A Letter For Process & Progress

Weekly Update (12/24) of Radical Transparency

This week I’ve been mostly laying in my bed trying to recover from a brutal cold. It’s also Christmas Eve and because of being sick, my shopping is not done and I’ve got to prepare a meal for tonight. On the menu is authentic Japanese Shoyu Ramen with Chashu Pork Belly and all the classic fixings. Our appetizer is going to be Wagyu sushi, chosen by my 10yr old son Otto, who was inspired by one of his favorite creators Nick DiGiovanni.

We will getting the Wagyu and Pork Belly cuts from our local butcher, a mom and pop joint called Snider Bros. Meats., who do an exceptional job. Growing up in Minnesota/Wisconsin my parents made a choice to utilize our local butcher, we had a relationship with them and they were a part of our routine.

I think butchers are an integral part of a community as they are the connection between us and the animals we eat as part of our omnivore diet. I’d much rather get that meat from the people who are experts in sourcing it and processing it and making that connection as close as possible to the animals that feed and fuel us. You don’t want any middlemen or excess time in that connection - it’s worth the small premium you pay and it’s a 10X better experience.

Thoughts / Ideas / Reflections

My weekly thoughts, while probably skewed do to nasty virus I had, were mostly dominated by a few core thoughts.

1. AI Acceleration

2. Human Consciousness

Neither of these things have much to do with this project, other than several of my recent posts have been inspired by these 2 things. My key thought here is that I don’t think many people, certainly less than 1% of the population in the US, are thinking about AI and how quickly it’s accelerating. I’m excited by it, although the challenges it will bring will be large and complex and hard, I believe we have a generation of people ready to take those challenges on. After all, most of us under 45 were molded by our video game consoles, computers, and phones changing rapidly every couple years for our entire lives. We can do this.

The human consciousness piece is because signals I’ve been keyed into for over a year led me to a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. Curled up in a ball on Wednesday night in the guest bedroom I binged the entire first season. It’s about non-verbal autistic children/people who can read each others and their parents and siblings’ minds. The creator, Ky Dickens, does an excellent and detailed job of creating tests with some leading doctors and scientists to prove that this is happening.

My fascination on this topic stems from my own experience with this subject - my 5 year old son Odin has an extra 23rd chromosome, aka Down Syndrome, and has been mostly non-verbal until this point in his life. He communicates with us in a different way sometimes that seems similar. All I will say for now is that when you live and take care of someone with these special gifts and circumstances, your world view opens up to many more possibilities of what being “human” means.

Stats

Percentage to goal: 70% to 30 day goal, 21% to 100 day goal

(I still pumpin these babies out every day and loving it)

• Minimal gains in terms of growth this week. I only promoted 1 post outside of LinkedIn (I have got to find time to figure this piece out) and it did the best by far.

• Gained only 3 new subs

• The positive side to this is that most new subs now are people I do not know in any way that find it organically. Those people have also been very engaged and active (4 & 5 star readers per substack) once they subscribe. I guess that means it’s resonating.

Biggest Learning

In another blow to western medicine and materialism, we have discovered 1 net new form of life and one that was discovered 40 years ago (but recently getting lots of publicity) that reside INSIDE HUMANS. We can now add Obelisks (for real they couldn’t come up with a better word?) and Vaults to the cell biology of humans, both of which are not documented nor taught to western medicine doctors.

The obelisks are smaller-than-virus sized things that scientists are calling viroids, which carry around RNA in tiny loops and are documented to be found in plants. Here is the best line from the article:

Viruses often have protective shells made of proteins. Obelisks seem to lack that familiar coat. Instead, they carry RNA instructions around in tiny loops.

Unlike standard viruses, they do not appear to encode protein shells. These differences suggest that life’s definitions might need some rethinking.

The “Vaults” seem even more mysterious - football shaped grenade like structures that are 3x larger than a typical cell and that even the people studying them for 40 years have no idea what they do. Can we please pump like a few Billion $ into figuring these things out, please?

• Reddit Post on Vaults

• Great longform article on the guy that discovered and has studied them for 40 years

• Wiki page on Vaults

Biggest Win

My son got curious and started playing around with my typewriter in the office after we typed up some cool Christmas stuff together. It’s unbelievable how captivating a Typewriter can be.

Highest Level of Resonance This Week:

It’s Christmas! God is love and love is god! A celebration of creation! What’s better than celebrating creation?

With deep love and appreciation,

-Andrew