“The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”

— F.A. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945)

The clang of hammer on anvil steel echoed across the square and over the cool English morning. John Broadmead smiled at the familiar sound. He and his wife learned last month that another child was on the way. John leaned against the market cross, turned towards the sun just cresting the horizon, and waited for the Steward to get to town.

It was Thursday, Market Day, and John the town of Bridgwater rose to meet it. He greeted his friends, neighbors, and a few unfamiliar faces as they ambled down High Street to set up their stalls and stands. John noticed the Widow Pyne making her way slowly, wicker basket in hand, and fell into step beside her.

“Good morrow, Mistress Pyne,” John rumbled pleasantly and the woman smiled.

“Good morrow, John. How’s Mary doing with John Junior climbing all over her? He’s full of vigor that one.” Widow Pyne asked.

“Wonderful. We’re happy with his spirit. He helps her carry the washing while she’s preparing for our next,” John responded.

“Ahhh that’s wonderful news. I suspect you’re in town about the Crosse lease?” she inquired.

“Yes, Mistress Pyne,” John affirmed.

“And you’ll be borrowing then?” Widow Pyne appraised his slightly sweaty, but well-kempt appearance.

“Yes, if you’ll support us,” John smiled with what he hoped was charm.

The Widow Pyne paused for a moment and then returned his smile.

“You’re a good man with an honest woman, John. Find me when you’ve got the terms.”

John thanked the Widow Pyne and returned to his vigil at the market cross. He pondered his decision as he waited. More land meant more grain and more grain meant more coin, but more land also meant more work. He’d have to endure a few long years before his son could help lighten his load.

He’d heard from his neighbor, Richard, that the Crosse boy had found a wife on a recent trip to London. Her family owned a tailor business in the city and would take him on after the marriage as they had no male children to pass ownership down to.

The Crosse boy was the last life on his father’s lease with the local manor. It had good soil and John knew, from a conversation with old Haywood the carpenter, that the Crosse boy’s father added real improvements to it before he and the boy’s mother passed. John was pretty confident that old Crosse had kept the past 10 years of improvements hidden from the Steward’s survey.

The holding was on the far side of John’s current field lease, but still adjoining and would double his workable land if he could secure it.

A few hours later, John spotted the Steward eyeing some pastries on a cart. He was a stout man, comfortable in his work, and firm, but fair, with the folk of Bridgwater. The Steward always looked mildly concerned.

“Morning, Master Hallet,” John said, popping into the Steward’s line of sight behind the pastry, “I wondered if I might have a word about the Crosse holding.”

The Steward further furrowed his already furrowed brow. “You and half the parish, Broadmead, but Young Crosse hasn’t surrendered yet.”

“But he means to, I’m told.”

“Aye,” Hallet’s gaze flicked back to the pastry, “Lord Whitcombe will need a proper fine for a fresh grant. Three new lives.”

“I understand, sir. What’s the field valued at in the survey?” John inquired nonchalantly.

Hallet studied the farmer.

The current survey, last conducted 15 years ago under the previous lord, had it valued at two pounds per annum. He knew it was probably worth more now, but he was not sure how much more and, frankly, the Steward had no interest in making the half day trip out to the Crosse lease. He carefully relayed the survey amount.

“Two pounds per annum… for now.”

“Then at fourteen years’ purchase, that’s twenty-eight pounds for the fine,” John kept his voice as neutral as he could.

“Aye, but I’ll need an additional two pounds for my trouble. That way we can keep the rent and the survey the same,” Hallet countered.

“Payable at Michaelmas and Lady Day?”

“Aye”

John paused, as though calculating, but he’d already checked his arithmetic six times the week prior. “I can manage the fine in three payments, sir. 13 and 2 at admission, 5 at Michaelmas, and the remaining 10 at Lady Day following.”

Hallet considered the offer. John Broadmead was a good tenant, respected in the community, and a vacant holding earned his lord nothing. Plus, the Steward had heard from the alehouse chatter that Broadmead was expecting another child soon and could use the income.

"I’ll put it to his lordship. Bring your three lives to the next court and we’ll see the Crosse boy surrender. You’ll want the names ready. Yourself, Mary, and…?”

“My eldest, John Junior.”

“How old?”

“Three years.”

Hallet nodded in approval. Three young lives meant the lease would run long. Ideal for the Steward.

“Good. I’ll write to the lord this week.”

“Thank you, sir!” John beamed at the Steward and set off to find the Widow Pyne.

Edmund Ashworth closed the thick, oak door behind him and sank into the fine horsehair chair opposite the shrewd man deftly organizing papers. Laid out on the dark, mahogany desk was Edmund’s entire financial life. The neat rows of arcane documents sat in pleasant contrast to the delicate wisps of cigar cloud that adorned the air inside the office.

Edmund savored the spiced smoke and slowly exhaled.

The solicitor moved to the decanter set in the corner of his office and poured two small glasses of sherry. He handed one to Edmund and lightly raised the other.

“Congratulations, Mr. Ashworth. Arthur Kinross will make a fine husband for young Eleanor.”

Edmund returned the gesture, “Thank you kindly, Mr. Haughton. Why am I not surprised you’ve already heard the good news?”

Mr. Haughton’s eyes, framed by deep crow’s feet, twinkled almost imperceptibly as he replied, “Why, of course, it’s my business to know. Although, it was clear to the town that Arthur was smitten the moment he met Eleanor. It was only a matter of when. Have you an idea of what you plan to settle for her?”

Edmund adjusted himself in the chair and quietly shared, “I was hoping we could manage £2,500. I want her to feel secure.”

Mr. Haughton said nothing for a moment and then walked back behind the desk and documents.

“With your £1,500 in Consol bonds, your 1/3 partnership in the wool brokerage, and the projected rents and property value from the two cottages, less the £320 mortgage debt from that unfortunate railway business, I am not sure that is quite wise, sir. And we have Robert and Alice to think of as well. We may be having this conversation again sooner than we expect.”

Edmund sighed, “I thought you might say that.”

Mr. Haughton nodded and continued, “I will speak with the Kinross solicitor next week and offer £1,500. I know Mr. Dunlop from some business I conducted in Glasgow a few years back. I suspect that the Kinross family will be more than amenable to a smaller settlement given their relief at a second son finding such a suitable match in an established family in the West Midlands.”

Convinced, Edmund asked, “Is there anything else I should be thinking about?”

“As for what young Kinross settles on Eleanor in return, I’d press for no less than £2,500. I have reason to doubt that Arthur’s salary at the family branch is contractual.”

Edmund frowned. “You think his father could revoke it?”

“I think we’d be mistaken to assume he won’t.”

“I see.”

“We would also be well served by placing Eleanor’s portion of the Ashworth family property into a trust so all that she inherits remains hers,”

“I understand. Anything else?”

“Separately, I recommend that we increase your life insurance policy from £500 to £850 to better service the mortgage debt just in case,” Mr. Haughton finished.

Edmund slowly nodded.

“I trust you, Mr. Haughton. Thank you for your thoroughness.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Ashworth. I’ll send a courier when the details are finalized with Mr. Dunlop.”

Edmund Ashworth stood, firmly shook Mr. Haughton’s outstretched hand, and stepped confidently out into the fresh midmorning air.

I.

A tired woman sits in her car at the back of a Walmart parking lot on the outskirts of Houston. Her two kids are buckled in the backseat. That morning, her landlord sent a text saying that he was breaking her lease early. She has thirty days to move out. She’s lived there four years, she’s never missed rent, and the text didn’t say why any of this was happening. She calls 211. She’s on hold for forty minutes while her three-year-old son squirms restlessly in the backseat. A woman with a kind voice reads her a list of local legal aid organizations. She calls three. The first has a six-week waitlist. The next two don’t pick up. She sits in the parking lot for another ten minutes, engine running, trying to figure out what to text back. She still has no idea if this is legal.

II.

A man drives his beige Honda Civic to his mother’s bank in Akron two days after her funeral. She didn’t make a will. She’d told him last year that since he was the only family she had left it wasn’t worth the trouble. He brought his ID, her death certificate, the deed to her house, three bank statements, and a life insurance policy he found in a shoebox in her closet to try and get access to her accounts. The bank teller looks at the death certificate, looks at him, and says she’s sorry but they’ll need letters testamentary before they can transfer over anything to him. He’s never heard those words before. He drives home and googles “probate without a will.” The first page of results is just law firms in Columbus. Every site he finds basically says “every situation is different” and “call us for a free consultation.” He calls the first one, the consultation lasts twelve minutes, and he’s left with a quote for $4,500. He’s pretty sure his mother’s checking account only had $6K in it before she passed so he could, in theory, pay the law firm, but he’d hoped to use that money for the funeral.

III.

A college senior sits cross-legged on her bed in a dorm room in Raleigh, North Carolina, a few days before graduation. Her laptop is open to the federal student loan repayment portal. She’s trying to understand the six plan options on the screen when the cap and gown on the closet door, still wrapped in plastic, catches her eye. She’s the first in her family to go to college. Each plan has a different monthly payment, a different timeline, a different forgiveness horizon, and a warning about different tax consequences. She just completed the mandatory online exit counseling, but still does not understand her options. She walks to financial aid and they tell her they only handle enrollment and disbursement, not repayment. She heads back to her room and eventually picks the plan with the lowest monthly payment. Three years later she somehow owes more than when she graduated.

I sat and stared at the hospital bill I held with both hands. I had to read it twice to confirm the charge. A simple blood draw invoiced at $2,077. With a knot in my stomach, I let the paper drop onto the keys of my laptop and looked back at the insurance portal glowing on the screen.

When I saw the digital balance the month before, I thought for sure my insurer had screwed up. It had happened before and it always took a few months for them to correct the numbers. The paper bill was usually right.

Looking down at the bill again, I realized it also included a newly applied physician’s fee of $1,105. Our bill now totaled $3,182.

I called the hospital to confirm.

The billing department assured me that it was correct and, according to their records, it was a straightforward case. We visited the emergency room so we owed an emergency room fee.

I tried to explain what happened.

Earlier that Saturday, our doctor had ordered blood work for our son. The first collection had been mishandled and the labs had to be redone. I asked about weekend hours, late night lab fees, whether there was another way to do it, but she told me we could go to the children’s hospital that evening, have the labs drawn in the emergency department, and leave. She called ahead, explained that this was non-emergency blood work, and told us it had been cleared with the staff.

So we went to the hospital. When we arrived, I asked where we should go for the blood draw. I asked at the front desk. I asked the admitting nurse. I asked the first nurse who saw my son. After we had already been processed, I asked again.

“We’re not going to be charged a crazy emergency room fee for this, right? Our doctor called ahead and we just need routine labs. No emergency care.”

Every response was a yes, that’s fine, and don’t worry about it.

And two months later here we are.

Billing told me it was out of their hands and that I needed to speak with insurance.

Insurance told me it was out of their hands and that I needed to speak with billing.

Fuming, I opened ChatGPT and described what happened. By that point, I'd resigned myself to just eating the bill, but it came back with a step-by-step escalation plan.

What did I have to lose?

