Circle Three 87 / Anna Sun
I’m stubborn.
I know it, my family knows it, my friends know it. “Mental Liquidity” has been the term of the year for me.
“Mental Liquidity: the ability to quickly abandon previous beliefs when the world changes or when you come across new information.”
Certainty, oftentimes, is more desirable than truth. Because *gasp* truth can require admitting your previous beliefs were wrong.
Maybe some of this week’s writings will open you to some new truths…I hope they do.
Contents:
brain bites: Psychology & Health
Ambitious People Need Each Other
Rob Dyrdek Tracks Every Hour of His Life
brain bites: Business & Investing
AI as a Forcing Function
The Emergence of Crypto Hedge Funds: Opportunities and Outlook
brain bites: Technology
Storing Value in Digital Objects
a16z State of Crypto Report
Lyric: Anna Sun by WALK THE MOON
brain bites: psychology & health
Rob Dyrdek Tracks Every Hour of His Life. His system is the most intense, thorough, and impactful life-tracking/optimization system I’ve ever seen. While the schedule tenacity certainly is not for everyone, at its most basic level it demonstrates the power of routine and reflection. For all you optimization nerds.
Ambitious People Need Each Other. David Perell writes a long tweet describing how being ambitious might leave you frustrated, and therefore why it’s so important to find your people. I see a lot of tweets each month, and this was one — with its unique examples and a quote from Paul Graham — that made me pause and think.
“Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people’s lives, then the ambitious ones won’t have many ambitious peers. When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water.”
brain bites: business & investing
AI as a Forcing Function. Read here.
AI has gripped the world’s attention. Every day brings another product set out on improving our lives, relegating us to the life depicted in WallE. The trends, possibilities, speculations, and timeline are enough to make your head spin. (All resources are just from past issues of Circle Three.)
Will we find God? Will we experience a dystopian world in our lifetimes?
These are just a few things I’m reading and pondering while I walk to my remarkably non-AI yoga class in my non-AI-designed city.
I’m curious about what’s next, but I think some of the earliest improvements we will see is how AI capabilities push us collectively to do, be, and desire more.
As an example, when DVDs and in-home theaters came out, movie theaters started adding comfier seats. The customer benefitted.
Photography’s effects on humanity was hotly debated in the 19th century. What was the artistic value?
Some argued it had none, but the benefits won out and photography quickly infiltrated the world and people’s lives, altering the artistic landscape forever.
Today, the relationship between AI and business functions, writing, or accounting is similar to that of art and photography. What roles will be redundant? More importantly, how will existing functions be liberated, pushed to focus on valuable and personal aspects? Accountants are starting to realize they need to level up:
“It's time for accountants to focus on strategic planning, financial advice, and all that good stuff that clients really value. Automate everything else. Pass the savings to people like me.”
I’ve used AI in a limited capacity, but have been left extremely impressed and curious about what’s next. The value that has been created so far and will be in the coming years begs the question: how will we be forced by technology to level up? Forced to the edge of the cliff in an adapt-or-die scenario. Based on the below AI-generated image, we still have some time to answer these questions.
The Emergence of Crypto Hedge Funds: Opportunities and Outlook. The most comprehensive piece I’ve read on the space, hitting on topics that I’ve experienced firsthand:
high net worth individuals (HNWI) and family offices are the early adopters, similar to hedge funds in the ‘90s;
the years of experience of managers continues to get deeper as the market matures;
crypto uniquely benefits from characteristics such as high market volatility and 24/7 trading.
brain bites: technology
Storing Value in Digital Objects. A long-form piece by Derek Edws of Collab+Currency. The attention flywheel — which used to take decades to build value — has compressed to a period of hours and minutes. Not only that, the value accrual now exists for digital-only objects. The implications of this are not to be ignored, including features of digital objects and attention-generating factors listed here.
Over the coming years, you can expect to see natively digital objects power virtually all major consumer product/service use cases. In the short-medium term, I believe they will become natively integrated into business models related to social applications, gaming, music, television, live entertainment and many of the other largest consumer verticals in the world.
a16z State of Crypto Report. The report “aims to address the imbalance between the noise of fleeting price movements – and the data that tracks the signals that matter, including the durable progress of web3 technology.” The developer activity is the most promising signal I see in the report. As an asset class and technology, blockchain and crypto aren’t going anywhere.
Lyric: Anna Sun by WALK THE MOON
Summer is here. Maybe not in the literal sense of the calendar, but 88 degree days, humidity, and baseball all signal summer. Similarly, Anna Sun means summer is here, for no other reason than it makes sense in my head.
What I didn’t know about this song is that Anna Sun is a Kenyon College professor whose name sounded interesting to the band. That’s it. "It's about maintaining that little bit of being a kid," songwriter Petricca said about the song. "Don't be afraid to play.”
Summer is here (almost). Time to play.
Stay Curious,
Dan