This newsletter goes out to more than 1,000 ambitious frontier people. If you like it, share it with a friend, support me on Patreon, or apply for my online school, Roote.
Poke. Hi!
Remember when poking was a thing in the early Facebook days? Weird. Good way to propagate a meme though.
1) I’d love your feedback on my in-progress book, Terra Sapien! Stop by The Stoa this Thursday, 3/11, at 5pm PT to hang out and discuss it. Register here!
2) We had our first cross-cohort Roote hangout last week. It was great. A dozen good folks from around the world, working on interesting post-capitalish problems. If you’re interested in joining the crew, please apply for RF4 by March 19. (Or share with a friend!)
LINKS
1) Responding to last week’s interview on Big History, one reader, Dylan, responded:
We taught Big History in our first Intrepid Semester at Hale [an outdoor high school]. While the obvious ideas of scale, interconnectedness, and evolution were strong, they were made stronger in the outdoors.
Students collected stardust (micrometeorites) on the ground with magnets, learned about the Overview Effect, built and sat around a fire while talking about tribalism (Dunbar's number), reflected on improved mental health while in nature (biophilia), and the long-term health outcomes of chronic stress based on a hyperactive amygdala. Plus we built a 100-yard scale of the universe along a path and saw that homo sapiens have existed for so little time.
I recently talked to any alum about his Intrepid experience and he remembered vividly the lessons about evolution, connecting to cosmos, and the mental benefits of nature and exercise.
Woo hoo! Good to see Big History being taught to young folks.
2) GameB folks have moved off Facebook and into a custom-built community here. I’ll be curious if other communities continue to move away from GAFA.
3) I was reminded recently (h/t @boldicons) that it was in only 1974 that women in the US could get a loan without a male co-signer. Sigh. It’s one thing to look at injustice in the 1800s and another to see it less than fifty years ago.
4) Results from the Stockton, CA guaranteed income experiment are in. They gave 125 folks $500 per month for 24 months. Results were as you’d expect: folks spend money on food (not drugs), it helped them pay off debt, and they were happier. One counterintuitive result: the money actually enabled more folks get full-time work.
5) Like the UBI experiment above, I love Little Free Libraries as a manifestation of financial Abundance. But why just books? My friend Howard has a cute Little Free Art Gallery.
Could we go further? Little Free Libraries aren’t the best community resource. They’re often stocked with crappy books and books don’t really help homeless folks. A bit too much signal, not enough impact.
I like Little Free Pantries, which hold. Or something that can hold N95s or money itself. Or maybe as a place to put bottles so homeless folks don’t need to go through my trash. (I’ve been thinking a lot about socioeconomic class as trophic levels recently. I don’t like thinking of people as “bottom-feeders”, but there’s a lot of truth to the analogy. I’m striving for a world without human trophic levels.)
I created a Little Free Spot last week.
I put bricks in the bottom, but the bricks were removed (along with everything else inside) and it was still stolen. This leads to a funny tension in my mind. I’m sad and annoyed my furniture was stolen. But it being stolen mostly just re-emphasizes the issue I’m initially trying to solve—that folks need to steal in the first place, and that I should share my own abundance. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Do you have any ideas here? How can we share our abundance in a bottom-up way? What else should I put in my Little Free X?
6) Babylon Bee: Biden Announces All Bombs Used In The Middle East Will Be Purchased From Black-Owned Businesses
7) The Onion: TikTok Assures Users Worried About Myanmar That They’re Aggressively Monetizing The Situation
8) Rhys: QAnon Deradicalization Therapy Announces 2-For-1 Partnership With Meth Overdose Centers Across The Midwest
JOBS AND OPPORTUNITIES
George Church is looking for bio post-docs to help revive the Woolly Mammoth
Zora, an NFT infrastructure protocol, is hiring Product Engineers.
Apply to be a Visiting Researcher at Other Internet, a hip writing crew.
Some friends at Witnesses of Climatology made a great Diamond List of Top 75 climate tech startups, many of whom are hiring. Check out the list here.
Variant Fund is investing in the Ownership Economy and is hiring a Research Analyst.
I’m looking for a driven and concrete co-founder for Roote. Learn more and reach out here.
EVENTS
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring). I’m hosting a 60min session at The Stoa on my book, Terra Sapien, on March 11 at 5pm PT. Learn more and register here.
MUSIC
I’ve been enjoying the soundtrack for Pixar’s “Soul.” It was created by Trent Reznor, who also created the Academy Award-winning soundtrack for The Social Network (and, ya know, Nine Inch Nails). Two of my favorite tracks from “Soul” are “Just Us”:
And “Epiphany”:
It’s great to see these videos use plugins like embers to create Guitar Hero-style MIDI music notation.
On the topic of music soundtracks: If you haven’t listened to it, you gotta check out the drums-only soundtrack from Birdman.
The drummer, Antonio Sánchez, and director, Alejandro Iñárritu, created demos of the drumming before filming and then used those demos to inform the pacing of the scenes on set. It should’ve won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, but was disqualified for dumb reasons.
Here’s a cool clip of how they incorporate the drumming into the movie scenes themselves:
Hope you have a good week! Warmth, Rhys
❤️ Thanks to my generous patrons ❤️
Audra Jacobi, Sam Jonas, Patrick Walker, Shira Frank, David Hanna, Benjamin Bratton, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Zoe Harris, David Ernst, Brian Crain, Matt Lindmark, Colin Wielga, Malcolm Ocean, John Lindmark, Collin Brown, Ref Lindmark, James Waugh, Mark Moore, Matt Daley, Peter Rogers, Darrell Duane, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Simon de la Rouviere, and Katie Powell.