An Open Letter to my Past, Warning of the Storms to Come
It's about to get rocky, but that's actually good news
If things go well, you’ll start seeing me in the news soon. Not exactly because that’s the place that I want to be, but because it’s the place I have to be.
If you haven’t been following me, and let’s be honest, few have, I’ve been spending the last four years researching the economics of information. In doing so, I uncovered a flaw in the economy that we can fix, and then everything will start getting easier.
Because it’s been getting harder lately, hasn’t it? Money isn’t going as far as it used to. I noticed that during the pandemic and I discovered that part of the economy is doing extremely well. They are able to insulate themselves against rapid changes without worrying. When you don’t have money, that’s not the case. Things end up being stretched, and any unforeseen expense can break a system. Combine that with systems designed to pile on unforeseen expenses, and people are breaking.
I know, because the economy broke me.
But I came back stronger. And now I’m going to speedrun the economy to highlight its flaws.
In case you aren’t familiar with the term, speedrunning is a term that gamers use to describe beating a game as quickly as possible. The economy is simply a video game, and it’s a badly designed one. I need the people at the top of it to understand what they are doing wrong, and how people can all be way wealthier than they are. But I can’t do that without capturing their attention, and beating them at their own game faster than they believe possible should be enough to do so.
It’s been harder than I thought to break into the startup scene. I’m trying to build trust up over twitter and zoom, and it’s time consuming. So I’m sending a message to my past, and hoping that some of the trust I’ve built up over the years can come to the present and help me overcome that gap.
I’m in the process of raising a pre-seed round, which is the first round of venture capital raising. Basically, this is the highest risk and highest reward part of investing, because it’s doing risk assessment based on very little proof. If you look at venture capital firms, they tend to say things like “we back founders at the idea stage”.
This isn’t true in most cases. The only way it’s true is if you have connections or signals that investors see as high value. If I had worked at a company like Stripe or Google, I wouldn’t have an issue raising. Instead, what I’ve found is that most investors have very little understanding of what’s valuable, and the entire VC ecosystem should be updated to remove bad actors from the system. I’ll be honest, it was a bit eyeopening to see how it all works from the inside.
You’ve probably seen all sorts of massive numbers tossed around in the news. $500B for Project Stargate. Millions being thrown at AI startups. And it’s all hype. Most of the money in these numbers will fade away into nothing, because that’s how we’ve designed the system.
What I’ve realized is that we don’t need to do all of that. We can build way more efficient economic systems by simply trusting the people around us, and by building stronger communities. We’ve just had the economy get disrupted by a bunch of people with lots of money getting to unleash chaos on the economy while people who are trying to survive bear the brunt of it. To be clear, it’s not anyone’s fault directly, just a poorly designed economy based on our previous understanding of money in a non-digital world.
There’s a wave of disruption that will be hitting the economy because people aren’t being paid nearly what they are worth. I’ve got a way to prove it and a way to fix it, and I’m going to use the system that broke things to start fixing them.
In order to understand the chaos that will be coming, you need to start thinking in terms of assets, not cash. The value of a dollar isn’t going to be stable, because of multiple forces pushing uncertainty into the market. There’s a wave of AI advancement which will cause companies to start shrinking headcount because they’ll simply replace those employees with AIs. It’s not that simple, and I believe a lot of companies are going to attempt that and end up failing.
So what’s an asset? In the coming world, I view assets as three things:
People
Communities
Cashflow assets - companies/products/services that generate some amount of money that grows over time
Notice that there are not physical goods on there. No houses or cars, anything like that. That’s because they end up being a rounding error when you build a hyperefficient system.
Right now, we are forcing people to do more and more for less and less, and the systems we’ve designed are crushing people. It’s time to fix the perception of what’s valuable in favor of what’s actually valuable: doing the work to help people.
By the way, there are other pieces that I didn’t include as an asset: cash, savings, or investments.
That’s because, the way we’ve currently structured it, cash is rapidly losing value. Savings won’t pay out enough. Investments are good long term, but we’ve turned them into a short term carnival game that breaks all sorts of things, so the investments I’m recommending are in people, communities, and understanding what’s valuable to those people and communities.
This is counter to what the world is telling you about what is valuable, because the system is broken.
I’m launching this model under the name of Human Insurance, because it’s focused on making the lives of people predictable in the areas they want, so they can take the risks they want. Right now, the banks and insurance companies simply push the risk on to people and communities and then extract everything they can from them. Banks were designed to price risk, and then in a world where companies scale what they are designed to handle, banks created a lot of risk because that’s what was valuable.
They just lost sight of the fact that humans are more valuable than money. So it’s time to remind them of their place in society, because it’s not at the forefront of decision making. Money is the least important part of the equation and it’s time to push it back to that role.
As it turns out, the risk that banks are creating are superfood for AI systems, so we’re going to turn all of that risk they created into some incredible communities that are protected against bad actors taking over communities by crashing local economies and then buying things up at a discount.
But I need some help, because I can’t do this alone. If you’ve got people, communities, or cashflow assets that you are worried about being stable in the coming months and years, I’m here to help. Because helping you helps me train AI systems that can protect your economic stability. And if you simply want to help, I can help you find valuable things for you to do.
That’s what Human Insurance is all about.
It’s there for you in times of uncertainty.
Let’s start working together to build more human systems. And regain humanity’s control of the economy.
If you simply want to follow along and help me get the word out, I’m starting to ramp up my YouTube presence. Here’s the first video for the speedrun: