The Weekly Distillation No.78
Crypto; NFTs; DAOs; AI; Synthetic Milk; Chip Implants; Quiet Quitting; Tall Leaders; Remote Work; World Cup
Photo
This newsletter is written for entrepreneurial leaders who want to learn about the moment we are living in but don’t have time to read broadly; who want to grasp the key themes; and who want to create better ways of advancing their mission. The Weekly Distillation covers a broad range of topics with the intent to curate the key narratives of the week, how they fit the broader themes of society and to pose questions that help you to think deeper on the application in your context. You can read more about the key themes I see here.
People once said…………
“I understand the situation is very tough……..So when you start counting pennies on your bank account or in your pocket, we do the same and count our casualties.” - Olena Zelenska
“If we don’t stop Putin in Ukraine we are going to see others under threat – the Baltics, Poland, Moldova – and it could end up in a conflict with Nato. We do not want to go there. That is why it is so important we make the sacrifices now.” - Liz Truss
“If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven't done much today.” - Mikhail Gorbachev
“My life's work has been accomplished. I did all that I could.” - Mikhail Gorbachev
“Aid workers have appealed for urgent donations to fight the “absolutely devastating” impact of flooding in Pakistan, as new satellite images appeared to confirm that a third of the country is now underwater.” - The Guardian
Skim it in a minute
Crypto & Web3
I’ve not written about Web 3 for a few weeks - mostly because I’ve been occupying my mind elsewhere, but also because much of the discourse has been about fraud, crime (Tornado Cash), bridges being hacked and the collapse in values and volumes of trades. No-one really wants to read more on that stuff.
Andreesen Horowitx, the highly respected VC that has the largest dedicated crypto fund ($7.6bn of AUM for just crypto/web3), announced a “Can’t Be Evil” NFT license, along the lines of the Creative Commons license you will be familiar with. It’s good to see recognition of the problems that can come with NFTs. Staying on NFTs, renting NFTs is about to become a thing.
YC alumni have created a fund that leverages a DAO structure for governance and for work. The DAO structure for VC funds is really interesting - because it draws the LP / individual investor much closer to the decision making process and makes the democratisation of funding easier to realise. It doesn’t yet solve the problem of disengaged token holders or one holder dominating the pool of governance tokens and thus centralising the voting power. If you want a sense of what DAO drama is like in reality, go deep into the Maker DAO recent narrative. DAOs feel very much not quite ready for the big time but still remain as potentially the most impactful part of Web 3 IMHO. Dynamic Quorums might be interesting - but could just cause a roadblock of token holders stay as disengaged as they have been.
Well done to recent pivot Mava who is setting out to solve the lack of customer support in the Web 3 world.
Technology is reshaping our bodies, minds and the world around us
I was catching up on a couple of hundred emails today that were links and articles that could feed this newsletter. There are some amazing inventions and creativity right now. AI’s application to the real world is increasingly evident - not always compellingly, but evident nonetheless. However, many of these developments are raising serious questions as to what sort of world we want to live in, what is a human, how do we address ethics and is their fair access to these products to those without high incomes or capital. Here’s some to stretch your mind.
One company still wants to put drones with tasers into schools, to tackle armed shooters, which is mildly better than the plan to put drones with guns on in schools. Imagine if this becomes AI driven. On the other hand, the last US state school I was in had an armed deputy Sheriff patrolling the halls and escape rooms from each classroom in case needed in an active shooter situation. Where’s the madness?
Ai is now developing artwork and in one recent case, this was submitted into an art contest and won. What is art? Is this the end of the artist? In another example from this week, DALL-E can now extrapolate your picture and expand it to a larger space, working out what would be surrounding the image you created. Just imagine your 3-year-old child’s simple painting and then turned out into 100 metre long wallpaper rolls………
Synthetic milk made without cows is on the way. Once I was in a supermarket in the US and it advertised cheese that actually contains cheese. A strange and beautiful land indeed. I may draw the line at milk that does not come from cows however. Where are the benefits? Less cows is less methane (although including seaweed in animal feed has a similar effect). Better treatment for animals. Scalability of milk production. Less antibiotics and hormone growth drugs making it into the milk. Not so good for farmers. If this had been around in my childhood maybe we would have kept receiving school milk and Margaret Thatcher would not be known for being “Thatcher, Thatcher, the Milk Snatcher”.
How do you feel about rap? I have a couple of spoken word / poet connections and I love to go down the “so what is the difference between hip hop, poetry, spoken word, battle rap and rap” rabbit warren with them. How do you feel if the rapper is an AI generated character? Is music dead? He got dropped shortly afterwards.