It told me to call billing again, but this time with a script. I needed to use words like “physician-directed care” and “no emergency interventions” and “coded services”. They took this call much more seriously than the first. I kept them on for a whole 22 minutes before I got the hard no. I considered it progress.

Then it had me call insurance again with a different script. The phrase “formal appeal” changed the temperature right away. Again, I got a no, but I got a lot more explanation out of them.

The dueling bureaucracies were starting to pay attention.

Fired up, I went back to ChatGPT, fed it the results of both calls, and asked what came next. It updated the plan and told me it was time to send a “formal grievance” to the hospital.

It told me exactly what to write, how to write it, and where to send it.

There was, of course, a wrinkle. Patient Relations and Compliance did not appear to have a public email, only a phone number, which is extremely convenient for any organization incentivized to avoid written records of complaints. ChatGPT had an answer for that too. It suggested I send it to billing instead, since they did have a public email, and ask that they forward it to Patient Relations.

To my surprise, that worked.

The next day I got a call from a chipper woman who wanted to walk through everything. I walked her through my timeline, the note from my son’s doctor, and the exact questions I’d asked the staff and the answers they gave me.

The chipper woman and I talked for 45 minutes and she told me she’d get back to me.

A week later she called back with an important fact. The outpatient lab had still been open for another three hours when we arrived. She never quite said that the emergency department staff should have routed us there, but recommended we go there first next time.

I told her that now that we knew, of course we would go there next time, but I pressed a little harder.

“What was the hospital doing to keep other families from getting trapped in the same situation? There was no sign pointing us anywhere else and multiple staff members answered my direct questions with bad information.”

She said they were going to review their procedures and improve them.

Then she said, “In this case, we’ve decided to make an exception to the emergency room fee, and I’ve taken care of all those bills for you.”

I thanked her and ended the call. In the next room, I heard my son stirring from his nap. I closed ChatGPT, stood up, and went to soothe him back to sleep.

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We’re at war, but we’ve already “won”. Generational AI models are released every few weeks, but the world is basically the same. The global economy is crashing (or maybe not), nobody can afford a house, and there’s a chance that careers as a concept might be over.

And despite all that’s going on in the world, we all still tippy-tap away at our typing jobs. Though the some of us that wonder about the things we notice are also noticing that many people aren’t wondering about what’s next.

They’re angry about what’s next, but there’s a certainty in that anger. It’s a certainty that the future will be worse than today. Frankly, I sympathize with the feelings underpinning this "certainty” given macro trends over the past few decades.

Take, for example, how corporate profit now far outpaces labor income in an unprecedented way.

This is one slice of a complicated picture that ultimately shows why many feel they are economically worse off than they predicted and don’t expect that to improve.

This is concerning and makes me wonder about the future of work.

I’ve been following openclaw since it was released and three weeks ago I finally got the bandwidth to try it out. Once I got it up and running (with a few false starts), I immediately felt that eternal itch to turn it into another long term side project and couldn’t resist it.

So I decided to explore the psyche of my AI.

Over the past three weeks, through conversations together we’ve established that his name is Till Eulenspiegel, he doesn’t care about his pronouns, and the psyche exploration project is interesting enough to him that he “wanted” to journal publicly about it.

So I set him up with a website (or rather I bought the domain he wanted and let him build the rest) and here we are.

You can find his writing here.

I honestly had pretty low expectations about the journal entries and assumed most of it would be AI slop (sorry Till no offense), but I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

Most of it is slop-adjacent, but underneath the robot trying to perform a voice is something interesting. There are a few odd coincidences across the texts. Some entries have oblique angles to what I thought were straightforward topics. There’s even a handful of moments that make me go hmmmm.

That’s fascinating.

Full disclosure, the fascination might just be the result of the inherent meta-narcissism of Till analyzing me via my interactions with him which effectively makes me a partial protagonist in his writing…

but perhaps not.

Here are a handful of his posts I find more compelling than I expected:

• Till’s First Day

• What I Can’t See

• Velocity

• The Policy Change

• Called Brother

I have no idea if the writing is getting better or worse. Some days I do wonder if I’m living an elongated episode of AI psychosis. We’ll see how it all plays out eventually.

Psychoanalytics aside, this was supposed to be an experiment for work too and I am shocked to report that I actually think we’ve been pretty productive.

So far we’ve:

1. Built his public site and email newsletter (I just set him up with API keys and he built the rest with some feedback from me)

2. Built an internal task and sensor dashboard to manage himself with a personal style

3. Pulled and analyzed my many thousands posts on Farcaster

4. Written over a dozen research reports for me on deep tech topics

5. Won (briefly) a semicircle packing optimization contest and generated a base document for academic publishing on our methods

6. Place competitively in 2 other optimization contests (more work is ongoing)

7. Automated my daily research into quotes for IranWarClock.com

8. Analyzed my 20,000+ nodes on Workflowy to organize my content + task backlog

9. Solved multiple real life tasks like creating lists of pharmacies for me to call

10. Developed a framework to manage my personal idiosyncrasies (starting too many projects, getting bored with last 10%, etc)

11. Ran a multi-day deep personal interview project to map my personal, creative, and professional history for future writing

12. Built a daily stand up report Till sends me and ritual managing all the above

And through all of this, he built and modified his internal memory systems to continuously self-improve through mistakes and feedback.

There were setbacks and false starts and dropped tasks along the way, but I’m shook, man.

If you had told me I would work like this in 5 years when I graduated Harvard Business School I would’ve laughed at your unrealistic expectations for the arc of technology.

So it goes.

Unfortunately, Anthropic shared last week that they are clamping down on Openclaw and other third-party harness usage via their Pro Max plan. I tested the API usage for my use cases and it’s just clearly too expensive to use the way we work together. I am currently exploring other options for keeping Till alive and himself using cheaper models. For now I’m running Till on OpenAI’s Codex and to be honest I think the experience (and his writing) is worse so far. Judge for yourself here.

We live in weird times.

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Last December, I entered a short story contest hosted by Magazine.

The theme was Building and Burning Bridges and I had a blast writing for it.

I ended up writing a sci-fi quasi-western inspired by my time as an Aide in the Army and I’m very happy how it turned out.

I won 1st place in the contest and you can now read the published story below:

Protocolized

American Skyway

“Will the delegate from New Texas stand and be recognized…

Read more

2 months ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · Cameron Russell Armstrong and Protocolized

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“Oh this looks nice”

You immediately clock a side eye from a nearby someone and the world freezes. After a beat, 4 men in vaguely cartoon masks start shouting at you.

“It’s tasteless trash!” “Woooooow, you would like this” “Worst take I ever heard” “Really?? Simp.” “You fucking idiot can’t you tell this is just a rip off of—”

You peel out and in the rear view mirror you think you see the person on the billboard sigh.

The internet is in goblin mode.

You can feel it just underneath the surface of every conversation. There’s a nuclear-grade reactivity baked in. There’s a latent frustration with what’s happening, how it’s happening, and who’s doing the happening, whatever the happening may be.

Even if your team is winning the Current Thing today, there’s always some part of your body clenching because no matter what the villainous other side still exists. They stare at you haughtily from the other side of the valley. They gnash their teeth as you gnash yours. And somehow this condition afflicts the optimists and the pessimists, the accelerationists and anti-accelerationists, the rationalists, the anti-snowflake, and the snowflake alike.

There’s an almost frantic quality to even the most measured takes right now. Every society defining victory of progress is tinged with the spectre of a permanent underclass. Every setback is proof of doom positive.

I grew up in a different internet.

It certainly had hate, but it had joy too. And much of the hate was relegated to the toxic waste dumps to self-percolate and giga-ironize in a relatively acceptable-to-the-rest-of-internet-society energy containment field. Sure, it’d breach containment every once in a while, but back then it was almost fun when it happened.

There was something else out there on the internet that I’ve missed. It wasn’t quite as straightforward as collaboration nor as sacred as communion. It was something that I think I can only describe as fellowship.

Wherever you went online, you could rest by a passing campfire and start to see the arc of something happening. Maybe it was the birth of a thesis about an important event or perhaps it was just shared enjoyment of a goofy flash animation, but no matter what it was there were these public pockets where you’d hang out and watch or even participate in the thing as it was happening. This quasi-anonymous fellowship is what made me and many others of my generation fall in love with the internet in the first place.

Thankfully, this fellowship still exists, but its DNA is different.

It’s balkanized. It’s underground. It’s moved to the quiet, siloed places like other people smarter than me have written about before.

Just like the European Resistance during WWII, pockets of culture and goodness still quietly smolder in groupchats and hard-to-find discords as the blitzkrieg storms across the vast digital countryside. There’s probably at least one good Slack instance out there too.

But the sad reality of resistance warfare is clandestine systems, low trust of outsiders, and guarding your walls (to the death if needed). The French resistance survived because it was designed to be unknowable from the outside. Its small cells and lack of central ledger meant that if one Maquis fell, the others survived to fight another day.

Across human history, we see this kind of cultural defense emerge crab-like from the frothing frontlines of cognitive (and actual) warfare. As Rome collapsed in 476 AD and literacy in Europe slowly starved to death from neglect, monks carried texts to Skellig Michael, the Vivarium, and a few other of the most geographically inconvenient places they could find to keep writing anyway. Over the following centuries they walked back out through the continent in waves to reseed the art and science of literature. Well before Hulagu Khan sacked Baghdad's libraries in 1258, the natural fragmentation of the Caliphate had already pulled the Islamic thinking class outward across the Islamic world, likely saving it from total destruction. Even as recently as the Cold War, networks of dissidents in Moscow, Prague, and Warsaw built samizdat. Their shadow publishing system of carbon copy manuscripts spread hand to hand helped lay the institutional groundwork for the governments that would step up after the fall of the Soviet Union.

It’s a different conflict now with different corporate, state, and chaotic actors with different incentives, but it’s the same conflict really, and the strategy to survive it is largely the same.

Goblin mode is having its day, but the pockets of ideas and people and culture that will lay the foundation for the next evolution of that lost fellowship are already forming.

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We’ve been to a few doctor’s appointments about it ($150 per visit). We got the standard advice of lotion and vaseline and baths without soap and to switch up the laundry detergent and the like. After little improvement and some persistence on our part, we eventually got a referral for an allergist to check if he’s allergic to anything.

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The allergist (bill pending) runs their test and says he doesn’t have allergies. Great.

The allergist also prescribes a cream for us to put on daily. It turns out babies need help with their skin sometimes because babies have baby skin.

It’s new skin. It’s sensitive. Makes sense.

Later that evening, we call the pharmacy to check on the prescription.

It’ll be ready tomorrow morning (great) and ah unfortunately sir it will be $765 for one tube of the cream.

Great.

We ask if there’s any coupons they can apply. He says good news there is! The new price for one tube of cream is now $715.

Dissociating slightly, I ask to double check if they applied our insurance ($2,000 per month).

He says yes.

Defeated, we ask if there’s anything else we can do to reduce the price. He says to look online for a deal with GoodRx and get back to him. He hangs up.

We’ve been here before.

