow any curiosity at any time of day.

Of course, educational internet videos can't control a classroom, nor can they empathetically listen to the emotions of an 8th grader. But the internet has drastically democratized access to knowledge. That's a good thing.

What about AI then? It's tough to know exactly what will happen. Already, 50% of students and 50% of teachers use it. Fundamentally, AI is cognitive labor that we can spin up at will. Teachers will use it to craft lessons and grade papers, while students will use it to follow lessons and write papers. The biggest promise of AI is a free personal tutor for everyone. A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer that enables everyone to do aristocratic tutoring and capture the learning gains of Bloom's Two-Sigma.

With AI, you can train once and tutor forever. I expect 1% of all tutoring to be done by AI by 2030.

But if AI can do everything, what world should we prepare young people for?

It's helpful to look at past technological shifts. The Industrial Revolution automated physical labor. We replaced muscle with fire. Farmers first became craftsmen and then became salesmen. Service jobs replaced agricultural jobs.

AI is automating cognitive labor. This democratizes expertise. I can ask my AI doctor for health tips before I ask WebMD or my real doctor. But AI also gives all existing experts a helpful assistant. Doctors, teachers, lawyers, and financial analysts can automate administrative tasks. As an example, 20% of healthcare costs come from repetitive admin—a massive work tax that we can reduce with AI.

Altogether, AI should give us a bit of a reprieve from Baumol's cost disease. Prices for services might go down, just like prices for consumer items have.

But white-collar labor is just the tip of the iceberg. AI cognitive labor can be used to automate and augment many other kinds of work. AI can model and predict physical systems, biological systems, human systems, and computational systems.

We should prepare ambitious young people to be orchestrators of digital minds, just like previous leaders managed human minds.

IV. Roote

What role will Roote play in all of this? How can we help the next billion young people live up to their potential?

For now, we're focused on young folks aged 15-25, especially those in high school. We'd love to help accelerate those five million students who are still under-served.

(Note: We're still excited to help anyone live up to their potential. 25% of fellows are older than 25.)

In 2022, we had 13 Roote Fellows. In 2023, 59. In 2024, 100. We hope to keep doubling for the next few years.

There's a lot of room to grow. Even if we double every year, it'll be 2040 before we reach 6 million students.

We're still working out our business model. We had a few large donations in 2022, so we can run the fellowship at no cost to students while still paying my salary through 2026. In the near future, I'm excited to try a model where adults donate $500 to support an individual student. I also want to give the fellows themselves $500 grants.

In addition, I hope to do some educational field-building. We're happy if any student lives up to their potential, whether or not they went through our program. We mostly just want to be part of a healthy educational ecosystem, no matter how big our role. In 2026, I hope to run a conference like NAGC. Around then, we'll also conduct research that helps find and spread effective models of teaching and learning.

If we're still in operation by the 2030s, I hope to expand our focus to other ages and ability levels.

In all scenarios, the most crucial thing is to stay focused on the students. Make the school I wish I had. Be the teacher I wish I had. Make something students want. Challenge and support them. Be helpful.

Lots of work still to do. RF8 awaits!

2024 version condensing the above ideas into a mission for Roote:

By 2100, we imagine an Earth we’re proud of in an age of abundant energy and intelligence. 

To make that happen, our mission is to help the next billion young people live up to their potential. We want to increase the human capital of civilization. To raise the ceiling and the floor.

We accelerate these ambitious frontier people by transforming possible talent into realized compounders—people who are increasingly impactful over time.

We believe the world is full of problems that can be fixed, but incentives and status quo bias keep us stuck. We look for and expect entrepreneurship in all its forms.

We ourselves are educational entrepreneurs. We think school can be much, much better. We demand excellent teaching. We take students seriously. We connect them to interesting and useful work, now. 

Indeed, in addition to increasing the supply of human capital, we want to increase the demand for impactful uses of human capital. We think it’s a tragedy that so many smart minds end up working on small problems, in extractive industries, or worse—trapped in layers of middle management. We want to develop infrastructure to help surface and incentivize young people to work on the world’s most important problems. There’s a lot to do.

Other schools and fellowships are on parallel journies to us. We celebrate them. We hope to catalyze and participate in a movement of effective and abundant education. The future of education.

Finally, it is clear that technology’s full pedagogical potential remains untapped. The internet is a one-room schoolhouse. AI is a personalized tutor. We hope to empower 21st-century teachers with new tools to drive student learning. Cognitive labor is becoming too cheap to meter. We should use it.

Our current initiatives are just the first steps in increasing human capital. We’re excited to build and learn together in the decades ahead. We’re students too.

I. Understanding Others

The first step to relating well to others is understanding them. The first step to understanding others is understanding yourself. Here's How To Understand Yourself. Plus, by leading and modeling your own self-awareness, others will follow suit.

To understand others, read and practice the ideas in Graham Duncan's piece: What’s going on here, with this human? Graham argues that your goal should be to see people clearly. I love his frame on this:

When you see people clearly, you see the transcript of their conversation with reality.

Raise the bar for how much you want to understand people.

It's not just understanding their MBTI. It's being able to predict their sentences, know how their childhood affected their present, and know what their dreams are before they die. Rank how well you understand someone from 1-10. A 10 is how well Jony Ive knows Steve Jobs, or perhaps how well your own mom and dad know each other. Most people understand each other at a 2. Try for a 7.

II. Reflecting Others

Understanding others is the long-term goal. Reflecting their emotional state is an excellent short-term way to achieve that. Here are some guideposts to strive for:

• Seek first to understand, then to be understood

• Be curious first

• Become an excellent reflective listener. Listen for emotions, not events. 

• Don't just play back their statements, try to concisely synthesize their emotional state. 

• Every conversation is an opportunity to practice.

• Don't forget to put yourself into the conversation. Say "what I'm hearing is..."

The most helpful framework I've learned for reflective listening is nonviolent communication (NVC). Read the book. It is short and good.

NVC has two parts: listening empathetically and speaking honestly. Most of NVC comes in the listening part. Listen for emotions. Listen for needs. Your goal is to be present with them. Be a presentist. Be ok with silence. Even when they feel done, ask "is there more?"

To listen for emotions and needs, you need to understand them. To understand emotions, use this emotions 2x2. To understand needs, use the Bentoism needs 2x2. Understanding morals is helpful too. To understand them, use the six moral foundations.

The best leaders listen. When Satya Nadella joined Microsoft, he made the entire executive team read NVC.

Especially when managing people & leading, try to make your ratio of open-ended questions to directive statements around 10:1. In a peer-to-peer relationship, your goal should be to listen 60% of the time and talk 40%. When you're in a group, speak 1/n. If there are 4 people, talk 25% of the time. If there are 10 people, only talk 10%.

Don't focus on your own anxieties. Assume you are liked, and you will be. Your goal when interacting is to make the other person feel more comfortable.

You'll know you've succeeded at all this when someone feels seen.

It feels great to be seen. Some of my most impactful moments have just been friends reflecting my own words back to me. "Wow, that sounds hard." Or: "It sounds like you're comparing yourself to others." Or when they note something about my being that I didn’t see because it's the water I swim in. I still remember when I was 26 and someone told me I was enthusiastic. I was so surprised!

Give that gift to others. Reflect their emotions and see them for who they are. Make the people in your life feel seen.

III. Helping Others

80% of helping others has already been covered: be aware of yourself first and reflect other’s emotional state. One trap people (and more often men) fall into is "trying to solution" when their thought partner just wants to be listened to.

But you can help others by giving constructive criticism.

The best practice for constructive criticism is called motivational interviewing (MI). MI recognizes that all change comes from within. Think about this for yourself—have you ever changed because someone offered you unsolicited advice to do so? No. With MI, your main goal is to support their own self-efficacy and their own desires for change, not yours.

You do this in two ways. First, elicit “change talk” from them by asking what they want to change about their life. Second, build self-efficacy by reflecting how much they’ve already done and saying that you believe in them.

But in the end, the work is theirs to do and you can't control their behavior. You want the best for others but let them #doyou.

The key idea underlying MI and other change techniques is the idea of psychological safety. People need to feel safe around you in order to share their shame, in order to change.

This is shown by the pyramid in the excellent book, 5 Dysfunctions of Team:

• Start by earning trust

• Then you can disagree and commit

• And drive accountability and results

(There's a similar idea of home → edge → groove in the excellent Robert Kegan book An Everyone Culture.)

Once you've built trust, be sure to give the constructive feedback in private while giving positive feedback in public. Then, when you give the feedback, see it as a partnership rather than as combative. As Claire Hughes Johnson notes:

We often envision critical conversations as combative, where the parties stand in oppositional positions. I aim to approach the situation as partners, standing side by side. To do that, you have to be aware of the language you’re using; you want to show empathy and curiosity but also take a bit of a risk.

Don't view feedback as +/- but +/Δ. The delta implies action-oriented change.

Try not to give too much constructive criticism over writing. Instead, record a quick Loom.

When you're considering whether to be honest with someone, almost always do so. Don't walk on eggshells. Often you might hold resentments within yourself, then let them out later all at once. This doesn't feel great for them. Instead of you telling them you were angry when they didn't take out the trash, you held it in, put on a mask, then eventually revealed your true state. This reduces trust because they never know what you actually believe. It's surprising when it eventually comes out.

Lend people ideas that are not yet fully formed. It's ok.

Clear is kind. Say the hard thing.

IV. Conflict

In addition to giving constructive criticism about a person, sometimes you disagree with a person about, well, anything.

Here's how to fight well.

First, start with the advice above:

1. Understand yourself & others. The primary trait to look for here is agreeableness. If you're already agreeable, lean into conflict more. If you're not agreeable, look to open up space for others.

