Bitcoin ETFs were just approved by the USA SEC for the first time.

Along with generative AI (the rise of LLMs + Diffusion Models), I believe we are witnessing significant and historic inflexion points. The last time I felt this was 7th Feb 2018 (Sydney) when I witnessed the launch of Starman (pictured).

Today, my rural life is only possible because Starman became StarLink. I've had thousands of conversations with people predicting Tesla's 'imminent death' (I worked there in 2017) and many other conversations claiming that Bitcoin and generative AI is a fad.

Bitcoin, Machine Learning and electrified transport are not fads or second layer gambles (like NFTs or sh*tcoins can be). Though scams and fads layer on top, at their very core they contain first principles innovations and value that cannot be extinguished.

I also notice that the strongest opponents to these innovations do not understand what they criticise. 'Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme going to zero!' is case in point.

But it's not about Bitcoin. It's about the relentless momentum of humans seeking out independence, growth and self-actualisation that Bitcoin satisfies.

It's not about saving the planet through 'clean' (lol) electric cars. It's about the engineering reality that electrification of work output is far simpler, more efficient and enjoyable than fossil-fuel based designs.

As a farmer, there are many things that still require dead dinosaur juice but the most pleasurable and human-centric inventions are electric.

Honestly, who cares about 'carbon reduction offset blah blah'. Humans just want their devices, tools and vehicles to be freaking awesome at their job and pleasurable to live with. This often means electrification.

Who cares about Satoshi's 2024 planned halving of the block reward to ensure BTC is a deflationary asset. Humans just want a store (and medium of exchange) of wealth that is immune to the corruption of politicians and corporations that run our lives in 2024.

Who cares about the transformer architecture and the arms race due to the quadratic compute scaling limit. Humans just want the Star Trek Computer that makes our lives easier and supercharges our natural abilities.

Now...if you're under 50 years old, you've got a lot of decades remaining. You will reap a real return educating yourself on the 'weird' terms I've dropped above.

Start by googling 'inflation' and 'fiat currency' to begin building your defence against those who would rob you blind of the wealth you've worked so hard to accumulate.

Consider the major revolutions of history:

• Agricultural revolution 10,000-5,000 BC
• Printing press 1400s
• Industrial revolution 1700s-1900s
• Information revolution 1950s-2000s
• Digital revolution ~1990s-2005
• Mobile revolution ~2005-2020
• AI revolution ~2022+

This layout is time/event based. Another way to think of technological revolutions is systems based. This is why you keep hearing about 'the fourth industrial revolution' which looks like this:

No matter how you think of revolutions, they are all ultimately defined by how significantly they change the way humans live.

We have all become de-sensitised to claims of 'technological breakthrough!' because they are usually overblown, myopic and have no significant effect on how humans live. Sometimes they never will, sometimes they are simply early. Current example: the Metaverse.

This 'failure to launch' is normal and to be expected in the advent of new technology. Tech needs to be birthed, tried and tested in the natural game of 'survival of the fittest'.

Thus it's easy to dismiss the latest 'groudbreaking app' as just more hype designed to line the pockets of a corporation. It's probably just a fad that will die in a year's time right?

Park that cynicism for a moment as you watch this video from Microsoft. Ask yourself whether you are witnessing vaporware, empty hype, or something more:

I believe it's something more. Let me explain by way of a story:

In 2022 we shrank our staff count (deliberately - to extend our startup's runway). In the strive to maintain output we attempted to automate or accelerate much of our daily tasks. Nearly all automated tools and assistants were eventually jettisoned because their effort:benefit ratio didn't make sense.

Except for OpenAI's ChatGPT.

We have now permanently integrated ChatGPT3.5 into a large number of our workflows, and our day to day looks very different to just 6 months ago. Not only is generative, predictive AI speeding up and enabling content creation with fewer staff, it's changing the way we create.

But wait, there's more! We are hearing from housewives, seniors(!) and from nearly every business we consult for...everyone is experiencing the same paradigm shift.

The common refrain is that they now rely on AI to such an extent that they cannot imagine life without it. Kind of like imagining living and working without the internet.

AI is now a contagion.

We are witnessing a technological revolution with generative AI and few are ready to adapt like Millennials are. Fellow travellers born loosely around 1981-1996 will remember what it's like to learn and grow on both sides of 'the internet'.

Thanks to fortuitous timing, we Millennials understand the internet both natively and as adopted phenomena.

This is unlike Generation X whose young minds were formed pre-internet but have since adopted it as a tool for life.

Millennials are even more unlike Generation Z (so called 'Digital Natives') who were born into a digital era, their brains forming in a world rich with information and instant connection.

I truly appreciate and feel the wonder of broadband internet because dial-up, failed connections and information scarcity is a visceral and lived reality:

But I also share the natural fluency for the digital world that Gen Z has, finding it easy to be an 'early adopter' of tech.

That Microsoft ad above is actually just a collection of use-cases that are already happening TODAY. But it seems to be happening in the lives of the 'early majority', not just the 'early adopter' category.

With smart integrations, we are going to blow right past 'the chasm' or 'the tipping point'.

Why? Because this revolution is PRAGMATIC. It's practically improving the lives of people and businesses everywhere. The 'Early Majority' are in fact...pragmatists. They adopt tech if it makes sense. And large language models make sense to our everyday lives.

