Starting from the day my 4th grade class dove into the Hobbit, I voraciously read fantasy books. They were an escape into wondrous worlds where I could live a thousand lives. This not only fostered my love of independence, creativity and vision - it also left me with a deep sense that one should live by a code of higher ideals that guides right action in the face of challenge.

As I progressed from the naivete of youth through the complex nuances and conflicts of the real world, I found that having a consistent set of operating principles is more, not less, important. 

Life throws an endless stream of choices at us. Without grounded reasoning, it's easy to get swept into short term or localized decision-making at the cost of what more sober contemplation would reveal. A coherent set of principles grounds our choices and actions in our ideals and values.

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Many people seem to believe that decency is a luxury, like polite language - nice to have, but not relevant when it's time to fight for what we believe in.  I think that's backwards, and the distinction is a core reason why our politics and online debate are so often toxic and unproductive.

Decency is, in fact, a necessary protocol for a properly functioning system.

Fundamentally, decency encompasses a commitment to honesty, fairness, and consistency in how we treat people and how we handle truth—especially under dislike or disagreement.  It is about epistemic and moral integrity.

This is not the same as politeness or propriety, which are more oriented towards social norms and can be co-opted to shut down speech. It is also not the same as kindness, which can be weaponized to demand comfort at the expense of truth. 

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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.

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We're back, and you didn't even notice the difference.

The old site was built from scratch on Rails during my heyday as a web developer. Then life got *really* busy and I stopped having the time to maintain the site or my skills. So I recently had it ported over to Wordpress, which is a much more stable (and secure) platform for keeping things up to date.

I hope this will help unleash the flow of writing that I've felt coming for a long time.

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This is based on a tweetstorm

Recently, @thisissethsblog posted about #NFTs, saying they are a "Dangerous Trap" His 4 arguments are reasonable-sounding surface concerns but they're all off the mark.

A point-by-point look at why we have to think more carefully about NFTs 👇

Argument #1: Art is silly too but it's ok for Real Art because we've done it that way for a long time.

This just doesn't make sense and seems backwardly purist.

Status conveyed by owning original editions of physical art doesn't just come from showing 3 ppl a week your wall, it's from making sure people know you own an original edition (art as flex, art as humble brag).

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This post is based on a Tweetstorm

It's pretty clear that NFTs have broken into the mainstream and, predictably, are causing all sorts of consternation because they're still in the "we're trying shit" phase. But, whether an artist, developer, or other creator, don't write them off yet. Here's why.

First of all, the initial phase of any market is a combination of "toys that look like crap" h/t @cdixon) and "us attempting to copy our mental models from the old world into this one... very awkwardly." (remember early mobile apps?) Welcome to NFTs 2021.

The first cryptokitties in 2017 first broke digital scarcity into the semi-mainstream and they were nearly impossible to acquire for average people because you needed to buy tokens just to try. "Kitties" are just collectibles and collectables make no sense to most people, particularly in the digital world where we're used to infinite replication.

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Everyone can agree that blockchain has a UX problem. The top apps right now have literally dozens of users. And no small effort has been undertaken to try and fix all the leaks in the onboarding funnel. But what if this effort is just mopping the decks of the Titanic on most of these systems… totally meaningless in the context of a looming disaster?

How do we begin to untangle which systems will stick around for the long haul and which are doomed to be disrupted from the start?

UX Equilibrium

In crypto economic and consensus discussions, we spend a lot of time cozying up to the work of mathematician John Nash, whose famous Nash Equilibriumis generally considered to be the ideal state for a game theoretic system to achieve.

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It started as a weekend project. A VC friend had put me in touch with one of his portfolio founders with a “you two should connect, I think you’ll really get along.” Suddenly I’m back in middle school and my mom is setting me up on play dates.

Wanting to have a better understanding of what they were working on, I took a look through their website and rolled my eyes when the word “Blockchain” came up. Not another one.

I was several months past the acquisition of my previous company and, during the scale-out phase, had gotten deep into artificial intelligence research. At the time, I was closing in on some interesting opportunities in the space and had a lot of momentum going. The tech is interesting, the problems are big and the space is highly active. I didn’t see any reason why I wouldn’t continue down that path.

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Despite being years deep into the new Age of AI, there is still surprisingly little clarity around how to systematically approach and model the space in order to find opportunities for investing and building new businesses.

My intention here is to create a simple top-down process for identifying opportunities by analyzing the core components that are critical in any viable AI-driven product or business.

As an entrepreneur, these are the questions I ask myself when deciding which areas look most fertile to pursue. As a VC, you might use this to find green fields for investment or as a tool to evaluate businesses that cross your radar. As a researcher, this may provide new areas to explore and as an industry expert this should help you think about triangulating in on a good opportunity within your domain space.

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