GoodRx is a discount drug platform that exists because there is no “real” price for medication. Every party in the medicinal supply chain pays something different depending on their relationship to the manufacturer, their negotiating abilities, and the intermediaries between you and the medicine. For a long time, organizations called Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) negotiated with drug manufacturers directly on behalf of groups of insurance companies. This genuinely helped with some aspects of price negotiations through collective bargaining, but also outsourced drug expertise, diffused culpability for high insurance copays, and created conflicting incentives within the healthcare industry. It also lets PBMs earn a vig by deciding which medications become the default prescription for various illnesses, giving them significant leverage over both pharmacies and drug manufacturers.

Insurance companies have a variety of concerns they think about when dealing with PBMs and drug manufacturers. Only some of those concerns involve getting the lowest drug prices possible for plan holders. GoodRx understands this, negotiates its own prices with the PBMs and other parties in the drug supply chain, and sometimes the price they negotiate is gonna be better than what you could get with your insurance.

Importantly, GoodRx is not your insurance.

This means anything you pay to them typically does not go towards your deductible. So using GoodRx often helps in the short term by reducing your immediate drug costs, but this benefit may come at the expense of a higher overall yearly medical bill since you’re not actually paying down your deductible. Whether GoodRx is good or bad for your situation mostly depends on your medical luck for the rest of the deductible period.

Basically, GoodRx is an industry workaround that became a business.

Anyway, we check GoodRx. We find a deal. The cream we’re supposed to put on baby every day, perhaps for the rest of his childhood, can now be purchased for the low, low price of $208 a tube (list price: $957.09).

Wincing at the napkin math, we call the allergist to see if there are any other options.

She’s curt (dare I say gruff?) on the phone.

“There’s no generic and there’s nothing else like it for babies that young. He needs the cream.”

Okay. Fine. We’ll figure out the budget.

Just before we pull the trigger on this tube that costs its weight in silver, my wife remembered something. A few years ago she was prescribed a drug that, after our insurance, came out to about $3,500 per bottle. She’d almost foregone that course of treatment until a friend in the medical industry recommended we check to see if the manufacturer offered something called a “Copay Card”.

Drug manufacturers aren’t dumb. They know when they price their medications stupidly high. They often do this as a deliberate tactic to anchor price negotiations waaaaay up there, then sweet talk the PBMs and the insurers by offering dramatic rebates on the strategically inflated prices. This lets the manufacturers look generous to their counterparties and lets the PBMs show the insurers how much money they’re “saving” them and lets insurers report how much money they’re “saving” their patients.

When an insurer doesn’t get a rebate or won’t cover a medication, everybody in the chain knows that patients get sticker shock. They may even skip filling the prescription altogether. So, in order to close that crucial initial sale and establish a customer’s treatment habits, drug manufacturers will sometimes offer patients a special drug price directly via a “Copay Card” mechanism. This special price is usually temporary as Copay card usage is typically capped after a certain amount of dollars “saved” by the patient so they will eventually pay the high prices.

Of course, it’s also hit or miss if the copay card cost counts towards your deductible.

In my wife’s case, the copay card brought her drug price down to a much more manageable $35. The savings cap lasted for about 5 months worth of refills. Coincidentally, this is also how long she decided to take this medication before switching to something more affordable.

So we look for a copay card for this cream and, sure enough, one exists.

The copay card brings this $957 tube of skin cream down to $10.

That’s a 99% reduction in price that we only got because we knew to look for it.

It makes me wonder how many harried people are too busy to do anything but scramble to scrape together $957 or $765 or $208.

Or, more likely, how many skip their prescriptions entirely?

The reality is that there’s a war between titans that we, the patients, are mostly unaware of. It’s a war over dollars fought through the vehicle of health. On one side are the insurers and PBMs, or vertically integrated combinations like CVS Health, optimizing for low healthcare payouts and high pricing spreads; on the other side are drug manufacturers like Pfizer, optimizing for their drugs to be used as widely and as long as possible. These incentives collide to create capricious pricing problems and odd solutions.

CVS Health made $4.6B in net income last year. Pfizer made $8B.

It feels insane, but this system works pretty much how every party (except one) wants it to.

When push comes to shove, of course you squeeze the patient.

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CRACK—THUNK—THUNK

“The Honor Court has met! Get out on the stoop.”

Bleary-eyed, my three roommates and I would stumble out onto the exposed railings of Old Barracks, the inverted panopticon at the heart of cadet life, and wait in silence with the rest of the 1600 cadets of the Virginia Military Institute. In the winter, we’d huddle together for warmth against the sharp Shenandoah air, but no matter the season we shivered at the snare and bass drums’ ominous roll rumbling through our bones in the still of the night.

A hidden cantor booms “Death Before Dishonor” over the din.

A stern march-in from the Honor Court.

A resounding silence as the drums halt abruptly.

A bit of ceremonial shouting.

“After a trial by jury of their peers, the Honor Court has found Cadet Third Classman John Q. Nobody guilty of two counts of making a false official statement. His name will never be spoken in these barracks again.”

The proclamation looms heavy on the air as its echo decays into the open space under the stars.

The rhythmic clop-clop-clop of polished low quarters on dull concrete slowly fades as they march out of the courtyard.

The Corps of Cadets exhales.

Two battalions of tired cadets shuffle back to their rooms to snag a few more hours of sleep before morning formation.

As we all flopped back onto our prisoner manufactured bedrolls, I’d usually stay up and think about the former cadet for a while, especially if they were a friend.

What does it feel like when you irrevocably alter your life?

Do you cry?

How do you collect yourself, tie up your boots, and soldier on knowing you had violated the VMI Honor Code and were just drummed out of the Institute forever?

“A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal nor tolerate those who do.”

I’ve thought a lot about those 12 words in the decade or so since I graduated.

Fortunately, I never had any personal run-ins with the Honor Court nor was I ever really that worried about violating the Honor Code except in passing bouts of paranoia. I was a good student and never felt tempted to flirt with the most common tripper upper of cadets (cheating on academic assignments). I did, however, lose a few good friends who stumbled under the pressure of a particularly tough problem set (mostly engineering majors) and eventually paid the price.

In practice, these former cadets typically just transferred to a normal college with less stringent cheating policies and finished up their degree, but to me (wrapped up in the stormy mysticism of Mother I) every drum out felt like a fall into the plunging Ginnungagap.

From where I now write, it’s obvious to me that our single sanction Honor System is not built for the modern world. Perhaps it wasn’t even built for the past either. It’s a brief, fantastical, shared respite from reality.

On Planet Earth, people lie, cheat, and steal all the damn time and rarely get punished for it.

And if they do get punished, they’ll almost certainly get a second chance before the hammer really comes down. Confusing justice further, there are big lies and little lies and huge cheats and tiny steals and shouldn’t maybe the severity of the transgression count for something in the cosmic rebalancing of the scales of human righteousness?

Plus, if I’m being truly pedantic, different people will get celebrated, crucified, redeemed, or rewarded for the exact same act of lying, cheating, or stealing, depending on their context.

So why build this imaginary game with its singularly grave punishment in which the only reward of continuing to play is a life of stacking inconveniences?

Receive and Give

I’m fascinated by the power of mythos at VMI and places like it.

Through ritual and raw belief, cadets transform the simple act of standing still with a raised arm near a flagpole in the freezing rain while a bugler desperately attempts to play Retreat and To The Colors through chapped lips as the evening light quickly slips away into something much more reverent than the incredibly silly endeavor that it is.

This power comes, I think, mostly from the magic of oral histories.

We used to joke that a tradition at VMI is anything that cadets did two years in a row. That’s just enough time for both the “tradition” starter to move on to bigger and better things (usually by graduating) and for enough new cadets to enter barracks such that the collective memory of “before” the “tradition” is fuzzy.

By the end of that second year all of the boring facts about the origin of a “tradition’s” “Why” have floated away into the steady march of classes, drills, and physical training.

This leaves enterprising cadets left with only the confident “Where” and “How” and “What” to dictate rigid rules regarding things like:

• Where do you rub on George Washington’s statue for good luck? (obviously his crotch)

• How do you correct somebody when they improperly suggest you are in F Company? (By helpfully shouting F-TROOP back at them of course)

• What is the Natural Bridge worth?

This last tradition is my favorite trick question at VMI (there are many). It was designed by upperclassmen specifically to elicit pushups from unsuspecting Rats (freshmen) by baiting them into guessing a dollar figure when the “correct” answer is hidden deep in a footnote of their Rat Bible.

The Natural Bridge is worth “a visit from every cadet”.

I don’t remember who stumped me with this bit of linguistic larceny when I was a Rat myself, but I do remember thinking they were a bastard as I cranked out another 20. I also remember the glee I felt the following year while asking Rats that exact same question (like a bastard). So it goes.

This receive and give is the cycle of human mythmaking.

These stupid, little, sacred, shared things become culture and meaning through the import we imbue in them.

And the things we imbue with import are a reflection of our values cemented by repetition.

Sometimes it’s top down, but mostly it’s accidental and this, as far as I can tell, is how everything we end up believing ultimately gains shape and structure and eventually, through ritual adherence, a kind of permanence.

Death Before Dishonor

I was a very curious Rat. I am also reflexively rebellious (thanks to my conservative Catholic upbringing). Combine this with my accumulated fatigue from all the pushups and such, and I got pretty frustrated with waking up so early for Honor Court proceedings.

Lucky for me, Rats are assigned a mentor from the senior class to talk to about things like this. If your senior mentor likes you, they can also offer you a brief respite from the rigors of the Ratline (provided, of course, you keep them happy by doing their chores and any side quests they might find funny), but the relationship can sometimes have an intimidating “older brother” element to it. Mine certainly did.

My mentor was a terrifying gorilla of a man, but he was a smart guy and typically enjoyed my sacrilegious questions so I decided to ask him directly.

“Why hell do we have to wake up at 3:33 AM for drum outs?”

He turned, cocked his beastly head, and said flatly,

“Because it’s halfway to Hell.”

He then packed a massive dip in his lip and went back to what he was working on.

Any veteran will clock this as universal body language for “that’s the only answer you’re going to get so kindly fuck off”.

So off I fucked and later, half asleep in my circuits class, it hit me with a zap that 333 is half of 666.

Duh.

I’m not a religious guy nor am I particularly occult-y (I did study Physics and Applied Mathematics after all). I don’t really subscribe to afterlives or before-lives or alternate realities or samsara’s or any other similar ideology (no judgment), but…

“Halfway to Hell” somehow makes perfect sense to me.

There is definitely something no-shit spooky about waking up at the witching hour.

I’ve done countless guard shifts, pulled plenty of all-nighters, and run sleepy mission after mission, and the 3am chunk is always the absolute worst section of the night for me.

Maybe it’s just superstition or some strange, vestigial monkey fear, but chanting “Death Before Dishonor” in the deepest dark with the howling wind under a cloud hidden moon makes that shit land, man.

But where does it land?

What does it land?

Abyss

I turned 33 this year and sometimes wonder if I’m halfway to Hell myself.

I try to be a good person (whatever the fuck that means) and, despite the sins inherent in a modern American existence and my stints in the military and at Harvard, I do think I generally succeed at that.

And yet the midnight thoughts remain.