Despite all the false starts, inflated claims, utopian visions and fear-mongering we've endured this past decade, AI may finally be truly be revolutionising the world.

 

Less Skynet, and more J.A.R.V.I.S.

 

 

But where does that leave us poor humans? How do we adapt?

 

Creativity won't disappear, at least when generative AI is built on prediction algorithms on large data sets. In a sense, it's merely smooshing things together to generate something 'new' but not really seeding anything truly novel. But it will re-weight everything we create...

 

 

With retrieval of information and generation of content commoditised in the next handful of years, you may feel a little like a phone booth in the era of smartphones, or a steam engine in the age of Teslas.

 

But there's a new skillset up for grabs: prompting.

 

'Prompt engineering' is designing inputs for AI to process and work with. This is the new skillset required in the AI revolution. He who asks best, gets the best answers. Just like we spend more time teaching kids to type than write, we now need to learn to prompt.

 

 

The nerds took over as 'the cool kids' somewhere after 2000, but soon having a whole lot of knowledge in your head will be redundant. Even content creation is about to commoditise, and statistically barely anyone learned how to be a content creator instead of a consumer!

 

 

Don't miss this next revolution. It's a biggie. Start searching some of the keywords in this article like 'prompt engineering', and get familiar with the new world coming at you, where:

 

Asking questions is about to become more important than knowing answers!

Every year between Christmas and New Year's Day we release a community message for the year ahead. 

A year ago, and during a time many were predicting a ‘return to normalcy in 2022’, we warned that 2022 would in fact get darker and it was important to ‘find lights’ and ‘hang around those lights’.

Our Christmas message this year will revolve around the idea of ‘being the light in every place' in 2023, and you can catch it on all of our social channels soon.

The Victorian election was a brief but false hope. It was important for the entire Western World because Daniel Andrews, Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern represent the peak of insanity and authoritarianism in policy making (always for our own good, of course).

The people's reaction to their rule will determine the course of history as leaders everywhere learn lessons from their bold, conviction style of [bad] leadership.

The 'day of reckoning' never came for Daniel Andrews (VIC) and strong endorsements were given to Annastacia Palaszczuk (QLD), Mark McGowan (WA), and Justin Trudeau (Canada). How wrong we all were about Commonwealth citizens and their disengagement from the weighty matters of ethics, true equality, the rule of law, democracy and responsibility.

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. -Frederick Douglass

This is how the world descends into darkness...with a grumbling but consenting polity who might wake up one day when the chains are heavy enough, but more likely will be anaesthetised into an numb state of dependency.

We've never had such effective technological anaesthetics as Netflix, Work From Home (WFH), and propaganda media to explain away the consequences of failed governance, failed education, and failed logic.

3 Steps You Can Take

1. Remember the Truth

We've had a powerful lesson in history making. Yes, ‘the victors write history’, but the truth is always preserved by brave souls who remember what happened, even whilst revisionist history wars are waged.

We cannot rely purely on institutions, experts and the media to preserve our memories. Censorship and propaganda are now endorsed from the heights of government and down to the hearts of everyday people. 

It is likely we will forget. In fact, it's already happening with faulty recollections of lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

So, do what you can to tell stories, remember, and preserve the truth.

Support truth telling projects like our Discernable Time Capsule - 120GB of un-censorable conversations on USB in a hand made gift box. We designed them to be palatable to even the most uninformed person, so you can buy these as gifts for friends and family.

2. Prepare Your Life

Dependence = Vulnerability.

This should be the number one goal of any wise human in 2023: decrease dependence and vulnerability, and increase self-reliance.

In this context, ‘self’ reliance include community networks and small, nimble structures that can out-fox encroaching governments and busy-body neighbours (mostly NPCs).

Distinct from the ‘prepper’ movements of years past that relied on suspicion of anyone outside your own home, self-reliance is all about taking responsibility for who and what your life interacts with: the friends you keep, the businesses you support, the ethics you deploy, the standards you uphold, the communities you grow.

We created 2 resources to help you prepare. Our Business Town Hall which has already helped a number of people replace their full time incomes, and our upcoming Life Your Way Town Hall where an expert in self-reliance will be teaching us how it can be done, no matter whether you live in an apartment, in the suburbs, or on a farm.

3. Get Educated

This is the key to taking over the world. The reason why so many people have fallen for propaganda, faulty reasoning and broken ethics, is because of the collapse of classical education.

When was the last time your kids came home from school debating ideas like utilitarianism (greatest good for the greatest number) or John Locke's natural rights argument of ‘life, liberty and property’?

I'm not a fan of email subscriptions, which is why I send you so few emails. So trust me when I recommend you sign up for these free email subscriptions:

Reclaim the Net - to understand where free speech, individual liberty and online is going.

Common Sense with Bari Weiss - solid news aggregation from a former New York Times writer who resigned in protest.

Brownstone Institute - regular articles from academics and esteemed writers who cut through propaganda and fake science like a scalpel.

And for God's sake, learn ethics. This is perhaps the most broken part of our collective education. We have no idea what our own personal ethics are and consequently we are being taken for a ride by those in power (both government and corporations).

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire

There are free resources like CrashCourse on Youtube who explain ethics concisely, or the best resource: our Ethics Town Hall: