Antonio García Martínez

The most mind-bending talk at the @BitkraftVC summit was by @real_alethea: autonomous AI agents living natively on the blockchain, with access to compute and liquidity. I've wondered how AI and crypto would collide. Strong "Holy shit! WTF?" energy.

How even successful paid user-acquisition can create cash-flow problems. Classic @eric_seufert post: detailed, tactical, very real-world. Our goal at @spindl_xyz is getting Web 3 to think about user acquisition in as complex and quantitative a way.

A classic marketing case study is Betty Crocker redefining “made from scratch” by intentionally (but needlessly) requiring the addition of an egg to cake mixes to boost sales.

Read this over shabbat. Learned two surprising things: 1. Just what a touch-and-go affair the founding of Singapore really was, and how it all could have come to nothing. Also, how desperately poor and fractious the city-state was on its founding.

A classic.

In Henri Charrière's masterpiece 'Papillon' (made into a film with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman) the French convicts in a brutal penal colony on Devil's Island would keep cash in a cylindrical tube called a 'plan' up their bums, as the only safe storage.

Great piece by @nayafia on the fundamental split in tech's political visions of the future: the bits of the software Gnostics, and the atoms of the hardware nation-staters.

I have! Great series.

An excellent summary by @g_shullenberger. One place where Girard seems to slightly miss is in prescribing supposedly Greek rule of law as an antidote to the overweening empathy of Christianity, when Hebraic legalism is right there. Perhaps a bit too close to the Pharisees...

Spectacular piece on the new Israeli politics of today.

Another film on the startup founder must-watch list: 'Layer Cake,' starring a pre-famous Daniel Craig.

Finally got around to reading 'Season of the Witch,' an excellent (though biased) history of post-WWII San Francisco. It lucidly delineates the abrupt 60s/70s-era shift from a conservative Catholic town to the petri dish of American crazy it is now.