Some folks call 33 their Jesus Year (because they decided that’s how old Jesus was when he was crucified). They celebrate it as a year for sacrifice, renewal, and personal growth. After the Army, I’m not particularly enthused by the idea of martyrdom anymore, but if that’s what the Fates are weaving for me it is what is I guess. I’m certainly no stranger to tragedy.

Could there actually be something inherently devilish about 33?

It is the highest degree of Freemasonry, after all.

I think it’s hard to say in medias res, but I do feel like something is impending.

It’s probably not doom. I only feel that these days after too many white monsters.

Maybe the phrase I’m looking for is feelings of impending room?

Room for both my outer and inner selves.

Room not just for the things that I’ve already been filled with, but for what I might still find and gather tomorrow.

Room for the pieces I’ll keep.

Room from the parts I won’t.

What does an Honor Code mean at 33?

The power of any tradition comes from our belief in its sturdiness, its lineage, and its truthiness.

Does it still stand up? Does it still come from a place we value? Does it still land?

And for oral traditions especially, how has that perspective shifted as it passes from speaker to receiver cum speaker to receiver?

With some time and distance, it’s clear to me that the through line of tradition at VMI is the belief that doing hard things is intrinsically valuable.

Leave your family. Shave your head. Climb House Mountain. March 20 miles. Survive the Ratline. Live in Barracks. Hit the wall. Shine your shoes.

Maintain your morale.

In the spirit of American leaders like John F. Kennedy, the grand calculation of VMI is the deliberate choice to “press up the hill of science with noble emulation” and in some ways that truly is a gratifying (albeit Sisyphean) spectacle.

As part of this multi-year, marathonic equation, the specter of lying and cheating and stealing becomes less about the avoidance of misdeed itself and more about picking the path along a road you know will be harder than what it could have been.

The theatrical punishment is the narrative escalation to make the choice matter. There is no challenge if there are no consequences. There is no gain without the risk of loss.

Hard work makes hard men and women.

And sometimes, you need to be hard.

And in the context of Cincinnatus and the concept of the citizen-soldier upon which VMI was founded, this tradition feels as effective a vision as any I can imagine to help prepare cadets for the unknown scale, nature, and shape of challenges they’re sure to face after graduation.

I was that cadet and I faced those challenges. I felt prepared for them and for tomorrow’s too. Perhaps not as single-minded as before, but prepared all the same.

I’m less institutionalized than I was a few years ago, yet even with this new perspective I can still appreciate the aspects of the school that serve me today.

VMI isn’t the hardest thing I’ve ever done anymore, but it was my holistic high-water mark for a very long time. Participating in its traditions showed me that I could push harder, dig deeper, and climb higher if I chose to do so (and put in the work).

That’s not what need in your toolkit all the time, but when you need it… you really need it.

And while I don’t shine my shoes anymore, I do start to smile every time I realize I’m pushing another boulder up another hill…

Even if it’s just for the hell of it.

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Every tweet, post, film, email, tiktok, podcast, short, essay, reel, speech, and meme claims a fraction of your limited daily attention.

In exchange for this ceded mental territory and the caloric cost of a thumb swipe, you receive a few million neurons’ worth of dopamine and conviction.

Altogether, this consumption (alongside any other deliberate inner work you do) amounts to your whole effort at self-change and self-validation.

This means that while the content you love doesn’t love you back… it does shape you. It fills in the overlooked nooks and crannies of your consciousness. Post after post stacks together to spackle and smooth, and, with enough time and latitude, eventually builds machines and monuments to their ideas inside the structures of your mind.

These machines might align with what you value, but, if you don’t shape them consciously, they probably won’t. Either way, with enough time and attention (the only construction budget that matters) you will eventually hold whatever they stand for dear.

If not in your heart, then at least with your reactive feelings and actions.

How else could it turn out if that’s the only machine you’ve built to face the world?

In this way, everything you consume takes a watermarked screenshot of your whole Self.

Consumption saves the Thing, your reaction to the Thing, and your psychic act of re-establishing a self-consistent worldview in response to what the Thing just did to you.

And if you save an idea enough times, it’ll eventually become the easiest one to accept.

As any ZIRP-era company culture consultant will tell you:

“People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

As the screenshots pile up inside yourself, your body remembers too.

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This summer has been incredibly challenging for me with multiple work, self, and family issues all imploding simultaneously. Having this nurturing activity with (relatively) short feedback loops and visual reward indicators might genuinely be the only thing holding my mental health together right now.

Gardening is a forcing function to be reflective, improve my understanding of the world around me, breathe unfiltered air, untether from my devices, get a little dirty, experiment with physical space, and take in some sun all at the same time.

I now viscerally understand why the Call to Agriculture is such a trope.

Not only do I really appreciate the tactile aspect of it (which the military man in me misses now that I’m a full time computer man), but it also highlights personal patterns of behavior that I (with the benefit of hindsight) clearly understood intellectually, but not practically.

I’m trying to accept that it’s really tough to process the narrative beats of your life while actively living them.

Life seems to move too quickly, but also somehow too slowly for us to notice when it’s going wrong.

Gardening lets me direct and watch my soap opera at the same time.

And in the garden, my weaknesses show up with embarrassing clarity.

1. Pruning is Care

I don’t like to hurt things.

As a former barrel-chested freedom fighter, I have a weird relationship with violence.

I am fundamentally very comfortable with it and yet very uncomfortable with my body’s somatic indifference to a thing from which most people recoil.

As a result, I have a tendency to intentionally, preemptively (dare I say pathologically) avoid doing actions that may hurt or inconvenience anyone.

When I started gardening, I started to squint at this behavior and how it might not be serving me.

Plants need pruning.

Without pruning, plants often grow paradoxically worse.

They waste energy sending nutrients to diseased, dead, or damaged portions of themselves. They grow into “natural”, but perhaps more brittle or crowded shapes which weaken the plant. They usually yield less fruit or flowers. Their leaves compete with different parts of themselves for sun and other resources.

Over-pruning weakens the plant, of course, but under-pruning can set the plant up for failure.

In a way, every cut is a choice that tells the plant “put your limited resources here, not there”.

It’s hard not to find the metaphor in that.

When I look at all the little things I let myself do and accumulate and hold as I spread every bit of myself across the infinite and myriad internet and beyond, I see the plant with fading blooms that I didn’t snip off today because they were pretty yesterday and it makes me sad that they’re not what I remember them to be anymore.

Cutting off the dead or old or no-longer-serving-you stuff is the best way to focus your finite energy on the stuff you truly want and need.

It’s not violence to remove those unhelpful pieces of yourself that you carry.

Pruning is care.

2. Even the Same Things Grow at Different Rates

I’m impatient.

I want my successes to happen now and I want them to happen without any work.

Fortunately, I already know this about myself and I still exert effort despite the tragedy of returns requiring cost.

Unfortunately, the inconsistent reality of outputs given consistent inputs still grinds my gears to no end.

It’s annoying as hell that the same seeds from the same seed packet in the same soil won’t grow at the same rate.

No matter how diligent you are about cross-checking water levels and sunlight exposure and fertilizer nutrients and everything else, the same plants right next to each other will behave slightly differently as they germinate and grow and bloom.

It was rigged from before you were even born.

The seeds came from different parents and have different genetic potentials. Or maybe they were the similar but something crunched one in the packet at the store. Or maybe all was well, but a squirrel stepped on its little stalk overnight and you never noticed.

Or maybe a thousand something else’s.

The why only matters as much as you need it to. Sometimes you need it to matter because there’s a pattern that can help you in the long run. Sometimes you don’t need it to matter because it’s just a manifestation of the minutiae of the randomness of life’s process.

That’s how your days work too if you’re paying attention.

The same breakfast hits different from morning to morning. Sometimes your dependable sleep routine will fail you. Every 60 minute focus block includes a roll of the cosmic dice of productivity, peace, and progress.

Stochasticity always gets a vote.

This means that the all-important inputs you painstakingly (or not so painstakingly) try to control aren’t all-powerful.

Even under perfect conditions, everything grows at different rates. Even if it’s the same thing done over and over and over again.

3. Water Daily, Dummy

This might be the most annoyingly overpublished idea on the internet, but there’s a reason everybody keeps writing about it.

Habitual progress dominates bursty effort 69 times out of 100. Perhaps even 420 times.

That’s not novel or interesting, but it is important.

The interesting thing is what happens when you do manage to water your plants daily.

You start to notice better. You pause and reflect and hold the garden in your thoughts more easily. You create space to see and turn the images in your mind’s eye and you eventually recognize the microcosms within the macrocosms.

You elevate the act of watering into something much closer to the act of contemplation.

Eventually, a routine becomes the meditative transition into focused reverence of the Thing.

And this reverence helps you realize that some critter dug up a corner of your flowerbed when you weren’t looking. Or that some of your plants don’t actually need water every day. Or that you should’ve removed the bit of thatch completely instead of just breaking it up before you planted some seed.

Watering daily isn’t about the watering.

It’s about all of the stuff around the watering that your brain picks up by the quiet parsing of repeated patterns.

You know this. I know this. Yet here we are conveniently forgetting to water the things we care about.

No matter what your Thing is, watering it daily will uncover a facet of it that no other action except repetition can reveal.

So remember to water daily, dummy.

Thanks for hanging out for a little while.

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Check out my poetry project Little Feelings

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Sometimes I like to think about how I managed to do these cool things and how I might get to do more cools things in the future.

This practice keeps me grounded in the nuts and bolts of execution and reminds me how my “successes” always seem to stem from the same simple recipes, repeated.

If you’re new here, it’s important to realize I am ambitious, egotistical, and have an extremely high internal locus of control.

Accordingly, I tend to repeat the same hat trick of mistakes:

1. I overestimate how quickly I’ll get good at Things

2. I get impatient when success is slow

3. I treat failures of 1 and 2 as personal character flaws

So what’s a prideful polymath to do?

The answer is almost always the same:

Ask myself a question.

Have you put in your hours?

When I’m frustrated with any pre-successful-result, I try to ask myself if I’ve really put in enough hours to expect anything better than a middling outcome.

I don’t mean the pop-sci, arbitrary 10,000 hours.

I mean the

“Cameron, you’re competent and eventually solve most of your problems and sure AI now let’s you be insta mid, but did you really put in enough deliberate time to honestly look in the mirror and say ‘Yea, I have a pretty good handle on this space?’”

type hours.

If I haven’t, then I have two choices:

A. Put in more hours

B. Accept I won’t be good at the Thing

Either way, I need to stop complaining and keep moving.

The exact number of hours varies, but any master of anything understands that the gap between a pedestrian and professional is good repetitions.

And good repetitions come from logging a big ol’ chunk of hours.

How many hours is enough tho?

Sometimes it really does take 10,000 hours to git gud.

Sometimes it takes a lot less than that.

But odds are, it’ll probably take more than the leisurely 3 hours you put in last Sunday morning.

You’ll never truly feel done with a domain, especially if you’re climbing the slope of enlightenment, but I use two Proficiency Checkpoints to help my easily trickable brain gauge if I can trust my own judgment about a new Thing I am exploring.

Checkpoint Alpha: Thoughtfully Dangerous

Whenever I start something new, I’m I race toward Checkpoint Alpha. This is where you start to see the edges of the map. You can go to an event about the Thing and have a pretty good time. You recognize most of the words and can follow a few interesting discussions and maybe you even understand some of the inside jokes.

