Rikyū

Gonna be a helluva ride

Credentialism isn’t what it used to be. Milennials are caught in this weird trap where we have no stake in our parents institutions and yet we still see their brands as valuable. We find ourselves placating to the old guard, only to drop out, quit, and retaliate. Who else has experienced what Dawson has? Gotten into the best school in the world for what you want to do, only to realize that the true value is in honing the craft?

You can understand all of the “cultural shocks” since the 90’s with one sentence. My generation has no stake in the status quo. Mamdani - We can’t participate in capitalism because we graduate with debt not capital. Crypto - 2008 showed us that our financial system is a scam. We might as well create our own. Podcasting - The real weapon of mass destruction was the media that lied for the government and led to us losing our cousins, uncles, and brothers. The boomers didn’t allow us to have a stake in their world, so we built our own flavored with nihilism.

Shepard Fairey @OBEYGIANT mastered one of the classic tools of propaganda in order to become a household name. Fairey is a propaganda artist who created the brand obey. He leveraged the tool of repetition that got him from the streets into the White House. Propagandist like to create truth by repetition. An idea repeated enough becomes perceived reality. Perceived reality is almost indistinguishable from reality. Fairey traveled the world for a decade pasting the same image of Andre. He did it so much that he was able to impact the 2008 election by creating the iconic Obama Hope poster.

Advertisers are the customer of media. We are not the customer of the thing that most impacts our collective reality. The only saving grace in this system is that we are what is being sold. We are the product. We can choose to turn our attention towards sincere media. We can leave the matrix. We can stop being the batteries for the ideas that want to see us destroyed.

It took the richest man in the world @elonmusk to glitch the control advertising had on media. Before Elon bought X it was prohibited to have “radical ideas.” We found ourselves in an upside down world where ideas held by the many were “radical” and ideas held by an elite few were “mainstream.” There was so much collusion that businesses were willing to take financial hits against the interest of their fiduciary duties to keep defining the overton window. Profit motivation appears to have won the day, but we can’t forget the timelines we barely avoided.

Fiction creates reality. There are some ideas that are meant to be realized. They act like viruses spreading through our minds, upgrading our software. The Overton window, or the idea that a society has a range of acceptable thought which can be intentionally manipulated, would be nowhere if Glenn Beck didn’t write a fiction Thriller on the concept. Fiction is a platform ideas use to seep through our psychic immune responses.

I believe we are in the optimum timeline. Three things that have saved us from a fork into destruction. 1. Blockchain hype cycle happened before AI. 2. Trump assassination attempt only hit his ear. 3. @MrBeast became a fan of One Piece. If any of these outcomes wouldn’t have happened we would be in a dark timeline.

The @theallinpod is absurdly smooth. Dangerously so. Sent us on a doozy of a podcast

Blockchain pumping before AI saved humanity. The scariest part of current AI tech is it’s reality distortion field. Between hallucinations, deep fakes, and the ephemeral nature of AI, it has gotten incredibly difficult to validate that something happened, something was said, and by whom it was said. We have been building tools to solve this for the last decade and they have been funded by the crowd in ways no one could have imagined. With the blockchain we have Provenance. This is the single most important structural factor that will allow us to use AI to aid humanity not to destroy it.

If Trump would have been Assassinated by Thomas Crooks we would have lost any opportunity for belief in the institutions of the United States. We were on incredibly shaky ground as a nation. Both political parties believed that the other side would use violence in order to win. If that happened everyone would lose. Civil War was sneaking it’s ugly head into the Overton Window. The movie Civil War had the biggest Box Office opening weekend of any A24 film.

Mr. Beast made headlines by entering the world of One Piece and changing his PFP to Luffy. @MrBeast has all of the attention of the world. One Piece has a unique capacity to get under the psychological protections of an individual and make them a better person. It has an intense focus on the importance of individualism and community. It fights against large governments and evil oligarchs. It supports the common man without losing our right as individuals to follow our dreams. If Mr. Beast can incorporate these ideas into his content the world will be a better place.

We only invested in 9 Startups in 2025. Here they are: 1. Embryo Corporation — Create New Animals with Gene Editing. (@WeBuildLife @josiezayner ) 2. @LuminaVehicles — Autonomous, Electric Construction Vehicles. (@ahmedshubber25) 3. Green Abundance — Engineering plants to produce advanced materials. 4. @cascade_space — Verizon for the Solar System. Deep-space communications network. 5. @_dynamo_air — Heavy-Lift Drone Quadcopters. 6. Obsidia — Ensure Chip Supply Chain Security. 7. @watoga_tech — Software to accelerate drill & blast mining efficiency. @elliot_fp 8. Blitzpanel — Integrate and automate control panel manufacturing. @K_leeeb (ty @elidourado!) 9. Tideway Logistics — Dirt-cheap robotic automation for e-commerce fulfillment. Our mission is to support "Obsessive geniuses building utopian technologies." Imagine the 2040s if all of these companies grow and thrive... what a beautiful future. 🚀 🌳 ☀️ 🛰️

this is good

Things always go awry when the government controls the memes of production

@hubermanlab It’s the Herpes Meningoencephalitis

If the SF Bay Area is the forebrain of California and San Diego is the hypothalamus what is Los Angeles?

Nueromancer adaption is finally happening.

It’s fucking happening

Got to “collab” with @jackbutcher on this one. Gas Wars IRL in Marfa, Texas

@danifesto Memory

I’ll share a small part of pickle.com Back in med school, I became obsessed with augmenting memory and dreamed of a Notion or Obsidian that completes itself. Today, we’ve built something close. My self-awareness is sharper and everything feels connected. I genuinely believe AI does not replace humans. It amplifies us. Huge respect to our engineers and designers who made this crazy thing real. Bubbles are the episodic units of my life that the system interprets from my raw data. Clouds are the system’s questions, its hypotheses about who I am. When I answer a cloud, it becomes a bubble again. There is so much personal data that I cannot fully demo it. Wish I could. This system understands me more deeply than anyone. Want to try it? Retweet and comment “memory.” I’ll DM you an access code to skip the waitlist.