2. Reflect others. Most conflict happens when you think you heard them say something, but they didn't actually mean it. As the poet Khalil Gibran writes, "Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost." Look out for the meant-said-heard delta.

3. Help others. If you've already created trusted spaces, now you can leverage that trust for this conflict.

As you have conflict:

• You don't need to join every argument you’re invited to. Ignore most conflicts, especially on the internet.

• Steelman their perspective, don't strawman it. You'll know you have succeeded when you can pass an ideological turing test for their position.

• As Patrick Collison notes here, see arguments as trying to collectively find the "topology of disagreement." Clarity is the goal, not winning. See the disagreement as an epiphenomenon of some underlying beliefs, and look for those.

• Co-create a shared third rail for the things you agree on (facts, etc.) then understand the disagreement from there.

• And, as always, tune in to your body. Breathe the tension out.

Some reality distortion is good—we want to change the status quo. But too much is bad.

Should we just stop believing in ourselves? No! Instead, build "almost too much" self-awareness. How can we do this?

First, what does it mean to be self-aware? Being self-aware is being mature. Being mature is being a developed adult. Psychologists call this "adult self-development."

Robert Kegan has a framework for adult self-development, which has five stages. (You can mostly ignore stages 1 and 2.)

• Stage 1 — Impulsive mind (early childhood). You're developing your senses.

• Stage 2 — Imperial mind (adolescence, 6% of adult population). You understand your senses but not yet your needs.

• Stage 3 — Socialized mind (58% of the adult population). You know what you need but are still searching for external validation from social groups.

• Stage 4 — Self-Authoring mind (35% of the adult population). You no longer need social validation and are starting to build a clear sense of identity.

• Stage 5 — Self-Transforming mind (1% of the adult population). You are on a life-long journey of balancing your many identities & your social groups.

It looks like this:

The goal, of course, is to reach stage 5. It should feel something like this:

• You're socialized in childhood (Stage 3)

• You understand that was just a lens, developing your own identity (Stage 4)

• You then integrate both: holding your childhood lens along with new identities (Stage 5)

The result could be called Coherent Pluralism. You hold many lenses (pluralism) but integrate them into a whole (coherence).

Here's a self-assessment you can take to understand which stage you're at.

What are some specific tactics to move up to Stage 5? There are two big pieces:

1. Decouple yourself from stage 3: Become aware of your childhood & your socialized ways of thinking & being.

2. Couples yourself to stage 4: Become aware of your identity separate from your childhood.

For #1:
To become aware of your natural way of being (to move from stage 3 socialization to stage 4 identity), I recommend a few things:

• Go to therapy. Therapy is understanding childhood moments, then decoupling yourself from them. What you perceive as your own thoughts are mostly your parents' words, incepted and masked as your own.

• Train your awareness. Instead of being your thoughts, see them.

• Meditation is the best for this. Use a meditation app to learn basic meditation skills like "noting". Make it a 10-minute daily habit for at least a month.

• CBT is good too. Become aware of your thought distortions.

• Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a good frame to recognize the different parts within yourself.

• Do a 360 life review. Ask a few friends & family to give you explicit feedback. (See my 360 form here.)

• In addition to socialization (by your parents), we've all been institutionalized (by school, laws, and society). If you grew up in the West, you're likely WEIRD and are more individualistic and analytic. (If you grew up in the East, you're more likely collectivist and holistic!) Read this summary of The WEIRDest People in the World to understand the different psychologies of East and West.

• Psychedelic therapy is being investigated in clinical trials around the world. See the book, How to Change Your Mind, for an overview of the ongoing motivations and research here.

To decouple yourself from your socialization, you need to see the water you swim in. See it as an idea maze. You'll know you've made progress when you have texture on how you were built.

For #2:
As you become aware of your social environment and how you were built (stage 3), begin to develop your own identity outside that (stage 4). Here's how:

• Start by taking the most scientifically-backed personality test, the Big 5. Test here.

• Use it as a seed to create your own How To Work With Me Manual. Mine is here. Here's the template.

• To understand other personality tests, read What’s going on here, with this human? Take the ones that resonate and use them to construct a sense of self.

• Use I am statements to construct your identity, and become aware of your superpower-shadow dynamics.

• Travel. Be independent. Be alone. Be ok with being alone. At first it's scary to be by yourself but then it's empowering.

• Be yourself. Go against the crowd. Know what things people would find weird, then do them anyway. It's fine.

To be proud of your self & identity, you'll need to take in constructive feedback. Here's how:

• No one is built perfectly. We're all messed up. It's your job to integrate those sides of you into a more pro-social person.

• Become world-class at searching for feedback and accepting it. Always ask people "how was that for you?"

• Treat feedback as a gift. Don't see it as an antagonistic act from another person, but rather with you two as partners trying to improve some aspect of your behavior.

• Decouple yourself from your behavior. Just because you did something bad doesn't mean you are bad. Treat yourself as clay, ready to be molded. All feedback is hard to hear.

• Try not to be defensive. Instead, breathe, feel your body, own your negative emotions (annoyance, sadness, surprise), then look to be curious about the feedback.

• Know that most of your shadows are also your superpowers.

You'll know you've developed a strong sense of identity when you aren't affected by peer pressure, when you feel comfortable alone in foreign places, when you can share what you're most ashamed of, and when you have both a healthy distance & a healthy closeness with your parents.

Finally, you begin the lifelong process of entering Stage 5.

Stage 3 was about embracing your social scene. Stage 4 was about rejecting childhood as you embrace your identity. Stage 5 is being in a fluid relationship to your childhood & identities. From my experience, it mostly comes by:

• Embracing your superpowers and shadows

• Valuing your parents & childhood friends as much as you value your present & future self.

• Learning How To Think in Systems so you can deftly move between perspectives.

• Pilling yourself into different worldviews, then understanding that life is just one long Grey Pill.

Finally, a reminder that self-awareness isn't the final goal. You want to have lots of self-awareness and lots of self-belief.

I like to think of this as being a Level 5 Leader (a different framework). Level 5 leaders balance personal humility with professional will. They manifest their vision in the world, all while repping others and taking a beginner's mind.

Deep self-awareness is yet another 10-year overnight success. Start building your awareness muscles today.

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel. — Socrates

Compounding is everything.

Compound interest dominates financial markets, compounding network effects dominate business, and compounding yourself dominates all other self-work you can do.

So how do you compound yourself?

We know what compounding looks like—an exponential curve in the red line below:

But what is it? Compounding yourself is best understood as a success spiral, which is a feedback loop where success begets success:

In a success spiral:

• Competence begets confidence

• Momentum begets motivation

• Curiosity begets learning

Once a success spiral starts, your spiral expands and you can tackle larger and larger problems with confidence:

Anyone who has done anything started with a success spiral.

Arnold Schwarzenegger won his first bodybuilding trophy, then won hundreds more. I coded my first TI-83 calculator game in high school, then studied computer science in college. (I'm just as impressive as Arnold, I know.)

Startups like AirBnB, Ethereum, and YIMBY are 10-year overnight successes. Behind their victory is a decade-long grind. Behind the grind is a kernel of belief.

Success spirals are quite powerful, so let's understand them. First, understanding why they don't naturally spark. Second, how to start them. Third, how to judge their health. Fourth, how to magnify their impact.

I. Releasing self-limiting beliefs

Often, if your success spiral hasn't begun already, it's because you have a self-limiting belief. These beliefs are (untrue) negative stories in your head that stop you from taking action and keep you in a bad orbit. Your beliefs become your future.

The most common self-limiting belief is that the world was built by smart people, not people like you. This is wrong.

Other examples of self-limiting beliefs:

• Perfectionism: "I need to be perfect." (Why?) "If I mess up, bad things happen."

• Imposter syndrome: "Others are capable. I am not." (Why?) "My parents didn't believe in me."

• Fear of commitment: "I can't commit to that." (Why?) "Things I love have left me."

• Need to control: "I get stressed when things are outside my control." (Why?) "I've lived in unsafe places without control."

Everyone has self-limiting beliefs. Find them by: a) Asking yourself where you want to be in 1 year, then b) Locating the internal thoughts that keep you from taking action.

It's often some kind of fear. Fear of failure. Fear of success. Fear of what others think of you.

For me, I had a fear of success. My parents often told me to "stay in the background" and so I did. I wanted to be ambitious, but I had a self-limiting belief that I wasn't allowed to be. I changed this belief, and now feel more free to live up to my potential.

Remember, you are allowed.

Understand where the fear and negative self-limiting beliefs come from, curiously question why they exist, then build positive beliefs (+ habits & evidence) in their place.

To start your success spiral, release your limiting chains first.

II. Starting a success spiral

The main way to start a spiral is by celebrating small wins.

Note that I said "small" wins. Why? There's a cold start problem here. How can you believe in yourself if you haven't done anything? How can you be confident if you aren't already competent, have motivation without existing momentum, and curiosity without a life full of learning?

You need to manufacture belief. You do this by celebrating small wins:

• Start by celebrating process goals, like learning a new email or coding hotkey.

• Then transition to outcome goals, like celebrating a demo you shipped or an article you published.

• At the end of every week, reflect on your success, be grateful, and create more of it.

To spark a success spiral, you need to meme it into existence.

Once you've started a success spiral, you need to continue it. Spirals only work when they're repeated. Build good habits. Write weekly. Read a few books every month. Use Anki. Exercise. Sleep. Go to therapy.

In 30 years, you'll look back in awe of what you've accomplished.

III. Judging the health of your spiral

There are three ways to judge the health of your spiral: 1) Do you believe in yourself? 2) Are you learning? 3) Is it fun?

The easiest way to judge all three at once is—Are you around great people? Surround yourself with those who believe in you, are smarter than you, and are fun to hang with.