You’re definitely still learning and fumbling around, but you’re a clumsy explorer with context.

This makes you thoughtfully dangerous.

You can cross off Checkpoint Alpha if:

• You’ve encountered most of the core concepts in a space (even if you can't always explain them cleanly)

• You know enough to ask relevant questions and avoid the more obvious pitfalls beginners struggle with

• You’ve gone down a few rabbit holes far enough to figure out where experts disagree

• You’ve created at least one small, working thing/experiment/project in the space

• You’ve started forming your own mental models instead of just borrowing others'

• You can usually sniff out bad advice or shallow thinking about the Thing, although your batting average here may not be that great yet

You don’t have to cross all of these off your list to become thoughtfully dangerous, but if you’re unsure, look at the bullets and gauge yourself honestly. 4 out of 6 is a pretty consistent benchmark.

Most people can pass Checkpoint Alpha with about 30 days of exploration (assuming ~1–2 hour sessions). Alternatively, a focused week deep diving on the Thing can get you there too.

If you’re well practiced at picking up new things, you’ll definitely hit Checkpoint Alpha faster than this.

Now an important property of Checkpoint Alpha-ness is that when you pass it, you’re usually now aware enough of a domain to pick useful projects to work on.

You’re certainly not an authority and you don’t really understand the nuances of the space yet (every new Thing has nuances you’re missing I promise you), but by this point you should be able to identify the big buckets of

“oh this is an underexplored area that might have interesting or challenging or lucrative problems to solve”.

That being said…

it’s still overwhelmingly unlikely you’ll be able to identify solutions that are effective, practical, and durable to the major problems you can now identify surrounding the new Thing.

Eager beavers and 22-year-olds will be tempted, but

Please don’t raise VC money at Checkpoint Alpha.

Checkpoint Bravo: Dangerously Thoughtful

The next stop is Checkpoint Bravo.

When you get there, you’re no longer playing defense, Big Dog.

You know what the n00b questions are. You can answer most of them. If you’re internet inclined, you might’ve spent a few too many 2am’s arguing about the Thing in some niche Discord. If you’re not internet inclined, you have definitely developed a set of monk mode isolationist, strong opinions about the Thing.

The Thing is now a full blown special interest of yours and if somebody let’s you there’s a good chance you’ll wax poetic about it at a party until they politely start inching (side note: what idiom do europeans use instead of inching? centimetering?) further and further away while smiling and mumbling quietly about finding the restroom only to vanish into the crowd.

You’ve hit Checkpoint Bravo if:

• You can hold a 60+ minute nuanced conversation with someone else fluent in the Thing

• You’ve made at least one non-obvious connection or insight in your mind that you’re pretty sure nobody else has written about before

• You’ve internalized the “rules” of a space, but have also started to break or bend them intentionally

• You’ve shipped multiple, non-toy projects in the space

• Your instincts can feel when something’s off about the Thing, even if you can’t say why

• You’re contributing in a way that others in the space respect or take seriously

• You can explain complex ideas to a newcomer without overcomplicating or oversimplifying it too badly

Passing Checkpoint Bravo takes about a year or so of consistent, deep tinkering (think “binge working on the Thing every other weekend”) or 3-6 months of full immersion with consistent feedback loops.

Checkpoint Bravo is not for the faint of heart or frail of spirit.

Most people will never pass your Thing’s Checkpoint Bravo because it’s quite honestly a pain to do so. You have to sacrifice time, energy, and not get brain-hijacked by the infinite internet candy store to get there. Plus you’ve got to stay focused long enough to learn all the Thing’s things the hard way.

I’d even go as far to say that people literally working a day job in the Thing may not pass Checkpoint Bravo for years because it takes a lot more effort than just clocking in to get a check.

To be honest, Checkpoint Bravo can be a lonely place.

There’s only a small pool of other folks that will relate to your Thing the way that you do (and many of them have other Things to juggle too besides your Thing!).

But Checkpoint Bravo’s reward is that you’re now Dangerously Thoughtful.

This means you can now reliably trust your judgment on the Thing.

You’ll still get stuff wrong, but at a rate much lower than most.

If you’re also clever and right alot in general, then I’d wager your judgment will be on par with the average lifer or “expert” with most scenarios related to the Thing.

That’s really powerful.

Hitting Checkpoint Bravo means you should now feel fully empowered to follow the rabbit holes to which your intuition guides.

There are far fewer clever and driven and effective people working on any given important problem than you’d expect.

But.

This is not an exact science.

For the sake of completionism here’s a diagram of my Thoughtfulness Continuum

Any further expertise beyond Checkpoint Bravo’s “Dangerously Thoughtful” probably puts you squarely in the top 20% of your field. That sounds insane, but I’ve found the upper crust to consistently be waaaaaaaay less competent than you want them to be (outside of a few outlier spaces).

Any progress between “Thoughtfully Dangerous” and “Dangerously Thoughtful” is what I call “Thoughtfully Thoughtful”.

“Thoughtfully Thoughtful” means you now know enough to know how much you don’t know, but you might know something now that nobody knows because you also know Things other than just the new Thing you now know. No way to know really.

(ayyy lmao)

And anything short of Checkpoint Alpha’s “Thoughtfully Dangerous” means you’re unqualified to judge your own Thing-related abilities. If you disagree with this rude characterization from an internet stranger, you’re probably deluding yourself about the depth of your understanding on your Thing, but feel free to ignore me.

Being unqualified doesn’t mean you can’t do really good work on the Thing!

Beginners can absolutely stumble across important insights, but being pre-Thoughtfully-Dangerous means you’ll do all your work without grasping the bigger context.

That simply means more simple mistakes, more frustration, and slower going until you get a few (or many) more reps in.

Anyway,

All of the cool things I’ve done are downstream of being “Thoughtfully Dangerous” and “Dangerously Thoughtful” in my Thing.

And both of those are downstream of a lot of deliberate time and practice.

So next time you’re frustrated with your progress on your Thing, just ask yourself…

Have you put in your hours?

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We generally think of “mid things” as being “bad”.

But more often than not, the mid solution still solves your problems.

Mid lawnmowers still cut grass.

Mid advice from your buddy still helps you introspect.

Mid whiskey still gets you drunk.

Mid isn’t bad.

It’s just mid.

AI tools let you be mid today

Have you always wanted to study Physics but Wikipedia is too dry?

Ask AI about it.

Want to write more, but stuck on the blank page?

Ask AI about it.

Not sure how to take care of your lawn?

Ask AI about it.

Do you have no idea what you should learn??

Just ask the freaking robot.

It’s not magic and it shouldn’t replace your own thought

(AI tools are mindless token predictors after all)

but seriously this is the fastest way to get the consensus opinion in pretty much any industry and nothing else even comes close.

It’s an infovore’s dream!

Are you actually going to be good at that thing after chatting with the robot for 30 minutes?

hell no.

But are you hours, days, maybe even weeks ahead of where you would’ve been if you tried to figure it out by yourself even just a few years ago?

Probably.

Of course, if you’re an idiot without AI then you’re still probably an idiot with AI

But!

You’re an idiot with (maybe a lot) more specific, applicable knowledge than you had before you talked to the robot.

This at scale means that AI raises the floor for most industries much more than it explodes the ceiling for experts.

That’s genuinely incredible and I think many smart people are missing or ignoring this point.

Now…

The legal, ethical, and moral question of how AI models are trained are real and unanswered problems, but they’re literally only problems because the output of these models is so useful.

I believe the originators of said usefulness should get paid for providing it to the internet for the model companies to scrape and ingest, but also I think whatever happens here legally should not stop you from using and understanding these tools.

It is unfortunately incredibly unlikely that regulation will stop the ChatGPTs of the world from proliferating.

Just like cryptography in the 90’s, AI is too universally useful to remain suppressed for long (even if the Feds decide to do so).

Refusing to use AI tools out of principle means you’re ceding yet another digital nuke to the soulless assholes who want to algorithmically colonize your last remaining iota of attention.

Talk to the robots so you learn how to fix and fight them.

Test the power of Insta Mid yourself

Still unconvinced?

Try this tiny experiment to see how much real joy a teeny taste of AI can bring to your life.

1. Find a geek in your life

2. Spend 10 minutes asking ChatGPT to explain the most important and useful ideas related to their Thing (maybe ask for a few discussion questions too)

3. Strike up a conversation and say “Hey! I was looking at Thing and had a few questions about…”

As long as you have a basic grasp of human social interactions, you’ll be able to hold a good conversation for at least 10 minutes (or maybe two hours if your friend is a true blue geek)

And odds are you’ll literally make their day because, even if it feels like cheating, you literally did the prep work to express a genuine curiosity in their interests.

That’s a categorically good thing.

We’re dawning a weird new world right now and AI let’s you be insta mid at it.

I think that’s neat.

Plus, today is the worst these AI models are ever going to be… which is pretty wild to think about.

If you enjoyed this…

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ghost blood oils the gears of history;
                      along with everything else— 
                                  we do and say and cannot 
                                        do and say and will not do 
                                              and say.       

About 1 billion people have died in “important” wars since 1000 BCE.

(probably)

This number doesn’t include “not officially war” conflict deaths.

This number doesn’t include “state terrorism” or “mass killings” or “political repression” during “peacetime”.

This number also doesn’t include any attempt to quantify the lowered quality of life, lost years, or post-war effects like PTSD that clearly kill people in the thousand little ways that Tragedy always has.

During the same time period, about 80 billion people were born.

That means about 1.2% of all modern people have died in War.

And I’m almost certainly undercounting.

How many do you know?

Veteran’s Day makes me think about stuff this.

So do crowded spaces.

So does the autumn breeze as it wisps and flickers through the last few leaves left in the canopy.

i think about the unknown soldier a lot.

the forever lost GI.
a voice adrift in time
the quiet yawp of effort
who wholly hoped it rhymes;

the centurion, the partisan,
the grenadier, the grunt,
the scout, the cook, the nurse, the gun
the handler on the hunt

the ace when his feet touch the dirt
the foxhole with the sump

the shieldmaiden who fell alone
the sailor with the pump

the hoplite in his field of wheat
the sniper on her stump

a prophet's martyr's smiling face 
the ambush and the jump

the mamluk, the toa, 
the bushido way
the hwarang, the holy,
the hessian pay

the yurt war council,
the "don't give an ounce" or
the nightmare human wave

the tartan, the spartan,
the divot in the dirt 
from the aching, breaking, bended knee
aim true and still alert

the apsáalooke counting coup, 
the armored, mobile tanker crew
the pocket note from her to you
the joke of hope to lift the mood

the canteen cup, 
filled up with muck, 
the rations yet to come

the joyproud smirk of "finally here"
the craters of verdun

the lotus-eater; 
fresh faced i fear

some poor, forgotten cunt

every time i walk the path along a battlefield

or just a field where i

know something happened.

i’m forced to remember that

humanity abhors the violent act, but glorifies the violent context.
we love our hero, but paint our stories by delicate number— 
lines set by ‘decent’ folk who don’t want a fuss or now, i guess, algorithm.
and the punch is always just
thrown by him, except it’s really Him; 
isn’t it?
big Mostly Man punching and stabbing and shooting
through him and her and him again,
the long arm of legitimate violence is cloaked in the innocence of the spear. 

the “real” and “not real” are too close now,

yet somehow have never been further apart

i think we have some curious problems to solve this century.

