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How-tos laying the path toward individual sovereignity

Check out the full notes for “The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive during the Collapse of the Welfare State” by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg

I’ve spent more and more on online courses each year. Not that I’m a sovereign individual, but I might be an early adopter (along with anyone else familiar with weighing whether they should opt-in to the upsell of access to all future cohorts).

The coming transformation is both good news and bad. The good news is that the Information Revolution will liberate individuals as never before. For the first time, those who can educate and motivate themselves will be almost entirely free to invent their own work and realize the full benefits of their own productivity.

Earlier today I looked up how to put ear medicine into my dog’s ear. There were two vets demonstrating. I tried to re-create this with Amy and quickly realized that we probably needed to add a “for dummies” to the search query.

And I know that there are at least a handful of videos that would be helpful for us at our skill level.

Actually, I just tried it, and hey…

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One from the official For Dummies account!

In any case, if you have a laptop and internet access, you can learn a skill that will get you paid. You might not get rich quick, but you can find a path that will help you change careers, if that’s your goal.

Many people have taught themselves how to program with online resources. I’d guess that most people who studied computer science or some other major that helped them become a programmer still supplemented that in some way by learning something through a free online resource.

Those educational resources will become available for more and more fields. Online education will continue improving and will replace many aspects of traditional education before everyone’s getting paid in low-tax cryptocurrencies after escaping their dissolving nation state (the book’s larger prediction).

Info Diet: Orlando edition (October 19, 2021)

Currently in line for Avatar: Flight of Passage at Animal Kingdom. I’m alone at the park and will write about that experience separately (summary: going solo is fine but not as great as some say and not as bad as you might imagine if you’re worried it’s a weird thing to do).

On to some recent listens, reads, and watches.

Behind the Ride by David Mumpower

Just bought this while in line—seemed like a good book to jump around in. Each chapter explains some of the design elements of different Disney rides. Pretty fun to read with some of the rides fresh in my mind.

The line I’m currently in can handle a queue of six hours before spilling out into the rest of the park. The bar is so high for these. Hogwarts is hard to beat, especially nailing it with such a beloved franchise.

When Disney announced the Pandora expansion in 2011, they projected huge crowds, especially given what was happening with the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. A few years later, the idea that Avatar would appeal to customers as much as Harry Potter seems a bit silly.

That said, the design for this Avatar ride is pretty nuts. I learned from the book that the queue and ride are set years after the movie events. Which is good to know because it wasn’t obvious at all especially because I’ve almost entirely forgot everything that happens in the movie.

In any case, it’s fun to read about somewhere that you’re traveling in. Especially when every single detail is designed.

Disneyland for Designers podcast: Episode 12 Rise of the Resistance

Really great to listen to this after riding Rise of the Resistance yesterday. The podcast breaks down the experience and also goes into some of the ride’s design details.

  • It’s Disney’s largest ride ever, but it’s hidden away from the rest of the park. You don’t see it from afar, even though elements of it are outdoors. This helps reinforce the idea that you’re starting from a hidden base.
  • The floor is a floating platform once you’re on the First Order ship for some subtle movement
  • The signage ends on the First Order ship—you won’t find a green exit sign anywhere near Kylo Ren

They also discuss the skinning possibilities with the ride. Swap Kylo for Darth, paint over some First Order symbols… good to go! How much effort would be required to create a limited time original trilogy version? How much detail inaccuracy would be acceptable to fans?

The Sovereign Individual

Continuing on with this book, I should be able to finish it this week.

Maybe there are some connections to the Rebellion and The First Order. The Rebellion would be a bunch of freelancers getting paid in cryptocurrency.

Actually, the real connection here is realizing how much obscure taxation details have shaped both the Star Wars universe and earth.

Governments control violence. Usually by being a looming presence that can dish it out better. If you have a weapon that can destroy another planet, it can help with persuasion in interplanetary negotiations.

But the metaverse can’t be targeted by the Death Star or its First Order equivalent. Assuming, of course, that metaverse’s underlying blockchain exists on multiple planets.

Or something.