But let's look at each in more detail:

First, and most importantly, success spirals come from believing in yourself. Do you believe? Are you proud of what you're doing? Do you have self-efficacy, self-esteem, and an internal locus of control? If not, celebrate small wins and become aware of negative self-talk. You get to choose whether to believe in yourself. Choose to believe!

Besides belief, the second best metric to judge the health of your spiral is your rate of learning. Are you being a sponge, drinking from the information firehose? If not, surround yourself with sharper & more ambitious people & ideas. Are you spending time and money on books, coaches, and lessons? If not, start working on yourself, like sculpting a piece of clay. Bet on yourself—$1,000 today will be worth $10,000 in a year. (Here are some tools for learning that have worked for me.)

Third, and finally, make sure your success spiral is pointed in the right direction. Don't put good effort toward a bad goal. Like the great pyramids, success spirals are only recognized after decades but are built minute-by-minute. You take thousands of actions per day that add up: reading, writing, coding, facilitating, listening. Because spirals are built from lots of micro actions, any amount of friction will build up.

Check in with yourself to ensure you're on the right path. Are you aligned with your Ikigai? Are you doing what comes easily to you? Are you following your relief? Are you doing what others see as your strengths? Are you excited? Are you having fun?

It's hard to continue a success spiral when you don't want to succeed at that thing. If you're unsure what to work on, spend more time learning about yourself and the world, then double down on a direction. Search for low friction, then simplify simplify simplify.

Trust yourself and surrender to the complexity of the world.

IV. Increase your leverage

Once you have a great success spiral, look to magnify it through leverage.

Leverage is a multiplier that takes a unit of goodness and spreads it as widely as possible. If success spirals are finding a good thing, leverage is scaling it.

As Sam Altman notes: "there are many ways to get leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people." Leverage comes by productizing your strengths, creating impact while you're asleep.

You'll know you're ready for leverage once you feel comfortable but unsatisfied. When you’re in a healthy success spiral, but want more. At the beginning of your career, each unit of your time should build more and more belief. But by the middle, each unit of time should generate more and more impact.

With a spiral, success begets success. With leverage, each success begets larger success.

To summarize:

Dents in the universe are the result of leveraged success spirals that come from kernels of belief, sparked by small wins.

To start: Release your self-limiting beliefs, celebrate small wins, believe in yourself, follow your energy, and increase your leverage. Then, at the end of life, you'll look back without regrets.

P.S. Thank you to Daniel Gross who first brainwormed me with this framing.

P.P.S. Self-belief must be coupled with self-awareness. Here's How To Build Self-Awareness.

Frameworks for a better future; agency to build it.

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The original sin was a Bill of Rights without a Bill of Duties.

The Statue of Liberty without a Statue of Responsibility.

Rights imply obligations, and the two combined make a social contract.

Unfortunately, I see our social contracts broken on a daily basis. On the train, a homeless man smokes fentanyl, filling the cabin with smoke. In my local CVS, a man comes in and steals a few bags of chips. Not only are both of these acts illegal, but they are breaches of the social contract. Don’t smoke in public. Don’t steal. It’s “not cool.”

You know what else isn’t cool? Decades of disinvestment that puts people in a precarious state. We’re breaking the other side of the social contract:

• We let addictification run amok, allowing corporations to pillage our minds & bodies. Fentanyl abuse is the result.

• CEOs make 400 times their employees, breaking the contract of “work together and distribute the gains.” Stealing is the result.

I don’t blame those homeless men for breaking the social contract. We broke our end first. Broken people break contracts.

These are just a few examples from a larger trend of “Contract Collapse.” Why have we lost our social contract, and how can we rebuild it? (And no, the answer isn’t “more lawyers to write more contracts.”)

I. What is Contract Collapse?

First, what is the social contract?

The idea began to coalesce during the Age of Enlightenment, starting with Hobbes’ Leviathan in 1651. Hobbes’ core idea was that without a state we would devolve into Mad Max. (Or god forbid Mad Marx.)

We need a state.

So we create a so-called “social contract” between the people and the state: the people pay taxes and in exchange the state enforces the rule of law. It’s not a bad deal. The state has legitimacy through the “consent of the governed.” No Mad Max. No Mad Marx.

The social contract started as an agreement between people and the state but has expanded beyond to include all agreements we owe each other. The social contract is the set of all agreements. It’s the cultural fabric of agreements between individuals and institutions. These agreements can take many forms:

• Norms: Don’t litter!

• Laws: Don’t litter in Singapore, punishable by death

• Financial transactions: $8 for an oat milk latte

• Code: 1 ETH to generate 10 JPEGs

In an average day you might complete dozens of these agreements, none of which existed before modern civilization. But Winter is Coming. 50 years ago we had a strong set of collective agreements that drove societal benefit. Now we have a tattered tapestry of agreements and struggle to get anything done. This is Contract Collapse.

Contract Collapse is part of a larger picture detailed in books like The Collapse of Complex Societies. There’s a lot of collapse happening and it’s hard to disentangle them sometimes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• Institutional collapse is the decline of public institutions. For example, trust in the US government has decreased from 70% to 20% in the last 50 years.

• Context collapse is our loss of shared context on social media. We have an abundance of narratives but no metanarrative.

• And of course, the current and future ecosystem collapse from climate change. Bye bye coral reef, sea ice, and forests. It was good knowing ya.

We’re in a vicious cycle. Contracts collapse, which leads to institutional and context collapse, which leads to more contract collapse. And before you know it even the fishies know that mommy and daddy are fighting.

II. History of the social contract

If Hobbes came up with the idea of a social contract, the US Constitution was its first real manifestation.

This piece of paper guaranteed “all people” the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (And the right for a DAO to buy it.) Americans got those rights in exchange for taxes fueled by a Protestant work ethic. Of course by “all people”, the Constitution actually meant white land-owning men. Most people didn’t get any rights. The actual agreement was “rich white men got freedom while the rest got little.” Indigenous folks, slaves, and women mostly put value into the pot without getting anything in return.

This changed a lot in the 1900s:

• From 1900-1945, the Progressive Era and the New Deal birthed a fresh social contract. Women received the right to vote in 1920. The 5-day work week was established in 1929. Minimum wage and the modern welfare state were created in the 30s.

• After WWII, this social contract was re-codified as the American Dream, but again mostly just for older rich white men. Back when boomers were cool, they pushed back on their Silent Generation parents. In the 60s, the Vietnam anti-war movement and Civil Rights Movement protested against the military draft and a segregated society. “We’ll go to war, but not for that.” “Separate is not equal.”

• We left Vietnam and integrated society. But these wins did not come without cost, which bore out in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. As Heather McGhee has expertly detailed in The Sum of Us, white folks did not want black folks as part of their social contract agreements. White communities filled their public pools with concrete and voted for the destruction of social programs. WTF Happened in 1971? Partially getting off the gold standard, but mostly white pushback on integration.

III. Contract collapse in the 2020s

Here are some examples of modern Contract Collapse:

1. Inequality: The old agreement was that CEOs and employees would work together and equitably distribute the gains. Now, CEOs make 400x a typical worker. No wonder we’ve seen the rise of populism. Break the agreement and reap what you sow.

2. Debt: The old agreement was to pay into Medicare and Social Security and then receive it when you retire. But with an aging population and deficit spending, this agreement will break. We’re going to double the percentage of GDP spent on seniors. Inflows won’t be able to keep up with spending.
   
   What will happen? Greece cut pensions 10 times after the financial crisis, totaling 70%. We might need to do the same.

3. Polarization & Immigration: We used to have the old agreement of the melting pot: America was a land of opportunity where all were welcome and could achieve the American Dream. Sure, we disagreed on some things, but in the end we were all American.
   
   Now, almost half of us have very unfavorable views of the other party and states ship their immigrants to other states in a game of hot potato.

4. Workers: As Stratechery notes here, the shift in value creation from industry to digital technology will require a shift in our social contract.
   
   Industrial Era contracts looked something like this: labor works for corporations, both of which are taxed by the government in exchange for protection.

But the Information Era will look something like this: gig labor works for tech both of which are taxed by the government in exchange for less regulation & UBI.

5. Too Many Agreements: The examples above show how we are breaking existing contracts. But there’s another form of Contract Collapse: the overloading of ineffective agreements.
   
   500 years ago, we only had a few contracts that just applied to a few nobles. But now, everyone has a right to everything! This is net good, but we’ve gone too far. Ezra Klein calls this Everything-Bagel Liberalism: we try to put everything (ESG, DEI) into every policy, which makes the policies less effective.
   
   The old agreement was basic rights for basic taxes.
   The new agreement is just larping: say we’re providing all rights for all people while actually driving no outcomes for anyone.

All problems today can be reframed as a breach of the social contract. Show me a problem and I’ll show you a broken agreement. Show me late-stage capitalism and I’ll show you Contract Collapse.

IV. Rebuilding the social contract

When the social contract is working well, no one defects. There’s a sense of social cohesion and direction. Everyone is bought in, like a championship sports team. Jonathan Haidt calls this moral capital: the set of agreements that enable a community to suppress selfishness and make cooperation possible.

Modern China has lots of moral capital. They get shit done. But moral capital is not always good. Nazi Germany also got a lot done.

Societies with a strong social contract and lots of moral capital are like a well-functioning organism. My body’s cells are in symbiosis with each other, all doing their job in service of the whole. But with cancer, the cell defects. It extracts from the whole and says, “I’m going to get mine.”

That’s what we have today. Adversarialism and defection. No tit, no tat.

How do we rebuild our social contract? Some ideas:

1. Play tit for tat. Approach every situation with openness, trying to do what’s right both for you and the other party. But if they defect, leave. Play long-term games with long-term people. Build networks of positive-sum games. Trust others and earn others’ trust.