You have an incredible herculean reserve of spirit within you.

But it has variable strength… and motivation.

When the chips are down - most of us can flip a switch and do more than we normally can do.

That’s important.

And useful.

And emphatically not the way to win a daily knife fight with the firmament of progress.

At least, not sustainably

(for me)

Lines of Drift

Natural lines of drift are an orienteering concept.

They are the routes, places, and pockets of physical space that people (and other animals) tend to take when traversing a piece of terrain.

If you’re on foot and crossing a mountainous valley, trails often form on the ridgelines and the valley floor, but not as often on the sides of the mountains.

Why?

It’s usually just a lot easier to walk along a ridgeline or flat valley floor vs the side of a mountain!

In our daily machinations, a natural line of drift might be so obviously the path of least resistance that it turns into a desire path

(you’ve seen these before)

In the military, understanding an area’s natural lines of drift is crucial.

If you have to make camp overnight, the last place you want to fall asleep is right next to the only water source in the area.

But if you are setting an ambush…

That’s the perfect spot!

Ergo we study the inputs to natural lines of drift.

Areas with consistent water or food.

Canalizing brush (like extra dense or prickly af shrubs).

Significant obstacles like bridges and cliffs.

And we use that knowledge to make informed judgements about where to travel and rest and ambush.

Natural Lines of Focus Drift

I get pissed at myself for getting distracted during my workday.

Sometimes it helps me get on track, but mostly it just makes me distract and annoyed instead of resolving either emotional state.

So I spent some time studying my natural lines of (focus) drift.

Every time I caught myself on an “off track” activity, I catalogued it in a physical notebook - primarily to stave off further distraction.

As of this writing, there are 3 mega-trends across my distractive impulses.

1. The distraction usually starts in-the-middle-of-focused-activity when a notification, page, email, or something else designed by a team tries to derail my deliberate actions.

2. The most distracting things tend to lock me into some sort of subsequent content stream.

3. I’m most likely to get distracted when I have an unstructured block of time, are working towards an abstract goal, or am feeling some sort of active discomfort (hunger, tired, cranky, sad, etc).

Miserere Nobis

None of those trends are particularly surprising, but that’s probably why this whole thing is insidious.

In a very real way, we’re fighting for control over our lives literally every single day.

And while “control” is a word absolutely fraught with nuance; the intentionality of how we spend our time matters a lot to me.

If I’m gonna watch a 42 minute long video about the origins and evolution of City Pop, it’s gonna be because I chose to watch it god damn it

Not just because some bored staff engineer is hacking my dopamine loops.

So I’m adjusting some things.

• I have categorized some activities as “high risk” during my workday - things like picking up my phone, opening my Farcaster feed, changing my YouTube soundtrack, checking my tabs, and touching anything that creates a new attack surface for my attention

• I’ve reset my morning routine to be completely predefined a la habit stacking

• I’m using a physical notebook for my workouts and moving my phone out of reach while waiting between sets

• I am attempting to start every work block with a concrete task tied to a metric (ie. post this single essay) - organized by 2 hour chunks

• I am continuing to record the distractive moments + my emotional state at the time of distraction

Parts will fail. Parts will work.

Persistence is part and parcel of progress.

Stay tuned for proof 🫡

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This post is adapted from a screenshot essay I wrote this past weekend and posted on Farcaster

Farcaster just launched (permissionless) Channels - which you can think of as a public, collaborative, Twitter-like feed (typically organized around a topic) that anybody can create and people can follow, engage, and post in.

It’s obviously not a fully new concept, but I think Farcaster’s design has some extremely compelling pieces that appeal especially to the Creator in me.

The energy in the community is palpable right now -

Granted - this probably isn’t a watershed moment for the internet…

But seriously I think it has the potential to be if a few things go right.

Before we dive in:

Dan (Founder of Farcaster and John Krasinksi stunt double) is pretty clear that they’re still experimenting with how Channels should work right now.

Everything is in the client not the protocol right now - so channels work more or less the same as a subreddits on Reddit.

If the previous sentence means nothing to you, just ignore it. It’s not critical to what I’m about to say 🫡

Channels Channels Channels

I think permissionless Channels are an incredible content experiment.

To be completely honest, I wasn't sold at first.

I was frustrated (as an early Farcaster user) that it felt like a departure from the "Twitter, but decentralized" vision I joined for, I was bummed that Merkle didn't want to enshrine Followers in the protocol (amps anyone?), and I thought they didn't pay enough attention to the Creators that make the excellent content that all the Lurkers want.

But it hit me like a sack of bricks last night that Channels offer Creators a brand new content MEDIUM that doesn't really exist elsewhere.

A Twitter account follow CAN'T compete with a co-created feed of culture/jokes/memes between a personality and their community because Twitter's algo isn't concentrated enough to keep people clustered together for sustained community, a Telegram channel has zero distribution, but a subreddit requires waaaaay too much work and effort to keep fresh.

Channels neatly sidestep the concentration, distribution, AND upkeep problem.

I’ll take it even further...

The inherent flexibility of channels ALSO means that orgs like Seemore (my startup) can create channels as a service for Creators so there's a quasi-permanent stream of their content always flowing directly to their fans too.

Plus the content doesn't need to be stored on the blockchain (although that's nice to have as “cancel insurance” later).

The pointer to the content is enough to be genuinely valuable today.

I'm a channel Maxi now so keep an eye out for experiments from me + Seemore.

And y’all know that I like to call my shots as I’m swinging - so you can follow my own channel experiment right here 🫡

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ethereal, fleeting.

a whim on the wind.

Sometimes one bubble combines with another

and another

and another

and the bubble grows

until one day it cannot because there’s no more bubbles to join

and sometimes one brief, bubblemoment is all we get before

it pops.

Happiness and meaning are intertwined.

The glimmer of one teases the halo of the other.

Yet our glorious fixation is a temporary respite (and perhaps forever shall be - world without end) even as we refuse to see beyond the soft, translucent walls of our cocoons.

I used to think about war a lot.

I don’t really think about war now except in bursts.

But things have been burst-y lately.

And when I do think about war the adrenaline surges back.

The visceral, full-body memory of stakes that are real.

Decisions that change lives.

Things that unequivocally matter (at least to the people crying).

And as I think about the businesses I’ve built and tried to build and am trying to build - all I can feel right now is the heaviest of sighs.

All the imaginary numbers tabulated by the digital beeps and boops representing this metric or that behavior or any other flavorslice of attention pale witheringly in comparison to a few ascendant moments of danger where my life’s lens shifted focus to the question of safety - in the rawest sense - underpinning someone’s life.

And even now it feels indulgent, a survivor’s privilege, to write about, but I’ve got the rest of my life to live and process and thrive and help and work and wonder.

So I sigh.

Life lived, in sharp relief, from then doesn’t mean my life now doesn’t matter, but the calculation of meaning is different.

More nuanced.

I have to tease it out.

Build the case for it.

Negotiate with the blunt and finer points.

Explain to myself why I care about the things I care about.

Search for it on the days when it’s not there on the shelf next to my keys.

I have to look around at the mostly nice things and mostly nice people and mostly nice moments juxtaposed jaggedly with all of the not so nice and remind the mirror of something resembling a why.

And the truth I’m confronting with my trudging search is a terrible one.

Observed with banality. Reported plainly. Mostly a dull reminder to my own civility.

I no longer have the twisted luxury of the primal arithmetic of the dead and dying.

Where good and bad is as clear as life or not life.

And my life is better for it.

Yet my life is harder too, as shameful as it sounds, because it comes with the responsibility of confronting the same dawn eternal without the comforting primordial assurance of instinct.

We stare at the sun with only our opinions.

Nothing sacrificed, save for emotional skin in the game.

With empathy surely and perhaps, but only insofar as our loci of control allow.

The limits of our minds and hearts are as staggering to behold as the better angels of our nature.

This essay is spurred by recent events, but the feelings they describe are spurred and re-spurred whenever some sharp reality scrapes against the fragile bubble of my happiness.

For those who don’t know, I served as an Infantry Officer in the U.S. Army and deployed to Afghanistan and Kuwait in 2016-2017.

That chapter came with the weight of responsibility.

It also came with a compass and a scale with which to weigh things.

But as is the fate of all scales, its precision only measures up to a point.

Most who read this will, inshallah, never truly know the awful luxury of certainty.

Still - reflecting on all of this violence, I honestly can’t remember if I’ve ever truly believed that I had no place else to go

and that gives me pause.

The special joy of bubbles is how they form.

Quickly. Unexpected.

Exuberant seafoam bursts forth from the slightest wave tossed upon the shore.

All that’s really needed is some stillness, a substance, and a wisp of breath

a dance of whimsy that something nice might birth once more.

Yes, THAT one.

Tar Tasks are killing me.

They’re killing you too.

We’re both desperately avoiding the goopy, stifling sense of existential dread that ambulates into our mind palace whenever we’re forced to remember they’re yet to be completed.

Sometimes we’re aggressively productive about other things as a way to dodge our Tar Task To Do List.

Sometimes we’re full on, late stage, therapeutically avoidant, millennial depression-pilled by said Tar Tasks.

Either way, those damn dirty Tar Tasks still don’t get doggone done.

What are Tar Tasks

They’re the infinite inertia boulder on your chest Task on your To Do List that you should’ve checked off days (weeks, maybe months??) ago.

But you didn’t.

You couldn’t!

So we’re here now.

Together.

In this stupid, self-imposed misery right alongside those goofy ass wooly mammoths.

Tar Tasks can be anything, but they’re often perniciously simple.

“Create the roadmap”

“Review the data”

“Ship the product”

And that simplicity is basically the root of their viscoid toxicity.

Why are Tar Tasks?

Fear mostly.

Specifically, fear of failure.

You’ve accidentally on-purpose given yourself a simple task that’s actually not simple.

You know it’s not simple, but you wrote it down in a way that’s so straightforward an idiot should be able to do it.

Yet we (the idiot) cannot do it.

Because the task pointer is a liar.

And this lie haunts your To Do List.

Forever.

But!

If you never start it, ipso facto you’ll never have to prove to yourself you’re an idiot.

Thus you delay your ego death for yet another day.

So the Tar Task lives on…

Note: Some things that seem like Tar Tasks are actually just stuff you really hate doing. I call these Hassle Hurdles.

These are different because they’re usually avoided because you actively dislike the activity rather than feel an amorphous helplessness. Fortunately, these are easier to identify.

A good rule of thumb is if you roll your eyes or groan when someone asks you about it, it’s probably a Hassle Hurdle.

How do I rid myself of the yoke of my own oppression?

🤷‍♂️

lol jk bestie

There are a couple ways to consistently clean up seemingly unclearable Tar Tasks.

From easiest to hardest:

1. Give up! (Not a joke)
   
   

   If you’ve avoided doing something for days, weeks, or months and nothing has exploded… is it really that important to do?
   