Okay that’s that for now. Riding Flight of Passage a second time. That makes this my first post written entirely in an amusement park line. Same line but different times. On my first ride, a child nearby yelled “I’m so scared” for the 90 seconds until an adult told them “just close your eyes!” This broke the immersion.

Update after second ride: It was way better.

Info Diet: NYC edition (October 15, 2021)

The Sovereign Individual

I’m finally getting to parts about how tech will change things. They wrote the book in 1996 explicitly to predict how the next few decades will shake out. So there’s some of the fun of reading old sci-fi books, but in a different way. Accuracy is more important here than finding entertaining angles.

It reminds me that sci-fi and stand-up have the same process: take some subtext and then stretch it out to its extreme.

But, again, this isn’t a sci-fi book so it’s more about explaining the foundational subtext of the future.

The first few chapters set up the relationship between violence and government. That relationship is essential to how technology shapes the future. Their hunch: technology will change that relationship entirely.

Governments could tax companies and individuals. Much harder if the company is a few people willing to pick their laptops up and move to another country. And their payments aren’t tied to that nation’s fiat system.

Workers could strike, take a factory hostage, and get higher pay. Much harder when most work is knowledge work done remotely in virtual spaces.

One interesting point is that some skilled work really wasn’t:

One of its pretenses was the idea that factory jobs, particularly in the middle of the twentieth century, were skilled work. This was untrue. Most factory jobs could have been performed by almost anyone capable of showing up on time. They required little or no training, not even the ability to read or write. As recently as the 1980s, large fractions of the General Motors workforce were either illiterate, innumerate, or both. Until the 1990s, the typical assembly-line worker at GM received only one day of orientation before taking his place on the assembly line. A job you can learn in a single day is not skilled work.

Today, there’s some pretense that technology jobs are skilled work. That will become less and less true as tooling improves. As an example, take setting up an online store and compare it to what it would take in 1996, when this book was written.

Or take a college freshman and give them a day of Canva training. Then throw them in the Delores back to 1996 and yadda yadda how they still have their laptop and Canva access in that time. They’d be able to replace many designers on a marketing team.

GPT-3 doesn’t replace a copywriter, but it can augment someone without the specialty to do a decent job. Or for one copywriter to multiply their output to fulfill needs for multiple companies.

Programming itself continues to require less skill for equivalent tasks through the power of open source tooling. The tasks get larger and the need for programmers still outpaces the decrease in skill reduction.

Info Diet (October 11, 2021)

I went to a wedding yesterday. My wife was in the bridal party so I had a bunch of time to kill in the morning. Went to a coffee shop to read and write a bit. I joked with my wife that I was radicalizing myself into NFTs.

In any case, these three books seem to give a nice overview of various topics related to crypto.

The Sovereign Individual — This is one of those books that is a reminder that I’m not smart. I don’t know how the world actually works so it’s great that giga brains share their knowledge for others in books like this. It was published heading into the year 2000, with predictions about how microprocessors change violence dynamics which change, well, everything in the world.

Blockchain or Revolution — So far, this would be the book I recommend if someone wants to learn about different aspects of the blockchain. It explains core technical concepts in an approachable manner. And also explains the current financial system and how blockchain could disrupt it.

21 Lessons — One of the best curious novice books I’ve read. Gigi explains different aspects of Bitcoin in an entertaining way. He’s turned into a true believer and explains why. There’s a lot more to it than just buy, hodl, and get rich.

In NYC, writing in the editor

In NYC, I feel most at home eating Korean BBQ with friends who know me best.

There’s that whole thing that people have smaller apartments in New York than they would otherwise because (1) it’s expensive and (2) you don’t entertain at home, you meet up in the city.

That said, the friends I met up with tonight are the friends who I’ve shared meals with in the comfort of our various homes.

But, like tonight, we’ve shared way more meals together out in the city.

So what does this have to do with writing? Honestly I just started typing (on a treadmill, my other home recently) hoping some connection would come.

I guess it’d be that there is so much value in the tools you know. Yes, you should explore new tools to see if there are any 2-10x improvements out there worth learning.