2. Turn agreements (where you expect a return) into pledges (where you expect nothing). State your pronouns, pledge to give 10% of your income, and become vegetarian. Do these things just because they are good. Engage in pro-social behavior and the world will shift.

3. Build new agreements from code. Law was the old way to crystallize IRL social contracts. Smart contracts are the new way to crystallize social contracts. It’s in the name! smart contracts 🤝 social contracts.

4. Re-commit institutions to a renewed social contract for the 21st century. We did this during the Progressive Era when elites sacrificed near-term self-interest for long-term collective interests. We need to do this again. Return capital gains tax from 15% to 40%. Use the Green New Deal to decarbonize the economy while providing good jobs. Make sure the gains from AI are distributed through UBI.

Not sure what will work, but hoping for an agreement to create new shared agreements.

-Rhys ❤️

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This week on the Rhys Show:

I interviewed Avi Loeb on his quest to find aliens on Earth. Pretty mind-blowing stuff honestly.

Full episode below and on Apple, Spotify, Google, and YouTube.

❤️ This work is supported by excellent patrons and organizations. ❤️

If you’d like to become a patron to help us map & build the frontier, please do so here or pledge below. Thanks!

Stardust Evolving, Doug Petkanics, Daniel Friedman, Tom Higley, Christian Ryther, Maciej Olpinski, Jonathan Washburn, Sam Jonas, Patrick Walker, David Hanna, Benjamin Bratton, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Brian Crain, Matt Lindmark, Colin Wielga, Malcolm Ocean, John Lindmark, Ref Lindmark, Peter Rogers, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Simon de la Rouviere, Jonny Dubowsky, and Katie Powell.

Frameworks for a better future; agency to build it.

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The world around us is a dangerous place, full of addictive products looking to hijack our brainstems.

We do what we can to shield ourselves from these dangers like making our phones black and white or asking for only 25% sugar in our boba tea #smallthings. Meanwhile, we see what happens to folks who don’t put up their guard in time. In the US, drug overdose deaths are up 4x in 20 years, while obesity rates are up from 10% to 40% in 50 years.

What is happening? Since when was our world full of addictive products, trying to suck you in? In some ways, our world has consistently been addictive—it Always Has Been™. But addiction has both been getting more intense and more prevalent. Paul Graham calls this the Acceleration of Addictiveness. I’m going to call it The Addictification of Everything.

To understand the Addictification of Everything, we’ll first define addiction, then look at how addiction has been a constant presence in human history, and finally explore how addiction has become even more ubiquitous today.

I. What is addiction?

Addiction is narrow, repeated behavior in the face of broad, repeated harm.

For example, fentanyl addicts continue their narrow, repeated behavior (using a drug) in the face of broad, repeated harm (to their health, family, and community).

The first part of this definition is “narrow, repeated behavior”. By “narrow”, I mean the reduction of many activities down to a few. Andrew Huberman uses this for his definition of addiction: “the progressive narrowing of what brings you pleasure.” By “repeated behavior”, I mean to do a thing many times. If you just go to the casino once a month, it’s likely fine. But spend 10 hours on slots every day and it’s likely an addiction.

The second part of this definition is “in the face of broad, repeated harm.” What this tells us is that addiction requires repeated harm. I currently do “narrow, repeated behavior” where I write my book every day. But it’s not harming me. (Not yet at least!) If my book writing got in the way of my health or personal relationships, then I would consider it addictive.

The “broad” part of this definition is important. From the narrow perspective of the addictive substance, it’s always a positive relationship—that’s why you keep doing it. But when you zoom out to a more holistic lens, there might be harm, and therefore addiction.

Addiction is a gradient. How many times does it take to qualify as “narrow, repeated behavior?” How much harm needs to be done to qualify as “broad, repeated harm?” On one end, there is addiction to hard drugs, which can lead to the largest harm, death. On the other end, there are small addictions, like how much I watch Magic: The Gathering streamers on Twitch.

We’re used to addiction for individuals, but addiction can apply to larger systems as well. Humanity is addicted to fossil fuels like a drug addict is addicted to fentanyl. Our use of fossil fuels is “narrow, repeated behavior in the face of broad, repeated harm.” At the system level, we’ll often call “broad, repeated harm” an externality. From the perspective of Shell’s shareholders, we should pump more oil—the harms are external to the profit motive.

Addictification is the expansion of addiction into all activities. But where did we begin? When did we first taste the forbidden fruit of addiction?

II. Human economies are built on addiction

All systems are built on addiction, even before humans.

For example, when cyanobacteria first learned how to photosynthesize 2.3 billion years ago, they covered the world producing oxygen as waste and killing all of the anaerobic bacteria. We call this the Oxygen Catastrophe. From the perspective of the cyanobacteria, photosynthesis was just narrow, repeated behavior. But from the perspective of the biosphere as a whole, this behavior came with broad, repeated harm. (Extinction!)

Addiction is a logical consequence of replication. A replicator is anything in the universe that can make a copy of itself. Cyanobacteria, and indeed all of life, is a replicator. Replicators need matter and energy to copy themselves, which they pull from their environment. If their environment includes other life, harm occurs. A cheetah does narrow, repeated behavior (reproduction by eating prey) in the face of broad, repeated harm (death to the gazelles).

Throughout the different ages of humanity, we’ve been defined by one addiction or another.

Early homo sapiens were addicted to hunting megafauna. Sapiens spread across the globe from 100,000 years ago until 10,000 years ago. Whenever we came to a new continent, we would kill 90% of the large mammal population there. This was good for us, but bad for the woolly mammoths.

We learned to farm around 10,000 BCE and agriculture spread, killing hunter-gatherers in the process. But even for the new farmers, domestication was not necessarily a net good. With worse cereal-based nutrition, human height actually decreased by four inches during this time. Farming also moved us into cities which gave us new moralizing religions like Christianity and Islam. These Abrahamic religions spread, ending animistic religions in the process. Good for us, bad for them.

In the last half of the 2nd millenium, the Industrial Revolution and globalization brought protoforms of our modern addictions:

• The Triangle Trade shipped tobacco and sugar (drugs) from the New World back to Europe, where it was processed into rum (a drug), which was shipped to Africa in exchange for slaves, who would then work in the New World to farm more tobacco and sugar.

• Before the War on Drugs, we had the War for Drugs. The American Revolutionary War began when the British tried to tax tea (a drug), leading to the Boston Tea Party. This happened out East too. Newly consumerist Britian was addicted to silk and porcelain from China. But their mercantilist government wanted to minimize imports and maximize exports. Britain needed to export something to China. Opium was the answer, and British opium exports increased 100x from 1650 to 1880, leading to the Opium Wars.

• Colonial powers were addicted to expansion in the face of broad, holistic harm to indigenous populations. Like all addictions, Europe’s addiction to expansion was unsustainable. After the Scramble for Africa in the lead up to WWI, there was nothing left to expand into—just each other. Meanwhile, leaders like the German Kaiser and Russian Czar were addicted to nationalism and an us-versus-them mindset. They were scared of what their people would do if they didn't go to war. Addiction to colonialism + nationalism = war.

Replication implies addiction. Human history is peppered with systems built on addiction.

And yet, addiction is addicted to addiction itself. (Woah.) We are even more addicted today.

III. The Addictification of Everything

Addiction has infested every aspect of our lives. Let’s start with behaviors that make US life expectancy lag 4 years behind the OECD: drugs, obesity, cars, and guns.

• Drugs are the clearest example. Overdose deaths are up 4x, with synthetic opoid deaths up 30x. It takes 30mg to OD on heroin but only 3mg (essentially a speck of dust) to OD on fentanyl.

• Obesity is also the result of addiction. Foods are engineered to be overeaten, and the resulting calorie surplus is the source of obesity. We’re surrounded by addictive foods.

• Cars kill us through addiction in two ways. First, 33% of car deaths come from drunk driving or distracted driving—addiction to alcohol or screens. Second, we are addicted to a US car culture. Other modes of transport are much safer, better for the climate, etc. But we can’t escape.

• The US is uniquely addicted to guns. We have narrow, repeated behavior (legal gun ownership) in the face of broad, repeated harms (50x more gun deaths per capita than the UK). A sure sign of addiction: a man kills 20 kindergarteners at Sandy Hook, but nothing changes. We’re trapped here.

The US does narrow, repeated behavior (drugs, food, cars, guns) in the face of broad, repeated harms (decreasing life expectancy).

Addiction pervades every industry. I like to call this the Addiction Economy.

First, with the Attention Economy, Big Tech addicts us to our phones by prioritizing time spent over time well spent. This causes various harms, like doubling depression in teens. Our only recourse is reading books that teach us about dopamine fasts and The Art of Doing Nothing.

Financialization is a form of addiction. As Jeremy Grantham notes in the Age of Easy Money: “In the last 50 years, the percentage of GDP that goes to finance has gone from 3.5% to 8.5%. The financial industry is like a giant bloodsucker. But we do not generate any real increase in income. We are just a cost.” Good for Wall St, bad for the rest of us.

Plus, I haven’t even talked about traditional addictions like cigarettes or gambling. These are still around, still insidious. A friend of mine was addicted to casino and sports gambling, so needed to put himself on a self-imposed blacklist so they wouldn’t let him in. Philip Morris is somehow still a $140 billion company, but their primary product hasn’t changed in decades—cigarettes coupled with scientific doubt.

Indeed, we can view all companies today as part of the Addiction Economy:

• Attention Economy. Apple, Youtube, Facebook, TikTok. Maximize engagement in the face of loneliness and mental health.

• Oil and Gas. Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil. Maximize fossil fuel extraction in the face of the climate crisis.

• Food. McDonald’s, Nestle. Maximize addictive fats and sugars in the face of obesity.

• Healthcare. CVS, UnitedHealth. Maximize opioids and other must-buy drugs in the face of an overdose crisis.