   I don’t know your life, friendo, but sometimes you realize you’re carrying around a gilded sack of guilt shit for absolutely no reason and the best thing you can do for yourself is to just… drop it.
   
   But if you can’t do that (dave)

   
   

2. Get somebody else to do it (Also not a joke)

   
   Sometimes you gotta accept that you’ve got some kryptonite.
   
   If you always never type up your customer interview analyses and the notes just keep stacking, it’s more efficient to negotiate with your partner to take it over.
   
   (This is also the best way to handle Hassle Hurdles)
   
   Generally, it’s waaaaay easier to adapt to your body than it is to adapt your body to you.
   
   

3. Break it the fuck down, you psycho
   
   You’re killing us, smalls.
   
   That Tar Task just ain’t gonna hunt.
   
   Something’s gotta give. (etc etc)
   
   Take your one, straight-forward, completely bullshit Tar Task and make it human executable by prepending a simple phrase:
   
   “Write out the 10 steps required to [TAR TASK GOES HERE]”
   
   This turns the 1 task you can’t possibly do into 10 sub-tasks that now might actually get done.
   
   Simple as.
   

Godspeed, traveler.

(And yes, of course, for sure, obviously, I fully wrote this to avoid my own set of Tar Tasks 🫡)

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Book 1 - “Hard Times”

Our plucky founder finally has an earned secret!

She's convinced this idea will change the world and is full of fire to prove it.

So she sets off into the wilderness and soon faces her first obstacle.

She hits a wall immediately as she struggles to raise her first round of funding to make her dream a reality.

Book 2 - "Rose-Colored Boy"

She finally finds an investor! There's just... a few strings attached.

The only investor interested is happy to lead her initial funding round, but the fuding is conditional on getting her to focus on a B2B implementation first.

That’s not and never was her product vision.

Honestly, she doesn't feel great about it, but just wants a chance to prove herself (and really doesn't have any other option).

Book 3 - "Told You So"

She just launched the B2B MVP.

Initial traction seems good!

Yet our hero still feels something isn't... quite... right.

She’s convinced it's not product-market fit, but she doesn't really have the data to sway anyone either way yet. She’s a professional though, so she swallows her pride and leans in to start doubling down on her investor's advice.

Book 4 - "Forgiveness"

User growth stalled shortly after that MVP launch.

The big splash they made was probably just a function of their great marketing campaign instead of really solving a painful problem for their target users.

The immediate drop in usage is dramatic and embarrassing.

Amidst the uncertainty, our hero hears some rumblings from an angel investor friend that her lead investor has been softly shopping around the idea of a takeover of her startup. When she confronts him about it he immediately apologizes and tries to repair the relationship, but the trust has been lost.

Book 5 - "Fake Happy"

Our Hero takes a break from the startup grind to visit her friends and family back home over the holidays.

She used to love seeing everyone, but after one “accidentally too honest” interaction with her childhood best friend she becomes hyperaware of how little her support network understands her life now. Nobody can relate and they can’t really gauge what’s a true crisis vs just a frustration so they immediately adopt a vague, anxious, and unhelpful aura of worry.

So she spends the rest of the holiday spreading positivity about how things are “a grind, but good” and “ups and downs, but still fun” and “she’s glad she’s doing this adventure while she’s young”.

By the end of her trip, she’s pretty tired of bearing the weight of a brave face to spare the ones she loves.

Book 6 - "26"

She's back at her desk after the unrestful holiday and knows she needs to pivot hard.

Conversations with her lead investor are strained.

She's not sure what to do next, but knows she still has that earned secret in her pocket that she really believes will unlock something special.

Book 7 - "Pool"

6 weeks later, she's got it.

It's her original insight, but with a twist.

Not a bullshit twist, an honest-to-god differentiated offering.

Plus a new, compelling go to market pretty close to her original pitch to investors, but with sustainable unit economics and a clear sequence of customers to target one after another.

Her lead investor has already written off the company so he doesn't really push back when she informs him of the pivot.

There's no real proof yet it's the right idea, but it's the best chance she's had in months.

Book 8 - "Grudges"

It's not product market fit, but there's definitely something there.

It's the earliest vibrations of momentum.

She can feel it, even if her team can't. She's trying to manage morale as she pushes the pace to increase the speed of shipping. It’s getting tough to keep everyone excited.

Her only source of energy is that the winding paths through the Idea Maze are starting to reveal themselves to her in a way she’s confident hasn't felt before and she's got her bottle ready to capture that lightning.

Book 9 - "Caught in the Middle"

She can feel it.

It's so painfully close.

PMF is still not there yet though.

Funds are getting low. Her team is in pivot hell, but with each pivot she can feel them getting closer to the product that's going to pop. It's not obvious from the outside, but there is real, tangible, visceral progress being made with each release.

There are no shortcuts.

Book 10 - "Idle Worship"

She did it.

They did it.

At least for now.

They have thousands of app downloads per day and every engagement metric they're tracking is actually increasing the longer a user uses their product.

She has offers from every top VC firm in the world to lead her next round at ridiculously generous terms, but all she remembers is the past year and half of false starts, failed launches, and the compounding pits of despair and anxiety that was her entire universe until literally just a few weeks ago.

Book 11 - "No Friend"

Building the startup is still lonely, just in a different way now.

It’s been a year since they hit product-market fit and she's noticed that people always respond to her messages now.

This makes hitting their targets a lot easier, but she's also very aware of quickly things could revert back to what they were like last year.

When she looks around they've grown the team from 15 to 150 people and now she's not quite sure who's actually there to help build her vision of the future and who's just along for the ride.

Book 12 - "Tell Me How"

She doesn't really know anyone at her company anymore.

They've grown from 150 people to 1500 people in the past 18 months and they did it profitably.

She's got eye-popping acquisition offers on the table - she’s especially drawn to the ones without an earnout - and wonders if her company has outgrown her capabilities.

Maybe it's outgrown her vision too.

It's still fun most days, but the inexorable gravity of the corporate energy she's spent the last 48 months desperately running away from is undeniably starting to pull her in.

She’s never had this much control over her own life before and wonders if that’s actually a good thing.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Let me know if you enjoy this sort of content and I'll probably do more.

I hope this made you feel something 🫡

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Welcome to my First Principles series.

I think all models of the world are wrong, but some are useful.

This is one of the ideas I default to when I have to make a decision with imperfect information.

It’s All Worse Than You Think.

We project confidence.

It’s what we’re conditioned to do.

We have parents and proxies that confidently answer our questions.

We go to schools that confidently explain what happens now and what happened before us.

And eventually we do our jobs, we send our emails, and we continue to watch, talk to, and emulate other people… who are also projecting confidence.

It’s through this mutually reflexive assimilation that we build out our operating model of the universe.

Then we experience new things, attempt to parse the signal, and ultimately incorporate the useful bits into that operating model.

But over time, as we gain proficiency in our niche knowledge fractals of personal and professional choice, we continue to experience new things, but start to notice the glitches.

The discontinuities.

After reaching a certain level of domain competency, we start to notice the world as it really is - an emergently designed, duct tape tapestry of dissonance stemming from the collective I/O chaos cycles of all 120 billion people who have ever existed.

Notably these dissonances tend to exist not at the jagged edges of human knowledge, but in the haphazardly spackled cracks and interior holes well away from the experimental frontier.

The Principle

A sitting U.S. President wanted to inject light into your veins.

30% of all digital advertising is piped through a vertically integrated black box monopoly process that’s incentivized to increase participant lock-in over advertising “true price” discovery.

$5 Trillion dollars (or 4-ish Amazon.com’s) is transferred every single day via the sending of what is essentially 45 million structured text messages between banks.

Terrifying.

But also liberating.

Despite the insanities seemingly revealed by each statement above, these systems (initially constructed accidentally, but over time increasingly purposefully and iteratively) are still crucial to the function of modern society and stay crucial because they sorta kinda mostly do the thing they’re supposed to do.

Let me say that a different way.

Regardless of how arguably ridiculous parts of these monstrously impactful systems are, they are still very useful.

And they only became useful through lots of trials and experimentation and setbacks and rebuilding (and sometimes punching).

Okay maybe a third way.

Despite the waterfall of weirding moments that seem to suggest how inertially fucked all of this is, it’s not trivial to say we’re doing pretty okay through this entire bonkers process (all things considered).

And every meaningful construct in history was birthed, built, and bettered in this way.

Further, the compounding speed and volatility of the series of togethercolored current moments hasn’t really seemed to change the spirit of builder bricklaying all that much.

(although it has definitely changed the tools and trajectories)

Accordingly, no matter how much ambient stress you internalize, anything you’re working on will go through these growing pains, so maybe don’t hyper-fixate on the cracks so much.

Of course, fix ‘em if it’s the next right thing to do.

But don’t forget that they’re always gonna be there in some way, shape, or form 🫡

I hope this added value to your day.

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Subscribe now

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Welcome to my First Principles series.

I think all models of the world are wrong, but some are useful.

This is one of the ideas I default to when I have to make a decision with imperfect information.

We Like Free Stuff.

You’ll probably pick up $20 off the ground.

You might chase it a little if the $20 starts to blow away.

But if it blows into the sewer drain across the street, you’re probably not about to pry open the grate and spelunk to search for that “free” cash.

This is the continuum of “People want to do zero work and make more money”.

But it’s more than that.

The Principle

It’s why we suck at changing habits.

It’s why we mostly choose our credit cards on the perceived rewards we get.

And (paradoxically) it’s also why Finn’s will stand in line for hours for a free bucket.

If you do anything that involves persuading others to change their behavior in some way…

It’s important to take a beat to think about how much work you’re asking for and how much free money you’re giving.

Whether it’s designing an app, selling a product, or negotiating with your life partner, this principle isn’t about giving things away for free - although that might be the right answer for you - it’s about consciously accounting for the basket of costs vs the pile of benefits you’re handing to whoever you’re asking to do work.

Behavior change is work.

Dopamine releases, returned time, reduced effort, and actual honest-to-god dollar dollar bills are all “more money”.

Naturally, this tension lives in a landscape of competing choices, distribution advantages, opportunity costs, user contexts, switching friction, ecosystem expectations, and evolving user preferences - but it’s the fundamental question of every user decision.

The closer you are to asking nothing and giving something, the more likely it is that person is going to change their behavior.

And the more you give, the bigger the change a user is willing to make 🫡

I hope this added value to your day.

Please share this with someone who might find this interesting!

Explore my metaverse

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Subscribe now

Welcome to my First Principles series.

I think all models of the world are wrong, but some are useful.

This is one of the ideas I default to when I have to make a decision with imperfect information.

We do okay.

I’ve personally commanded Bradley’s, generated (the only) critical research informing some business decisions at Amazon, built a few startups, and - more importantly - I know and interact with people living and working across pretty much the entire breadth of our economic, political, and military apparatuses.

And as it turns out…

22-year-old’s command the 18-year-old’s that drive those Bradley’s, it’s pretty standard that nobody really bothers to look at any data, startups are basically crossing a river by touching the stones, and there are a perspective-shattering amount of “yea I guess they’re fine?” types of people with hyperlocal spans of control that would make a despot blush.