But if you need to get something done reliably, you shouldn’t try to combine that learning the new tool.

That said, there’s value in using the new tool in an actual meaningful project. Because you can then weigh how well it works in your actual workflow.

So it’s all a trade off in getting something done vs. learning a new tool effectively.

And now, a sloppy transition to a book quote and another point on writing: start with small ideas and build from there

I put Tyson Fury & Deontay Wilder III on the other night, thinking the first couple rounds might be interesting. I ended up watching the entire thing, as it evolved into one of the great modern heavyweight fights.

Sometimes ideas can grow from “oh I’ll jot this thing down” to “oh I’ll revise 100 pages of this”.

From 21 Lessons:

I tried to answer this question in a single tweet. Then the tweet turned into a tweetstorm. The tweetstorm turned into an article. The article turned into three articles. Three articles turned into 21 Lessons. And 21 Lessons turned into this book. So I guess I’m just really bad at condensing my thoughts into a single tweet.

Gigi was trying to answer “what have you learned from Bitcoin?” and it turned from tweet into an excellent book.

Round 1, you start with some tweets to feel things out.

Round 3, you get a nice few paragraphs in, looks pretty straightforward. It’s not.

Round 4, you get knocked down a couple times. But you stick with it.

With each of the next rounds you’re able to keep going. To keep chipping away. You have Resistance in control and wobbly.

But Resistance can get you if you’re not paying attention. So you have to keep showing up, focused.

Keep your hands moving.

Eventually you triumph.

And you hit publish.

Book Notes: The Sovereign Individual

Check out the full notes for “The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive during the Collapse of the Welfare State” by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg

I’ve seen “The Sovereign Individual” mentioned here and there by crypto folks. Naval has a thread about it and the core argument around how violence shapes society.

“The coming transformation is both good news and bad. The good news is that the Information Revolution will liberate individuals as never before. For the first time, those who can educate and motivate themselves will be almost entirely free to invent their own work and realize the full benefits of their own productivity.” —

The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Dale Davidson, Lord William Rees-Mogg

I’m reading to understand whether my JPEGs will continue to have value or not.

One thing to mention as far as Web 3.0 goes: a bunch of people I follow who were fully involved in empowering others to educate themselves and invent their own work (let’s call that the creator economy) have transitioned almost entirely to building Web 3.0 things.

Teachers of cohort courses I joined last year now have web3 communities.

It’s a very small sample size, but just something I’ve noticed. Plenty of other course creators of courses I joined last year are still running newer versions of their courses.

I am still slacking off on the assignments.

The money-to-happiness engine

Equally, in the future, one of the milestones by which you measure your financial success will be not just now many zeroes you can add to your net worth, but whether you can structure your affairs in a way that enables you to realize full individual autonomy and independence. The more clever you are, the less propulsion you will require to achieve financial escape velocity.

I listened recently to a reunion of the Twitch Founders on Justin Kan’s YouTube channel.

First, this is just amazing that it’s available for free. I’d love to go back in time and tell the authors of The Sovereign Individual that you can go on the internet and watch the founders of a company that sold for a billion dollars talk about their early days starting the company from scratch, laying the foundation of streaming video on their platform. This would be free on a different streaming video site, where 9 figure individuals choose to create their own freely available video channels.

The authors might be distracted by the time machine.

But I could get their attention again by pointing out that the company in question sold to a trillion dollar book store.

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Second, and the actual reason I bring that reunion convo up, is that Michael Seibel talks about money and happiness. They’re all Silicon Valleu successes, so they are and know many millionaires. Not all of those people are happy.

Seibel says it comes down to knowing how to convert money into happiness. The more efficient the better.

At peak efficiency, of course, you don’t actually need the money to realize happiness. Since enlightenment is a different kind of difficult, you can start by figuring out what makes you miserable and seeing if money can help in those areas. Then figure out what activities and people and whatever else make you happy. Then see if money can help you have more of those experiences.

If you’re sacrificing time that would otherwise go toward happy activities to try and make more money, your engine has some kinks in it. (Assuming a lack of money is not leading to misery, e.g. your rent is paid comfortably, etc.)