• Consumerism. Walmart, Amazon. Maximize sales in the face of massive waste.

Sigh. Rip. Damn. Meh. What should we do?

IV. Conclusion

Addiction is narrow, repeated behavior in the face of broad, repeated harm.

Addiction is not new. Replication implies addiction. Human history is peppered with systems built on addiction.

But today we’re currently experiencing the Addictification of Everything—the expansion of addiction into all activities.

Addiction is not just reserved for companies. For example, as Chris Elmendorf notes: unions, governments, and nonprofits all rent-seek the excess value in our constrained housing supply. Politics too is full of addiction. We’re addicted to manufactured outrage and 24/7 news cycles in the face of massive polarization. The moment something gets politicized is the moment we know nothing will get done. And yet we politicize everything.

More generally, we live in a system with the expectation of growth. Dopamine creates an expectation of reward for our brains. Debt creates an expectation of profit for our institutions.

Many addictions start out harmless: a candy bar here, a TikTok video there. But as PG says:

“When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want it seems bad. The thing we like is transformed into a thing we like too much.”

The primary goal of any system it to perpetuate itself. Systems are addicted to themselves.

It’s difficult to know what we should do about the Addictification of Everything. After these addictions speedrun our bodies, brainstems, and biosphere, we eventually do respond. Attorney generals charged tobacco companies with a $200 billion settlement in 1994. The Sackler family will pay $4.5 billion for falsely marketing opioids. It’s a fine response eventually, but would be much better to prempt the harm first. Instead, we should tax addiction like we tax externalities. Sin taxes and Pigouvian taxes are a good first step here.

If we want to change the culture itself, we need spread anti-addiction memes. These social antibodies exist for behaviors we now look down on, like smoking. But there are some more generally concepts we can propagate too.

• Compersion is when you feel happy for someone else’s happiness, like a world in which Philip Morris is happy that someone quit smoking. (Wake me up when this happens.)

• The philosophy of subtraction from Aya Miyaguchi of the Ethereum Foundation is a way for institutions to be happy without growth. Instead of an addition mindset, organizations can aim to be small, not large:

We should not embrace post-growth (increasing GDP does actually lead to happiness), but we should embrace post-addiction. To do this, we will need to measure addiction itself. Just like we track government corruption indices, we should track Gross Domestic Products of Addiction (GDPA). If someone is producing, importing, or exporting lots of GDPA, that’s bad.

One final place to look is further upstream: addiction is often caused by a lack of connection. Let’s tax the Addiction Economy and point the financial capital towards building social capital—walkable cities, third spaces, and human connection.

Not sure when, but hoping for a less addictive future for our kids,

-Rhys ❤️

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This week on the Rhys Show:

I interviewed Peter Singer on his new book, Animal Liberation Now. Lots of juicy nuggets on the utterly inhumane conditions of animals, and what we can do about it (vegetarianism, cellular meat, etc.).

Full episode below and on Apple, Spotify, Google, and YouTube.

❤️ This work is supported by excellent patrons and organizations. ❤️

If you’d like to become a patron to help us map & build the frontier, please do so here or pledge below. Thanks!

Stardust Evolving, Doug Petkanics, Daniel Friedman, Tom Higley, Christian Ryther, Maciej Olpinski, Jonathan Washburn, Sam Jonas, Patrick Walker, David Hanna, Benjamin Bratton, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Brian Crain, Matt Lindmark, Colin Wielga, Malcolm Ocean, John Lindmark, Ref Lindmark, Peter Rogers, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Simon de la Rouviere, Jonny Dubowsky, and Katie Powell.

You’ll learn frameworks for a better future and gain agency to build it.

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Richard Feynman was once asked: if you could only send a single sentence to future generations, what would it be?

His answer: everything is made of atoms.

It’s true! Atoms make everything.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t tell us much. Which atoms? How are they arranged? We know we breathe oxygen (an atom), but what atoms are cars made of? What atoms are cats and dogs made of?

I hope to give you a fancy new device: Atom X-Ray Vision aka “Atom Vision.”

Atom Vision tells you how physical objects are made and how they work. Point Atom Vision at a shiny diamond, and see trillions of carbon atoms in a repeated crystalline structure. Point it at a cat, and see millions of cells with carbon-based molecular machinery inside.

Atom Vision is the opposite of Bits Vision. Bits Vision tells us how digital objects work. It has been instrumental in creating computers, the internet, crypto, and AI.

During the Industrial Revolution, Atom Vision was more popular. It helped us build the steam engine, the modern automobile, and massive skyscrapers. But recently, during the Information Revolution, Bits Vision has become more popular.

Atom Vision, though, is having a comeback. In order to get to net zero or to eliminate cancer, we need a renewed interest in the real world—in the atoms that underlie climate tech, biotech, and the rest of our non-metaverse.

I. The industrial world is made of atoms

Let’s start with something that’s very clearly made of atoms, a brick.

What is a brick made of? Most of the time, we just think of it as a brick. Sometimes we’ll zoom out to see structures made of multiple bricks: bricks make walls, make houses, make neighborhoods, make cities, make the world.

But we can zoom in too.

Roughly speaking, a brick is made of lots of atoms of dirt and lots of atoms of water. One of the simplest forms of dirt is so-called “sand”, which is just one atom of silicon (Si) and two atoms of oxygen (O). We call this silicon dioxide or SiO₂.

Scientists call anything that has multiple atoms a “molecule.” Water is a molecule too. It is made of two atoms of hydrogen (H) and one atom of oxygen (O). Hydrogen dioxide or H₂O.

So, taken together, we have:

Many molecules of SiO₂ + Many molecules of H₂O = a brick

How many SiO₂ molecules are there in a brick? A lot. Like, a lot a lot. A single grain of sand has 43 quintillion atoms, which written out is 43,000,000,000,000,000,000. Because there are so many damn zeros, we’ll use scientific notation. A single grain of sand has 4.3 x 10^19 atoms.

That’s a lot! But it also makes it easier. We don’t need to think of 10^19 things that are different, just 10^19 instances of a thing that is the same.

Let’s assume it takes 10,000 grains of sand to make a single brick, then we have:

10,000 grains of sand + an equal-ish amount of water = a brick

Or:

4.3 x 10^23 molecules of SiO₂ + 4.3 x 10^23 molecules of H₂O = a brick

Boom, we did it! You can now use Atom Vision to see a brick not just as a brick, but as a lattice of SiO₂ molecules.

Now we can look at other materials and ask: what lattice of atoms made this?

Unfortunately, there are over 118 elements in the periodic table. It would be hard to learn all 118 and how they combine.

Luckily, most of those elements don’t matter. Instead, we can just learn these three modes of Atom Vision:

First, almost all rocks are made of that SiO₂ stuff, which is also called silicate. Silicate minerals make up 90% of Earth’s crust. Quartz? Pure SiO₂. Granite? SiO₂ with a bit of aluminum mixed in. Darker rocks, like basalt, are SiO₂ with some iron from Earth’s mantle mixed in. Sedimentary rocks, like sandstone, are often just SiO₂ in a more grainy, layered form.

Why is there so much SiO₂ out there? Silicon is to inorganic materials as carbon is to organic materials—they like to form bonds with other atoms. Both silicon and oxygen have four open spots in their outer electron shell to mix with other atoms. This is why we see both SiO₂ and CO₂.

So the next time you pick up a rock or walk on a sandy beach, use Atom Vision to see the SiO₂ silicate atoms inside.

The second mode of Atom Vision: seeing hydrocarbons.

Hydrocarbons are a chain of hydrogen (H) and carbon (C). (Nice naming, scientists!)

Most types of fuel and most types of plastics are made of hydrocarbons. The main plastic, polyethylene, is defined by the formula (C₂H₄)_n. That means it’s a molecule of two carbons and four hydrogens (C₂H₄), put into a long chain with thousands or millions of other (C₂H₄)’s.

Crude oil is how all hydrocarbons start. Oil is a big mush containing hydrocarbon chains of different lengths. There’s (C₂H₄)_n, (C₈H₁₈)_n, (C₂₀H₄₀)_n, and everything in between. This oil is processed into different chain lengths:

• Gaseous methane waste: (CH₄)_n

• Ethylene to create plastics: (C₂H₄)_n

• Propane (C₃H₆)_n and butane (C₄H₈)_n for lighters and gas stoves

• Liquid gasoline from pentane up to octane: (C_5-8H_10-18)_n

• Then C₁₀ through C₂₀ make up jet and diesel fuels, while C₂₀ through C₅₀ make engine oil and solid wax.

When you look at fuel with Atom Vision, see hydrocarbons (C_xH_y)_n in the form of a liquid. Point Atom Vision at plastics and see hydrocarbons (C_xH_y)_n in the form of a solid. When you burn a hydrocarbon, see all of the oxygen combining with carbon to emit CO₂.

The third mode of Atom Vision: Most buildings and vehicles are made of either concrete or steel. (And wood, but we’ll get to that in the biology section below.)

Concrete is mostly made of our friend silicate, SiO₂, and limestone, which is calcium carbonate or CaCO₃. We heat them up together to create calcium silicate (CaO₂·SiO₂), releasing our greenhouse friend CO₂ in the process. Add some rocks and water to this and you get a strong material.

Steel is a sheet of iron atoms (Fe) with a bit of carbon (C). Like with concrete, we release tons of CO₂ in making it. This happens when we turn iron ore (too much carbon) into steel (less carbon).

Each year, we make 4 billion tons of concrete and 2 billion tons of steel. We only use 10% of that (200 million tons) for the other industrial metals. These are used to create other buildings & vehicles:

• Chromium, manganese, zinc, and nickel are used to make stainless steel. They’re part of the Steel Industrial Complex. Chromium is why we call shiny things chrome!