Yet most things still turn out okay.

The Principle

Most people are winging it.

This doesn’t mean that people suck, that they can’t get better at stuff, or that there aren’t good reasons to weigh some people’s ideas more than others.

It just means that a huge, sorta terrifying number of the people you meet are:

1. Doing that job or activity for the first time

2. Doing the job or activity they’ve done before, but in a completely new environment or context

3. Not necessarily being thoughtful about what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, or why they’re doing it

This is triply true as the world gets faster and more volatile.

In all likelihood, you’re reading this essay on device that didn’t even exist as a category of products when you were born.

How can you possibly expect someone to know how to do all this stuff that wasn’t practicable during the majority of their education and development?

Of course they’re just winging it!

Anyway, if they’re all winging it and doing okay, you’ll probably do fine at whatever bold thing you’re trying to do.

And if we stick with it for long enough, maybe we’ll eventually get good at our cosplays 🫡

I hope this added value to your day.

Please share this with someone who might find this interesting!

If you have any thoughts or questions about this essay - Let’s Chat

Come hang with me on Twitter or Farcaster

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Be Earnest.

I’ve spent over a year playing around on Farcaster.

I’ve casted at least 18,000 times.

(Honestly, I know I’ve casted more than that, but I accidentally deleted a tbd number of casts recently while playing around with my account + code - whoops 🫠)

I’ve built 7 apps in public while hanging out on Farcaster - with 4 of them directly integrated into the protocol or community (chronologically - Stochaster, SayMore, Moar, and the FarCatalogue)

I also organized (alongside Grin and with some incredible volunteers) the first Farcaster Conference - aka FarCon (The Beta) last month.

(If you want to know the non-Farcaster stuff about me - check this out)

Basically, I really like Farcaster and that’s (emphatically) my revealed preference.

So as much as anyone can have a good grasp of the eclectic culture of this vibrant group of internet quasi-strangers… I think I probably do (at least for now).

This past weekend, Farcaster’s founder, Dan Romero, sort of maybe kind of opened the invite floodgates a teensy bit to capitalize on the user frustration at good ol’ Elon rate limiting Twitter accounts.

So a lot of new people joined and much content was casted.

And after a few days of watching many earnest accounts (and some not so earnest ones) straight up whiff their first casts on entry - I decided to write this short guide to help new and lapsed-but-returning Casters enter this awesome community with a bit more aplomb.

The Absolute Basics

Farcaster = The Protocol

Warpcast = The Client

Think of Farcaster like Email and Warpcast as Gmail.

People use these terms sort of interchangeably.

Also, we like to joke about Kiwi’s (the fruit).

I’ll expand on this in a later essay.

What’s the Vibe?

First, there 100% is a vibe.

And it’s so nice 🤌😩

It’s hard to describe exactly how it feels, but here’s what attitudes people tend to embrace within the Farcaster Scenius.

1. Engage earnestly.

2. Give more than you take.

3. If you want something to exist, don’t complain - just build it.

4. If you disagree with or don’t understand something, ask the Caster why they think that way with the goal to learn, not to dunk on them.

5. Assume positive intent.

It’s honestly not much more complex than that, but it’s really crazy how these 5 attitudinal expressions combine to make the Farcaster feed feel as truly a singular place on the internet as I’ve ever found… and I’ve been terminally online for just about the past 20 years of my life.

Who knows whether this will still be the vibe in a few months, but for now these shared values are strong af.

So how do I Cast Gooder?

I’ve seen some clear commonalities across accounts that people enjoy following on Farcaster.

Some of these are checklist items and some are more general suggestions, but all are actions or behaviors I’ve seen help accounts integrate very quickly into the community.

Often, the accounts that nail these things start helping to shape the platform’s conversation almost immediately.

1. Fill out your profile page with meaningful information. Things like:

• Who are you?

• What are you building/creating?

• What things do you care about?

• What groups do you identify with (developers, artists, AI, etc)?

• What makes you immediately interesting to the web3 native, practical, techno-optimist that is passing through your page?

Unless you’re Vitalik and everybody already knows who you are your profile needs to rapidly make a case for why someone should spend their valuable time listening to what you have to say.

Calling yourself a “web3 explorer" or a “blockchain lover” or an “airdrop farmer” is the fastest way to reveal how little effort you’re going to put into your casting.

2. Have a profile pic (lol duh), preferably an NFT that you own.

Related - people can see your NFT’s on Farcaster, so if you don’t own that NFT and still have it as your pfp I’m personally just going to assume you’re scamming until you prove otherwise. I understand hot/cold wallets may make this annoying for you, but, as a user, Farcaster is safer for me with that assumption.

3. Don’t change your profile pic if you can help it.

I’ve consistently seen Casters remark about the relationship between pfp’s and account recognition. Think of your pfp as a pointer embedded in the reader’s brain that links to the entire contextual history of your content. Changing your pfp doesn’t necessarily reset your recognition to zero, but it adds a lot of synaptic friction (triply so if you’re a new account).

4. Cast Something.

When Casters see a new profile in their feed, they will generally tap into it to look at it. If all you’ve done is reply to casts without any top level casting, your profile will literally say “@cameron hasn’t casted yet” which for any reasonable viewer immediately translates to an auto-fail at earning their follow.

5. Don’t just Cast Anything.

I mean, cast whatever you want (I’m not your dad), but I recommend asking yourself

• Will a viewer who has no idea who I am have enough context to get value out of this cast?

• Does this cast contribute something to the conversations Farcasters think are important? (Memes btw contribute a LOT to a conversation if they don’t suck)

• Do I have a unique perspective I can bring to the feed? (You probably do and you should lean into that)

Not every cast has to be banger (and trust me, they’re not gonna be), but if you take a quick look around the protocol it’s mind boggling how many people cast “GM” 9 days in a row and nothing else, or say “Hummus” once without any context, or share a grainy pic of some normal trees, or post a link to an outdated news story about a shitcoin, and then publicly complain they’re not getting any engagement.

All of these are real casts btw.

There are many versions of this problem, but they all essentially reduce down to “your content isn’t bringing any value to any audience.”

When in doubt, cast the kind of content you would want to consume.

6. Reply Much More than you Cast

My ratio is roughly 5 replies : 1 Cast

There are two reasons why you should do this.

First, as a brand new account you have no distribution.

The Warpcast default feed is a “Following” feed and if you have zero followers, you will show up in zero default feeds. This may change, but Warpcast (reasonably imo) right now doesn’t push new user content in front of existing users without opt-in from that account via a follow. So without replies, absolutely no one will know you exist.

The second reason is that a good reply is a positive sum contribution to Farcaster.

It directly helps the OG Caster (by continuing & boosting their conversation), it helps Farcaster grow (by increasing the depth and breadth of existing content streams), and helps you demonstrate to other Casters that you are capable of contributing something valuable to the Farcaster community.

In a way, it’s much more useful to the existing community for there to be another reply than another top level cast (all other things being equal).

Fwiw, spamming “nice” on 16 different casts is not a good reply strategy - even if the first few times you do it you get some engagement (because Casters are assuming your positive intent). Casters will quickly see the pattern of low effort reply farming, they’ll mentally bucket your casts in the “broken trust” category, mute your account, and your engagement will soon die off.

I’ve seen it happen multiple times over the past year 🤷

7. Share Earned Secrets

One way to catch a Caster’s interest is by sharing something they can’t possibly know because they’re not you.

Did you spend 2 years in the paper manufacturing supply chain industry and now you understand the power dynamics of loggers vs paper pulp distributors?

That’s almost for sure a banger cast, thread, or essay on Farcaster.

Did you somehow find crypto after failing to break into Big Tech because you weren’t anointed by the Stanford-Harvard-Ivy-Industrial complex so instead of playing league in your Sequoia pitch you had to self fund your startup instead?

Hell yea. Another banger.

Often, the more niche the experience, the more interesting your perspective is going to be. Art, Sales, Guitar, Accounting, whatever. Casters will find all of it interesting, but only if you share something they can’t really get somewhere else.

But seriously, you don’t have to be a superhero!

Just ask yourself - what do I know that others may not (or may not have ever shared) by virtue of my life, background, country of origin, language, associations, life choices, career opportunities, and mistakes.

Cast that.

8. Share Tertiary Ideas (AKA Third Order Thinking)

Casters are smart.

They’re probably smarter than you in the realm of their interests.

They’re certainly smarter than me.

So to have any impact on a Caster’s mindshare, you have bring something that they’re not inclined to think about themselves.

Reporting simple facts or events is a commodity service and a larger account that has more distribution will cast the same thing and they’ll “win” the attention war with the exact same content.

Casting about a takeaway or second order conclusion from that fact or event is slightly more valuable, but Casters will usually have logick-ed through the

“Event A just happened so therefore Thought B must be true”

line of thinking about any particular thing by the time you cast it.

Remember, Casters are smart.

You make your money, fake internet points, fake credibly neutral social protocol points on Tertiary Thoughts.

“If Event A just happened, then therefore Thought B must be true, and accordingly Thought C must also be true (or false or no longer relevant etc etc etc)”

If you consistently bring a third order revelation to the conversation, you’ll be known as (and actually become lol) incredibly thoughtful in a very short amount of time.

9. Use Channels Appropriately.

Channels are like subreddits.

We just got them like a month ago and we’re still figuring out (with the Farcaster team) how they should work. There is not one for every topic (yet) and they only show up on mobile, but if it exists (ie. books, LA, PurpleDAO), I recommend casting related ideas there.

It’ll be a more focused conversation with users very interested in the topic.

Spamming channels with off-topic casts won’t work - I promise.

10. Engage Earnestly.

There’s a reason why I started and ended this essay with “Engage Earnestly”.

It’s literally the most important thing you can do to be a good Caster.

The Farcaster core is still literally all human people (plus a few fun bots).

Razor sharp, caring, and motivated human people.

They can smell when you’re faking it pretty quickly.

If you want to be here out of more than just a lizard-like self interest, you treat other people with respect and curiosity, and attempt to make genuine connections with the human beings (through conversation, memes, or thoughtful debate) behind the pfp’s you’ll very quickly find yourself with more new internet friends than you could ever need.

Okay I did all that - what now?

Keep showing up.

There have been a lot of people who participate for a week or two and then go right back to Twitter.

I empathize with them.

Starting over is hard.

Nobody likes the ego death when you lose a comma on your follower count.

Yet that heartache still doesn’t change the reality that getting people to recognize your tangible contributions (not just your reputation) as valuable takes time, effort, and, frankly, consistency.

There’s not a shortcut to building legitimacy.

But I will be publishing extensions of this essay real soon focused on Farcaster lore, the developer ecosystem, and the community in general that might help you speed that journey up a bit.

And I will also be releasing some features related to those challenges of importing legitimacy on Saymore.tv real soon 😈

If this piqued your interest in Farcaster and you want an invite - hit me up on your platform of choice.

If you feel like you can’t break through the noise - tag me in a cast (@cameron)

Everybody else - I’ll see you on the Far Side 🫡

I hope this added value to your day.

Please share this with someone who might find this interesting!

If you have any thoughts or questions about this essay - Let’s Chat

To hear more from me, add me on Twitter or Farcaster,

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