Starting in 2023, I shifted my consumption of information towards a deliberately sparse diet so I could focus my attention on cultivating the inner creative who had been underexpressed through my many years of academic achievement, career advancement and building startups.  I shut down all the newsletters, podcasts and scrolling that had previously generated a constant hum of mental background noise and I cloaked myself in the resulting silence with glee. 

It was a delicious window for self growth which brought me on a necessary journey of love, grief, connection and catharsis about which I’ll write more at some point. 

Last summer, though, I felt the readiness inside of me to reawaken the part of my spirit which had been napping.  

My inner problem-solver emerged from his hibernation *hungry* for a worthy challenge.

As a natural builder who read too many books as a kid, I can’t help but feel the deep need to contribute to the greater cause of humanity.  

So, like any well-meaning second-mountain capitalist with financial resources and some wins under his belt, I explored what it might mean to put together an impact fund to do some good in the world.

If you want to start a fund, the first thing you need is a thesis.  What area of the world are you expecting to touch, and what is your theory of change for doing so? How are your actions going to drive the desired results?

That’s where my clarity about the path ahead began to fray.

The Polycrisis

Unfortunately, every time I started to dig into potential issue areas, I found myself stymied by questions that inevitably popped me back up to a higher level.  

I would look at farming research and end up in planetary ecology.  I would look at renewable energy technologies and end up needing to understand global supply chains and geopolitics.  I would look at political reform and end up mired in underlying cultural forces.

It became pretty clear that the rats’ nest of issues affecting our world is a tangle where the second order effects of one area could easily wipe out all the desired direct impacts of another.

Moreover, there are clearly a LOT of simultaneous crises pushing us towards civilization-collapsing catastrophes at varying rates.

It turns out, they call this the “polycrisis” – the idea that humans and our planet are blithely skipping forward amidst an overlapping set of worsening crises which can only end in catastrophe.

Suddenly, deploying capital into the leverage points of specific industries or sectors seemed far too small.

But hey, I *like* this kind of challenge! I cut my teeth during my early career as an analyst of the natural gas and power commodities markets and used to spend hours poring over maps trying to make sense of the grids and their players. Complex systems are the best kind of games, especially when the prize is a better future for humanity.

The Metacrisis

In the beginning, things were rather depressing.

I went to a talk in November from Nate Hagens, an energy analyst and ecological economist who runs the Great Simplification podcast. Set within the idyllic skin market of Summit in Baja, Mexico, where people were generally more concerned about who they’d pass a room key to than the state of the world, his inclusion in the programming was fairly out of place.  

I remember walking towards the auditorium and stopping to chat with a group of friends who were moving the opposite direction, ready to hit the beach for the afternoon.  When I explained why I wanted to check out his presentation, amidst the skeptical looks, one of them peeled off to join me.

90 minutes later, in the sparsely populated presentation hall ringing with the last of Nate’s proclamations of doom, she had tears running down her face and darkening the bright colors of her bathing suit.

She wasn’t the only one, either.

It’s hard to take in the fact that we’re pretty my much *fucked* along a wide range of dimensions. You can cling to all the charts of human life expectancy rising over time that you want, but nothing can hide the fact that we have been applying our talent for exponential growth in ways that are systematically destroying our mental health, our physical health, our social cohesion and the very planet we live on.

Phew.

But, as Nate often says, there is a certain power to understanding the nature of the problem.

When you can’t hide behind the usual hedonistic or nihilistic impulses, or the hand-wavy “it’s someone else’s problem” mentality, or the sweet comfort of undefined optimism that things can’t really be that bad, then all you have left to do is roll up the sleeves and get to work.

The work starts with understanding the system.  

There is a lot going on, but it’s still all part of a symphony of human activity and human institutions operating with incentives and constraints. Hacker mentality says that when you understand the system, you can hack the system.

The core epiphany – which is both empowering and depressing at the same time – is that there is indeed a root cause to all of this.  There is a layer outside even the poly crisis, which acknowledges that it’s actually a “metacrisis” driving everything.

That crisis is essentially the expression of our biological impulses – that we’re monkeys with spaceships and exponential technologies, united by collective beliefs (see Harari’s Sapiens), and driven by deeply felt social and survival impulses. Our impulses, incentives and collective cultures drive all of the behaviors which have created the basket of interrelated problems making up the poly crisis.

On one hand, this is disheartening because it’s the result of our evolutionary hard-wiring, which isn’t going to change.

On the other, it’s empowering because culture is a malleable force that absolutely has leverage points.

The realization that there is a single gradient of incentives pushing us towards the cliff is the key that unlocks the cascade of downstream effects and makes everything feel approachable once again.

Buckle Up

My journey now is to dig deeper into this system and its possible solutions so I can find the leverage points and begin moving resources towards them.

Right now, the landscape looks like a handful of philosophers – people like Nate Hagens, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Tristan Harris, etc – yelling as loudly as they can to a world of deaf people that we are all running towards a cliff.  

It looks like an industry of technology utopians pushing more and more exponential tools into their hands. 

And it looks like well-meaning builders and do-ers putting band-aids on the scrapes from a patient terminally bleeding out while their comrades keep bludgeoning the patient.

Amidst this landscape, the path to progress starts with understanding the reality of our world and the systems that drive it. That means looking at everything from planetary ecology to geopolitical reality.  It means internalizing and distilling the message being delivered by the philosophers of doom into a series of easily digested models and ultimately creating an actionable menu of strategies for navigating the minefield ahead and fostering communities of others along the same path.

THEN I can get back to my original intention of deploying time, attention and capital towards the areas of highest leverage to start creating solutions.

This is especially meaningful to me in this life stage, where I’m confronting on many levels the concept of lineage and legacy.  After unplugging from the Matrix, I found my way back to all of the brightness that makes our time on earth so beautiful. The preciousness of life in all its forms and the joy that comes from living in alignment with the rhythms of our inner animals among the cradle of nature that we’ve done everything in our power to shut out.

I want to leave a better world for our children, and I want to do so in a way that never loses sight of the joy of living.

This journey lacks the frenetic, single-objective obsession of my other startups.  It comes from a deeper, more powerful sense of stewardship and contribution which expresses not in years but over decades.  There is great urgency but also a call for sustainability.

This is new, and this is right.

Let’s see where it leads.