• Aluminum is used when we need lightness instead of strength, like with jet planes.

• Copper is used for wiring to transport electrons (instead of full atoms) from one place to another.

• Titanium and zircon are used to make things white, like paints and dentures.

• Finally, lead is used for car batteries.

That’s roughly it. When you look at buildings and transportation with Atoms Vision, see concrete (CaO₂·SiO₂), steel (Fe₁₀₀C₁), and the CO₂ emitted in the process of making them.

We have three forms of Atom Vision for the inorganic world:

1. 90% of rocks are made of silicate SiO₂

2. Fuel and plastics are made of hydrocarbons (C_xH_y)_n

3. Buildings and vehicles are made of concrete (CaO₂·SiO₂) and steel (Fe₁₀₀C₁)

We can apply our new Atom Vision to understand new science in climate tech:

• How carbon dioxide removal (like Charm) takes biomass (carbon) from agriculture, heats it into a bio-oil, then pumps that bio-oil underground.

• How we can make carbon-free concrete (like Brimstone does) by starting with a different rock than limestone (CaCO₃), so we don’t emit CO₂ as waste in the production process.

II. The biological world is made of atoms

The biological world looks complex, and it is! But with Atom Vision, all becomes clear.

Biological Atom Vision has two modes.

The first mode: all organisms are made of cells.

Think of any animal like my cat, Diego. Diego looks like a cat, but he’s actually made of millions of cells, 75 million to be exact.

75 million cells = a cat

In fact, all animals are made of many cells. We call them multicellular organisms. Humans are made of 100 trillion cells and even an ant has 20 million cells.

All animal cells have the same DNA, but build different things based on our boot code. One cell may become part of an eye, while another may become part of your fingernail. When they combine, cells form tissues and then tissues form organs like the heart.

Many cells = tissue

Many tissues = organs

Many organs = body

Plants too are multicellular. We just call their cells plant cells instead of animal cells.

What is a cell made of?

This gets at the second mode of Atom Vision: every cell is made of a few types of molecular machines, all of which are chains of carbon.

Carbon is to the organic world as silicon is to the inorganic world. Everything is made of carbon!

First, the cell membrane. No matter whether the organism is single-celled or multi-cellular, it is protected from its surroundings by a cell membrane, which is made of many fatty lipids organized into a membrane bilayer. Molecularly, lipid just means a chain of methylene or (CH₂)_n. Cells create a phospholipid by putting a phosphorus head (P) on that hydrocarbon tail (CH₂)_n. Taken together it looks like this:

Dozens of methylene in a chain (CH₂)_n = lipid tail

(Phosphorus head + lipid tail)_n = cell membrane

Inside the cells, there are proteins and carbohydrates. These too are made of carbon chains.

A carbohydrate is similar to a hydrocarbon chain, but with oxygen (O) added. The main kind of carbohydrate is called a polysaccharide. Polysaccharides like glucose and fructose have six carbons, resulting in the formula (C₆H₁₀O₅)_n. Often, n will be in the thousands.

(C₆H₁₀O₅)_n = carbohydrate

Proteins are also chains. Their chains are made of amino acids. An amino acid has the normal hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, but with a nitrogen (N) thrown in there. (Amino means nitrogen!) Like a little mini-language, there are twenty amino acids that combine into chains of a few hundred to create a protein.

Nitrogen + Carbon + Oxygen = amino acid

100s of amino acids = a protein

Our cells know which proteins to create based on our genetic code, DNA. DNA is also a chain, organized into a double helix. This chain is made of “base pairs”, and the human genome has 6 billion of them. There are only four types of base pairs (CGAT) and each is a little molecule of the usual players: hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, phosphorus, and nitrogen. There are three parts to DNA: a phosphorus “backbone”, a 6-carbon ring, and a nitrogenous base that connects a strand to the other side.

(Phosphorus backbone + 6-carbon ring + nitrogenous base) = one side of a base pair

Billions of base pairs = DNA

So when you use Mode #2 of biological Atom Vision, see the inside of a cell as different chains of carbon all talking to each other.

The third and final mode of biological Atom Vision is: organism bodies and energy are structured as carbon chains.

Two examples:

• Collagen makes up 33% of the human body’s proteins and is our main connective tissue. It’s just an amino acid-based protein twisted into a wire.

• Cellulose makes the structure of most plants. It’s extremely similar to the glucose we mentioned before. Cellulose is C₆H₁₀O₅ while glucose is C₆H₁₂O₆. Plants create the structure of their bodies with cellulose while they store their energy as glucose. But it’s carbon chains all the way down. See a tree as cellulose. See a construction 2x4 as cellulose. See your cotton t-shirt fibers as cellulose.

Taken all together, when you look at something with biological Atom Vision:

1. Cells make organisms

2. Cells are made of carbon chains: cellular membranes, carbohydrates, proteins, and DNA

3. Bodies and energy are structured as carbon chains like cellulose and glucose

This Atom Vision can help us understand biotech like:

• How we can bioengineer yeast by changing its DNA to synthesize insulin (a protein) from sugar (glucose)

• How we can make short-haired cows by using a CRISPR protein to shorten the part of DNA that codes for “long hair”

Finally, we can translate between the industrial world of atoms and the biological world of atoms: With photosynthesis, plants use photons from sunlight to take H₂O, pull off 6 molecules of hydrogen, and stick them onto 6 molecules of CO₂, creating glucose C₆H₁₂O₆.

Everything is made of atoms.

I hope Atom Vision helps you see the world for what it truly is. Yarn in the fabric of reality.

And, the most beautiful part is that you can now apply Atom Vision wherever you go. It has helped me have a beginner’s mind. When you see a yellow flower, ask: how does it become yellow? When you smell fish, ask: how do my nose receptors smell things?

Wikipedia is your friend, and a tree of knowledge can be built…from silicon, carbon, and the rest of our atom-y friends.

From one (hundred trillion) atoms to another,

-Rhys ❤️

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This week on the Rhys Show:

I interviewed Claire Hughes Johnson, the ex-COO of Stripe, on her excellent new book, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building. Lots of juicy nuggets on how to be an excellent founder, leader, and manager.

1min clip:

Full episode below and on Apple, Spotify, Google, and YouTube.

❤️ This work is supported by excellent patrons and organizations. ❤️

If you’d like to become a patron to help us map & build the frontier, please do so here or pledge below. Thanks!

Stardust Evolving, Doug Petkanics, Daniel Friedman, Tom Higley, Christian Ryther, Maciej Olpinski, Jonathan Washburn, Sam Jonas, Patrick Walker, David Hanna, Benjamin Bratton, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Brian Crain, Matt Lindmark, Colin Wielga, Malcolm Ocean, John Lindmark, Ref Lindmark, Peter Rogers, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Simon de la Rouviere, Jonny Dubowsky, and Katie Powell.

We can ask the question: what are we doing now that will seem immoral in 100 years?

There are some pretty clear answers, like the fact that each year we kill 70 billion animals in factory farms. A big no-no.

I’ve been starting to ask a different question though: From the perspective of an alien species, what does Earth do that is embarrassing, immature, or unacceptable? If you were to date Earth, what would be our red flags? And how can we change them by 2100?

Here are some things that I find embarrassing, starting with San Francisco:

It’s embarrassing that there’s a $100,000 fee to create affordable housing in SF.

It’s embarrassing that San Francisco calls itself progressive, but from 2010-2019, median white incomes increased from $90,000 to $150,000, while black incomes stayed level at $30,000.

It’s embarrassing that SF spent $32M on a payroll system, but still couldn’t pay its teachers.

More generally, it’s embarrassing that our government is focused on policy and comms over ops and impact.

It’s embarrassing that SF is the innovation capital of the world, but has 1/3rd the density of Paris.

It’s embarrassing that, because we don’t build housing, SF has 10x more homeless folks per capita than Chicago.

It’s embarrassing that one small neighborhood group can stop thousands of kids from enrolling at Berkeley.

It’s embarrassing that we live in a vetocracy and can’t get anything done.

It’s embarrassing that it’s illegal to build nuclear power in California, while China builds a new plant every month.

It’s embarrassing that tech created tons of wealth but left much of the Bay Area behind.

What about the larger US? What do we do that’s embarrassing and unacceptable?

It’s unacceptable that US life expectancy is 6 years behind similar countries, and dropping. This is from guns, food, cars, and drugs.

Guns: It’s unacceptable that twenty 6-year-olds were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, that we have 60 times as many gun deaths per capita as the UK, and yet still don’t have reasonable gun control.

Food: It’s unacceptable that our obesity rate has increased from 10% to 40% in the last 50 years.

Cars: It’s unacceptable that the US has 3x more car deaths per capita than the EU.

Drugs: It’s unacceptable that the US overdose rate has increased 4x in the last 20 years.

This is the water we swim in now. Two people OD every day in SF, and I regularly pass the ambulances on my bike. A 17-year-old friend of mine recently OD’ed from fentanyl. A 65-year-old friend retired, then run over on his bike.

These things are unacceptable, and we should see them as such.

More generally, it’s unacceptable to perpetuate these problems under the banner of freedom, when actually they make us more vulnerable. Guns, food, cars, and drugs. It’s exploitation masquerading as freedom.

Many of the problems thus far have been problems of government. But companies and markets are not necessarily better. They too are still unacceptable and immature.

It’s immature that we decreased our capital gains tax from 40% to 15%, sucked capital and talent into tech, then complained about government dsyfunction.

It’s immature to think our value capture system is correct when Instagram was acquired for $1 billion, but only 13 employees and 14 investors received the upside. Nothing for open-source. Nothing for their 30M users.

It’s immature to create dark patterns that force users to call a phone number to unsubscribe from the New York Times.

It’s immature to ignore that happiness levels off after $100,000, while 700M people still live in extreme poverty.