There’s a dude that has implanted chips inside himself that allow him to unlock his Tesla without keys. This feels like a solution without a problem. However, implants are real and coming - and in one case recently have been shown to last up to 7 years without needing replaced. Here it is in his own words
“We’re at the dawn of this technology and it’s a very niche product. And there’s been a lot of pushback. People thought that Bill Gates was putting tracking chips in the Covid vaccine. It fuels a lot of conspiracy theories. It’s funny because these chips can’t track anything. You would need an external power supply to be tracked anywhere. And their phones are tracking them everywhere they go anyway. If you go to your Google location history, it shows you step-by-step where you’ve been. And there’s the religious people who have sent me a bunch of weird comments on Facebook about the mark of the beast on the video of my first chip installation. There’s something in the Book of Revelation that talks about this mark in your hand or forehead that shows your allegiance to Satan or something like that. I just don’t want to have to worry about forgetting my car keys. I’m not over here worshiping Satan.”
If you think that’s strange, there’s also technology that can read your thoughts and turn them into pictures. How do you feel about that next time you’re in a meaningful meeting? And a material that can learn like the brain.
Researchers are close to making human sex cells in the lab. This is a classic technological advance where you can see how it serves a real and painful problem for a subset of society, but raises massive questions for society as a whole. How will we navigate these? Is it through regulation, laws and controls? Or freedom and individual choice? Or outright bans? Or do we just welcome all new technology?
“The advances could herald the end of infertility—there’s no need to worry about a lack of healthy eggs or sperm if you can create new ones in the lab. It would open up alternative routes to parenthood as well. Same-sex couples could have genetically related children. If a cisgender woman could create her own sperm cells, she could use them to fertilize the egg of a partner. Likewise, a cisgender man could produce his own eggs to be fertilized by the sperm of his partner. And why stop there? The technology would allow four parents to make equal genetic contributions to a baby, for example. Or a single person could produce both the sperm and the egg that create an embryo.”
The pace of change is accelerating rapidly - which is going to benefit the world in lots of ways. Thoughtful adoption of technology, and forums and leadership and research to shape that adoption are critical.
What’s happening in the workplace
I caught up with a friend this week who leads a significant fast-growing technology company. His company has now introduced (after polling their staff on what would make a difference to their work and life outside of pay) no-meeting Wednesdays, flexible Fridays (if you’ve done your work for the week you can take the day off, subject to line manager consent), no team-meeting Fridays, unlimited holidays and boundaries on when colleagues can send you Slack messages and emails. I have another friend who runs a significant technology company who has moved his team to 9-day fortnights - one Friday off every 2 weeks. He also doesn’t check email in the mornings. Flexibility is becoming a signficant recruiting factor, retention factor and arguably a productivity factor. Obviously these are two examples of desk workers and so it does not extrapolate in all circumstances.
Quiet quitting is all over the press at the moment - this sense of I’m not happy in my job but I’m not leaving and so I’ll do the minimum required and check out mentally. When I was growing up this was called “taking the huff”. Nothing new. I wonder if it’s a sign of a generation that feels entitled (see last week’s newsletter for a rant on this). I’d struggle with my integrity if I was to take that approach to my employer. The BBC believes that quiet quitting is nothing new and I agree. There is a positive angle to this though and it’s in the short-term. If you’ve worked to midnight 3 nights in a row and your body and mind are collapsing around you, putting boundaries around your work to let yourself recover CAN be a good thing.
Tall people are more likely to be seen as leaders and people who moved jobs in the US are getting raises twice as much as if they’d stayed with their employers. My favourite of the week though is flagging to employers that the remote employee they just hired may not even be real, you might have just hired a deepfake - this is a thing.
The workplace of the future seems likely to be more remote, more flexible, more complex (social issues, political viewpoints, generational differences) and more artificial (metaverse, deepfakes, AI, AR, VR). Who’s training people how to lead well into this?
I had the strange experience this week of having a meeting at the Crichton estate in Dumfries - which used to be an 85-acre residential care site for psychiatric patients, at points treated a couple of people I knew well, and is also the location of the church where my mother’s funeral was held. The overall estate is an amazing location, and it was good to hear of great work going on in that part of the world. Dumfries & Galloway is arguably the most under-sung part of Scotland. However, the highlight of this week was reading this article and remembering the World Cup is around the corner. I have begun setting expectations in my family that all I will do that month, whilst I endeavour to watch all 63 games (many on catchup rather than live), is eat, work, sleep and watch football - oh, and complete my Panini sticker album which has become a major tournament ritual My last one cost me £350 not £883. This next week involves two roadtrips, a steak lunch, a vegetarian dinner and three nights out. Thanks for reading and enjoy the weekend.
Huh? My remote employee might not even be real?! Food for thought...