“You can assemble an iPhone with 996, but you could have never designed one.”

Long post but the TLDR is choose your reference points carefully. I grew up comfortable in Kansas with a father who owned a small business pulling $40k a year. I felt rich until I went to Brown. Then I felt like the poor. There were students that had BMWs parked on different parts of campus so they wouldn't have to walk far to get access to a car. I needed to make money to pay back my parents for college so I went to Wall Street. After Morgan Stanley, I worked for a single manager hedge fund managing $1.5Bn (alot of money back in the day) in SF that had just received an anchor investment from Yale University. My boss was making more money than ever and was spending it. He would vacation with Lance Armstrong and Cindy Crawford. He became close with Wes Edens at Fortress. We made investments in Fortress portfolio companies. My boss took board seats on some of these investments. My boss spent alot of time frustrated he was not on the same level as Edens. My boss was also close with Charles Schwab and we also invested in SCHW. Charles would let my boss and the firm stay at Stock Farm in Montana to host events for our LPs and management of some of our portfolio companies. It was the first time I ever flew private. I met Don Valentine of Sequoia who was an LP in our fund. We ran into Huey Lewis in the men's locker room before playing some golf. It was a world I never knew really existed growing up in Kansas. We were also investors in Herbalife and would complain to the CEO at the time Michael Johnson (ex Disney) that he was massively overpaid and that the compensation structure of the company needed better alignment for shareholders (based on hitting key KPIs, etc). He would say he impressions mattered in his industry and living in LA was expensive. When 2008-9 happened, our fund got decimated as we basically were a long only. Heavy exposure to Fortress names with massive leverage was no bueno. My boss had board seats which meant we were restricted. Yale pulled their entire investment. While the world was burning down, my boss in his fancy office in the Transamerica building told me that I was lucky "to not have any money to lose" while the world was burning down lol. I get what he was saying now as we saw clients that had amassed generational wealth in tech or owning boring businesses in Louisiana lose half of their net worth in 12 months. People were scared. I would move back to NYC and end up working for 3 billionaires at different points during my career as a journeyman buysider. I did well enough at points to have direct contact with some of them. I saw the same dynamic - always someone doing better. Always frustrated. Not that happy. I stayed in this world just trying to stay alive with some good years and years I got paid nothing when performance was poor. I was fine staying on this never ending hamster wheel until 1) I got married 2) we had a daughter 3) my dad's cancer diagnosis got more grim and I did more self reflection on what game of life I was playing. Ultimately I left to buy a small business which has been hard. I still have friends on the buyside and in tech that struggle with comparison. But the reference points I was around constantly in my W2 are no longer loud. I wake up early and turn on machines. Most of my team members never graduated high school. My customers are mostly salt of the earth sales people working for small distributors sprinkled with some big publicly traded companies. $4 gas is a huge problem to everybody I interact with during my day - my customers complain daily about it in their daily lives. I sometimes lend money to my team members when they need help. I have to fix problems every day as the business isn't big enough to support hiring a general manager right now. But I'm home for dinner every night. This works better for me and my family. My life is simple now => bring in business to make sure the 10 team members can feed their families. Last year when tariffs and a big customer shutting down hurt business badly for 3 months, my accountant told me to start firing employees as my competitors were either shutting down or firing 25-33% of their entire staffs. Entire shifts were shut down. I fired no one. It didn't feel right. I just stopped paying myself. This year things have turned around. Team members are making 25-33% more due to overtime. I have more purpose now as my life is simplified as I'm just focused on making sure my team can eat, we make good product for our customers and the business can continue to pay down debt. This is a hard path. I wouldn't recommend it for many, but it works better for me at this point in my life. My mental health has never been better. My wife reminds me how big of an asshole I used to be in finance as I was always stressed about my exposure / frustrated I wasn't doing better. What changed? My reference points changed. I no longer live in NYC. I live in this myopic world where I spend my weeks talking to team members, customers and vendors. 4am until 4pm is spent living in this world. 4pm-8pm is spent with my family before I go to bed ahead of a 330am wake up. I have no doubt if I stayed in finance and was living in the Upper West Side in NYC, I'd still be playing my own version of "why aren't I doing better." It took having a child and thinking more about my Dad's mortality (he passed this October from cancer) to re-evaluate things. I wish I had been brave/smart enough to consider a pivot earlier in life. x.com/deedydas/status/205549…

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

The future is private and encrypted.

Github really is the first victim of the dead internet theory. The P2P internet will make a comeback. Exciting times ahead.

There are trillions of cyber market cap up for grabs because of how wholly ill suited the cyber oligopoly is for AI There will be multiple (many) new cyber companies built to purpose for emergent vulnerabilities, behaviors, surface area, and vectors.

It is so hilariously obvious that the optimal arrangement for airlines is to offer a free checked bag and charge for overhead bin space

I had to rediscover this vitality later in life. It's taken out of you. We are made soulless in public school and then secular society. It's all money. "Success." Striver class status signaling. I am EMOTIONAL and SENTIMENTAL. Feels great.

Focusing on what you love and what you want more of in the world is becoming a superpower. We're drowning in opportunities to focus on what we hate; for most people, that's disempowering and distracting. Staying focused primarily on what you love is now a duty and skill.

A 10-minute application for $100,000. A free, no-strings-attached prize for builders, scientists, operators. Introducing the Eigenprize. ↓ run by @menemazarakis, @markkhrapko, & yours truly :)

Pocket (@Heypocket) sold 30,000 units in 5 months recording doctor visits, legal calls, and board meetings. So I did my due diligence like I always do. Their Google Play listing says "No data collected." Their own privacy policy lists audio recordings, transcripts, device IDs, ad identifiers, cookies, IP location, and behavioral inferences. One of those is wrong. They brand themselves "open source". Their GitHub org (github.com/heypocketai) contains exactly 4 repositories: - Raspberry Pi Zero prototype called icecream-project [from the CEO's prior Omi work], - FFmpeg Flutter fork, - docs repo, - org profile page. The actual Pocket device firmware, mobile app, backend infrastructure, and audio processing pipeline are NOT here. There is NO Pocket source code to audit. Recordings go to unnamed "cloud/AI vendors" with no disclosure of which LLMs process your audio, what jurisdiction they operate in, or how long they retain it. Users can't choose their provider or bring their own keys. If you cancel your $19.99/month subscription, your recordings get processed by whichever default model Pocket selects. The contact mic is marketed for recording phone calls without speakerphone. In 11 US states including California (where Pocket is based) -- that requires all party consent. The device has NO consent mechanism. Their terms cap liability at the amount you've paid or $100 (whichever is greater) - for data breaches involving your medical appointments, legal consultations, and proprietary meetings. A third‑party LobeHub skill has already reverse‑engineered Pocket’s web API and can pull recordings, transcripts, summaries, and action items using short‑lived Firebase bearer tokens extracted from the user’s browser session. Their privacy policy confirms that if Pocket is acquired -- every recording, transcript, and summary transfers to the buyer.

RT @JoshuaSteinman: I cannot retweet this enough.

Couldn’t have said it better myself

out of necessity, the internet will soon be made up of geofenced, human-verified, invite-only micro-communities

power accrues to whoever can: - clearly name a previously unarticulated tension - make people feel deeply seen by it - collapse all of the complexity into a legible arc - & offer a direction that feels inevitable this is the blueprint of every giant movement, from politics, to company building, to religion.

“10 million dogs go missing every year, help us find 365 of them by soft launching the total surveillance state”

Each of the last three years on New Year’s Day my wife and I have made phone background vision boards, so we look at them 100s of times each day. I’m a believer.

Who’s read The Egg?