It’s immature to allow the yacht industry to repeal our luxury tax.

It’s immature to think that your individual success is primarily a result of your hard work, and not some combination of your place of birth, genetic lottery, and childhood.

Put simply, we need to grow up.

This is true for everything but is blatantly obvious in our lax response to the climate crisis. We can barely keep a single nuclear plant running, much less rebuild all of our infrastructure to be green. By 2050, we need a 4x larger electricity grid, 10x more carbon capture piping, a 10x increase in renewable electricity, and 100x more EVs. It’s a lot.

We need to build. And we should’ve started yesterday, last year, last decade, last generation.

Although our status quo is embarrassing now, it doesn’t need to be that way. We can respond, and respond in a serious way.

What does it mean to be serious? Here are some things that feel serious to me:

• Brie Wolfson’s reflection on how Stripe’s demanding work culture was actually deeply rewarding.

• How Navy Admiral Hyman G. Rickover “exercised the concept of responsibility” by personally interviewing 14,000 people to build and operate 200 nuclear-powered submarines.

• Truly prioritizing self-growth. As Stripe’s old COO, Claire Hughes Johnson, says: “Build self-awareness to build mutual awareness.”

So…yes!

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Right now our culture is meh. Instead:

Work hard. Be focused on outcomes. Don’t accept bullshit.

Do your part. Step up. Have high standards.

Raise the bar. Push the pace. Do the right thing.

Everything good in the world results from years of hard work on a single problem. As Sam Altman notes, spend 1 year exploring, then 4 years relentlessly focused on execution. Repeat.

Get two of these sprints in your career, and feel ok. Get five and feel satisfied. Achieve 10 sprints like this? S Tier status.

How can you find a problem to sprint on? Start by looking around you. Search for things that you find embarrassing, unacceptable, and immature. Get annoyed by them.

Then work on one for 5 years. Focus on outcomes. Be proud. Rest. Repeat.

By 2050, we’ll look back with pride on what we’ve accomplished this quarter-century. But we won’t be there yet. Too far to go. Success by 2050 will just set us up for 2050-2075, then 2075-2100.

By 2100, we finally can have an Earth we’re proud of. No red flags. Nothing to be ashamed of. Just wise people in an abundant world.

In all seriousness,

- Rhys ❤️

P.S. If this doesn’t resonate with you, that’s ok! But for some people it might. As Patrick Collison says:

To the extent that you enjoy working hard, do. Subject to that constraint, it's not clear that the returns to effort ever diminish substantially. If you're lucky enough to enjoy it a lot, be grateful and take full advantage!

This week on the Rhys Show:

I interviewed Freada Kapor Klein on Closing the Equity Gap. Lots of juicy nuggets on how investing can (and can not) further equity.

Listen now on Apple, Spotify, Google, and YouTube.

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Stardust Evolving, Doug Petkanics, Daniel Friedman, Tom Higley, Christian Ryther, Maciej Olpinski, Jonathan Washburn, Sam Jonas, Patrick Walker, David Hanna, Benjamin Bratton, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Brian Crain, Matt Lindmark, Colin Wielga, Malcolm Ocean, John Lindmark, Ref Lindmark, Peter Rogers, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Simon de la Rouviere, Jonny Dubowsky, and Katie Powell.

India surpassed China but will hit their peak in 2060, while Africa will continue to rise until 2100.

Let’s use this population milestone as an excuse to understand India a bit better, especially as they grow on the world stage. These learnings are pulled from the 600-page beast, India: A History, with a sprinkling of organically-sourced internet rabbit holes.

Five small bits:

1. Geography: India has a breadbasket too

2. History: India had and continues to have religion

3. India is like China’s 10-year younger sibling

4. 600M internet users is 600M more than 0

5. The India Stack is like WeChat for India — an enabling startup platform

1. Geography

India’s geography is kind of like the US’s—a breadbasket and two coasts. But instead of the breadbasket in the middle of the country, their breadbasket is up north.

India’s geography has five main parts:

1. The Himalayan mountains in the northwest and northeast—in brown.

2. The Indo-Gangetic Plain—in yellow. This is farmland where much of India lives.

3. The Deccan Plateau—in green. Highlands where not many people live.

4. Coastal regions—in blue. Lots of people in cities like Mumbai & Chennai.

5. The Indian desert—in tan. Honestly, I don’t know anything about this 😂.

This geography leads to India’s current population density. Many Indians live in the Indo-Gangetic Plain as massive Himalayan rivers feed lots of people.

This is the same floodplain that feeds the large populations of Pakistan (230M) and Bangladesh (170M).

2. Extremely detailed short history

Back in the day, in 3000 BCE, the Indus and Ganges floodplain led to the Indus River Valley Civilization, one of the four OG birthplaces of modern civilization. (Which all started on floodplains!)

For much of pre-globalization history, India existed in pseudo-isolation between its neighbors to the west (aptly named the Middle East) and the east (China).

India was the birthplace of both Hinduism (~1000 BCE) and Buddhism (400 BCE), which finally culminated in the 2006 memoir, Eat Pray Love.

Buddhism was especially powerful initially, but its influence waned by 1500 CE. Why? First, Hinduism was able to remix itself to get the best parts of Buddhism, while also integrating with the larger empire’s bureaucracy & culture (creating our friend the caste system). Second, Islam did the whole “caliphate” thing and conquered much of Buddhism.

This leaves us with the religious maps we know today: Buddhism in Southeast Asia and China, Islam in the Middle East, and Hinduism in India.

But don’t worry, we don’t have full peace. We still have an -ism schism. The fighting now isn’t between Islam and Buddhism, but between Islam and Hinduism. This conflict created the original partition in 1947 with Pakistan and Bangladesh splitting off from India. It continues to create conflict today between Modi’s Hindu nationalist party (BJP) vs. the minority Muslim population of 200M.

In modern times (after 1500 CE), the West rose to power and colonized the world. In the Americas, this led to one of the most “whitewashed history” names ever, the Colombian Exchange, where 90% of the 100M indigenous folks were killed.

The situation was similar in India. British rule (~1750-1950) was mostly, as Amartya Sen notes, a Time of Famines with over 100M excess deaths.

With death, so falls the one metric to which we all bow—GDP. Around the time of our (literal) boi Jesus (0 CE), China and India were each responsible for 30% of the world’s GDP. By 1970, they both decreased to ~5%. Now China is 20% and India is back to 10%.

My favorite graph for this is the Global Economic Center of Gravity. The center of gravity was closer to India and China 2000 years ago and now is returning. Rise of the East!

3. India vs. China

I’ve found it helpful to think of India as 10 years “behind” China. You can see this in GDP where China in 2007 is equal to India in 2019:

Or we can see this from through tech. As Sebastian Mallaby notes in Power Law, China’s first talent and capital aggregator, Baidu, was founded in 2000, while India’s first big win, Flipkart, was founded in 2007. These both fueled massive tech ecosystems in their wake.

4. Bollywoodization of the English internet

Bollywood still only has 20% of the box office revenue of Hollywood. But India has lots of internet users. Lots.

What does this mean? First, the West will learn to recognize top Indian apps. MX Takatak, Meesho, and Resso are coming to an app store near you. (Unlike Chinese apps, which exist on their side of the Firewall That Shall Not Be Named.)

The top Youtube channels will soon be Indian as well. Right now, #1, #3, and #10 are all Indian media companies.

5. The India Stack helps a thousand flowers bloom

These consumer apps on build on a beautiful tech stack, the India Stack, which may be my favorite piece of government internet infrastructure. (What is yours?!?)

It combines a digital identity system (Aadhaar) with banking protocols (UPI). This means you can build, well, anything. As Albert Wenger notes, these protocols enable massive startup experimentation, just like WeChat did for China.

///

Of course, India is not perfect. Only Canada is. 🇨🇦

But it’s been fun to hang with increasing numbers of Indian frontier people through the Roote Fellowship (RF1, RF5, and RF6 had folks calling in from India). I’m excited to see how India takes an increasing role on our world stage in the coming decades. 📈

Warmth, Rhys ❤️

I’m adding my weekly podcasts to the bottom of newsletters now.

This week I interviewed Kevin Kelly on his new book, Excellent Advice for Living. Enjoy!

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❤️ This work is supported by excellent patrons and organizations. ❤️

If you’d like to become a patron to help us map & build the frontier, please do so here or pledge below. Thanks!

Stardust Evolving, Doug Petkanics, Daniel Friedman, Tom Higley, Christian Ryther, Maciej Olpinski, Jonathan Washburn, Sam Jonas, Patrick Walker, David Hanna, Benjamin Bratton, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Brian Crain, Matt Lindmark, Colin Wielga, Malcolm Ocean, John Lindmark, Ref Lindmark, Peter Rogers, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Simon de la Rouviere, Jonny Dubowsky, and Katie Powell.

I give you permission.

Permission to be ambitious.

Permission to lead.

Permission to apply for that fellowship, drop out of school, and start that startup.

Permission to write about your passions and what’s on your mind.

Permission to be optimistic when everyone around you is a climate doomer.

Permission to be pessimistic on how the attention economy is warping society.

Permission to speak up and speak out.

Permission to be serious when everyone around you is having fun.

Permission to say no to drinks because you really just want to work this Wednesday night.

You. Are. Allowed.

You are allowed to be yourself. The people that care don’t matter. The people that matter don’t care.

You are allowed to own your weirdness and love the frontier.

You are allowed to stay up late and wake up late. Conversely, you are allowed to go to sleep early and wake up early.

You are allowed to take a break between jobs and take a day off at a job.

You are allowed to say that you’re good at neuroscience, even though you’re still learning.

You are allowed to learn new things. To change fields. To move cities.

You are allowed to say I don’t know.

You have the King’s Blessing, the Universe’s official seal of approval, and Obama’s endorsement.

These truths are self-evident. All people, even you, have the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Nothing you are doing is illegal. The opposite, in fact. It is authorized & sanctioned. You have the correct licenses & clearances.

What you are doing is pro-social.

So why wait?

You have the go-ahead ✅, the thumbs up 👍, the 🆗, the green light 🚦.

…To ask dumb questions.

To leave your small town for college in America.

To go against your parents, your school, and society as a whole.

You know yourself best. They don’t know you.

Do art. Do science. Make love.

Breathe.

You will still be accepted. You will still be loved.

Follow your body.

Say the thing you think you cannot say.

Be honest. To be clear is to be kind.

People appreciate it and will appreciate you.

I give you cover.

The only thing I ask of you is to give this gift of permission to those around you.

Surround yourself with people who do the same.

Even if you don’t have someone telling you, give that gift to yourself.

Whisper “you are allowed” whenever you’re feeling tension, then take action.

And if someone tells you no, just tell them to talk to me. 😉

Warmth, Rhys ❤️

P.S. This work was inspired by a combination of two things:

1. Tyler Cowen’s classic The high-return activity of giving people permission:

At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations change the life course of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind giving them permission. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous.

This is in fact one of the most valuable things you can do with your time and with your life.

2. Danielle Strachman and Dylan Field on how one of the biggest benefits of the Thiel Fellowship is simple: it gives fellows permission.

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Stardust Evolving, Doug Petkanics, Daniel Friedman, Tom Higley, Christian Ryther, Maciej Olpinski, Jonathan Washburn, Sam Jonas, Patrick Walker, David Hanna, Benjamin Bratton, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Brian Crain, Matt Lindmark, Colin Wielga, Malcolm Ocean, John Lindmark, Ref Lindmark, Peter Rogers, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Simon de la Rouviere, Jonny Dubowsky, and Katie Powell.

Perfect time to let the narrative talkboxes begin:

Techies like Musk began by spinning it as: “Bob was killed. SF is dangerous!”. But then one week later, we learned that Bob was killed by a fellow tech exec. So the Lefties came in and said: “Ha! Techies just spin narratives. SF is safe!”

We shouldn’t build our world on the sand of narratives. So which is it? Is SF safe or not?

Obviously, we need to do a simple thing—look at the data.

Here’s what it shows:

First, we need to distinguish between violent crime and property crime.

For violent crime, SF is right in the middle of the pack. 715 crimes per 100,000 people (per year). A bit fewer than 1 in 1000 people are victims of violent crime each year.

SF is roughly 2x safer than Oakland and 3x safer than Detroit. It’s 2x more dangerous than San Jose though. Here are the top 20 US cities by population, sorted by violent crime (in red). San Francisco is in the middle.

If we look at just property crime, SF jumps to the top. (Behind Albuquerque for some reason?)

If we look at total crime (violent + property), we see that San Francisco stays near the top with roughly 7,000 crimes per 100,000 people. In SF, a bit fewer than 1 in 100 people are victims of any crime each year. 2x worse than LA and 3x worse than NYC.

So that’s the data. SF is safe-ish for people but not for property. Unfortunately, I saw very little media coverage with a graph. Just text and narrative.

In a healthier information ecosystem, the media would not have updated either way when we learned that Bob was (or was not) murdered by a fellow techie.

Of course, from the perspective of Bob’s friends and family, everything can and should matter about his case. But from the perspective of “the state”, “the people”, and “progress”, the specifics here don’t really matter. It’s one of 6300 violent crimes per year (56 of which are murders). All of them are bad.

What matters is the overall rate and whether we’re making progress on that.

SF is already average on violent crime. It should try to decrease violent crime even 2x more! Get down to San Jose levels.

But SF should be a bit ashamed of its property crime rate and should try to decrease it at least 2x to the level of a city like LA.

Before we even start to have a conversation about what to do (increase community investment vs. increase policing), we need to agree on where we are now (average violent crime rates, bad property crime rates) and where we want to go (2x decrease in crime rates in the next 3 years).

And then we need to be serious about getting there.

- Rhys

P.S. At a bare minimum, I shouldn’t need to create these graphs myself. We need Our World In Data at the city level.

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❤️ This work is supported by excellent patrons and organizations. ❤️

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Stardust Evolving, Doug Petkanics, Daniel Friedman, Tom Higley, Christian Ryther, Maciej Olpinski, Jonathan Washburn, Sam Jonas, Patrick Walker, David Hanna, Benjamin Bratton, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Brian Crain, Matt Lindmark, Colin Wielga, Malcolm Ocean, John Lindmark, Ref Lindmark, Peter Rogers, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Simon de la Rouviere, Jonny Dubowsky, and Katie Powell.

All images courtesy of Midjourney!

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❤️ This work is supported by excellent patrons and organizations. ❤️

If you’d like to become a patron to help us map & build the frontier, please do so here, or pledge below. Thanks!

Stardust Evolving, Doug Petkanics, Daniel Friedman, Tom Higley, Christian Ryther, Maciej Olpinski, Jonathan Washburn, Patrick Walker, David Hanna, Benjamin Bratton, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Brian Crain, Matt Lindmark, Colin Wielga, Malcolm Ocean, John Lindmark, Ref Lindmark, Peter Rogers, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Simon de la Rouviere, Jonny Dubowsky, and Katie Powell.

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AI is very much The Current Thing.

Everyone seems to have their take. AI good. AI bad. AI fine.

Which one is it? AI complicated, of course. :)

Whenever something new emerges, we’re all just blind men touching the elephant. The elephant looks different depending on what part you look at:

With AI, we’re all blind men touching a Shoggoth/Doggoth:

I see roughly 8 tribes of AI:

First, you have three builders, working on each layer of the AI stack:

• The Shoggoth Summoners are building foundational models

• That are fine-tuned and given a UI by the GPT Wrappers

• That are then actually used by the LLM Psychologists

Second, you have three commenters who are worried about different parts of the AI timeline:

• AI Doomers are feeling doomy about the long-term

• Alarmed Globalists are alarmed about the medium-term

• AI Justice Activists are worried about the impacts today

Finally, you have:

• Progress Agnostics, who, on the margin, aren’t worried too much

• Intelligence Aligners, who are trying to use the AIs themselves to ensure AI value alignment

Let’s spend a paragraph looking at each more closely. Plus, we can look at the fun Midjourney pictures that I made!

I. Builders

Shoggoth Summoners

These are companies building foundational AI models. The text-based LLMs combine a startup + Big Tech:

• OpenAI + Microsoft

• Anthropic + Google

While the generative AI space is a bit less traditional: open-source Stable Diffusion and 10-person Midjourney.

GPT Wrappers

Then there are the businesses fine-tuning and adding a UX layer on top of GPT. Half of the latest YC batch are GPT Wrappers, as are ChatGPT plugins like Instacart and Expedia.

The jury is out on which GPT Wrappers will turn into big businesses, but some definitely will:

LLM Psychologists

Finally, there are the LLM copilots. People who talk to LLMs to supercharge their productivity.

Instead of Python, coders now believe:

Outside of coding: writers, graphic novelists, and artists are now seeing themselves as creative directors, orchestrating a team of Lalambdians.

LLM Ops are the new People Ops.

II. Commentators

AI Doomers

X-risk Doomers like Eliezer Yudkowsky are (rightfully-ish) worried that we might all die.

They point to surveys like the one below that show how ~10% of AI researchers believe this technology is likely to lead to human extinction.

(Black is bad outcome. Yellow is good outcome.)

Alarmed Globalists

Alarmed Globalists are more worried about the medium-term impacts of AI. What will these AIs do to our information ecosystem, to teen health, and to the current economic order?

4,000+ of these folks (including Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari, and others) signed a letter to Pause Giant AI Experiments:

We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

Of course, that letter doesn’t include anyone working at OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.

AI Justice Activists

Finally, folks like Timnit Gebru are worried about the impacts of AI today.

They highlight the low-paid ghost work to tune models with RLHF, the explosion of synthetic media that pollutes our information commons, and the continued concentration of power in the hands of Surveillance Capitalists like Big Tech.

Progress Agnostics

But not all folks are worried about AI. Many think the good will outweigh the bad.

Or, as Tyler Cowen notes here, the idea that there’s just so much uncertainty with AI tech.

We didn’t know what would happen with the printing press. We won’t know what will happen with AI.

Tyler:

The case for destruction is so much more readily articulable — “boom!”

Yet at some point your inner Hayekian has to take over and pull you away from those concerns. Existential risk from AI is indeed a distant possibility, just like every other future you might be trying to imagine.

All the possibilities are distant, I cannot stress that enough.

Intelligence Aligners

Finally, there are those who are trying to align AI with AI.

Sometimes this happens within the Shoggoth Summoners. For example, Sam Altman has talked about how both RLHF and interpretability don’t just help with alignment, but make more capable models. Alignment and capabilities are not orthogonal.

And sometimes this happens in the wider engineering community. For example, the Collective Intelligence Project, AI Objectives Institute, and others are looking to use AI to understand our values, then use those values to align AI.

Twitter collapsed context into bite-sized tweets. LLMs can expand context into more nuanced interactions between and within humans and machines.

///

Let me know if you think I’m missing a tribe!

- Rhys

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Stardust Evolving, Doug Petkanics, Daniel Friedman, Tom Higley, Christian Ryther, Maciej Olpinski, Jonathan Washburn, Audra Jacobi, Patrick Walker, David Hanna, Benjamin Bratton, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Brian Crain, Matt Lindmark, Colin Wielga, Malcolm Ocean, John Lindmark, Ref Lindmark, Peter Rogers, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Simon de la Rouviere, Jonny Dubowsky, and Katie Powell.