Everything I share — writing, short curated lists, and links. You can also find me on Threads.
Although we will never have perfect data to rule out any possible link, it seems very important to ask, *What is the evidence on the other side?* What is the reason to think there *is* an association? The answer is: nothing.
Silicon Valley’s best — our top operators, exited founders, and most powerful investors — are almost all on *bad quests.* Exiting your first startup only to enter venture capital and fight your peers for allocation in a hot deal is a bad quest. Armchair philosophizing on Twitter is a bad quest. Yachting between emails in de facto retirement at age 35 is a very bad quest.
Somehow, I’d turned the thrilling prospect of a better life into a sequence of lifeless tasks I had to execute – and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Of course, I realise that any meaningful goal entails *some* less-than-thrilling tasks. But these top-down, willpower-heavy systems sucked the joy from *everything*, even the theoretically thrilling bits, leaving no room for spontaneity, or the rhythms of inspiration, or my shifting moods.
No moment could better capture the fundamental irony of Trump's second term: a populist revolution that begins with the people outside pressing their faces against the glass.
The Power of the Perfect Pause
A more interesting question—a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before—is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
This new infrastructure will additionally require regular inspections and maintenance by trained staff to ensure integrity. But, these protocols would not be widely dissimilar to current kerosene handling processes – and with time would become the norm.
Let’s start with what Altman is doing right: physically writing stuff down. I love my colleague David Pierce, but he is hideously wrong about basically every productivity tool because he insists on using a computer. At this point, we have multiple studies showing that writing by hand is better for learning and memory. You want to remember something? Write, don’t type.
I’m not quite as bullish as some of the public statements around how quickly we can ramp up the system, but in the medium to long term—ten years out—I’m actually quite bullish. I think this is a mode of transportation that will eventually become quite frequently used. It will be safe, it will save many of us time, it will be sustainable—so there’s a bright future to look forward to.
Advances in low-carbon and renewable hydrogen production also will be crucial to the maturity of the PtL value chain. Lowering the levelized cost of hydrogen (which includes renewable-electricity input but excludes transport and distribution) to less than $1 per kilogram would reduce the cost of PtL to $1,200 to $1,800 per ton, depending on the carbon source, amounting to a 40 percent reduction in average cost by 2030. While this cost is still higher than that of fossil jet fuel, it is within range of alternative SAFs. Low-carbon hydrogen, sometimes referred to as “blue,” is derived primarily from natural gas using carbon capture and storage, while renewable or “green” hydrogen is made with renewable electricity. Low-carbon hydrogen is more cost-competitive than renewable hydrogen today and can be used as a transition technology to scale PtL faster. Although low-carbon hydrogen has lower production costs, it requires capturing CO2 twice to produce PtL—once in the hydrogen production route and again in the fuel synthesis step. Since this is an inherently inefficient system, renewable hydrogen can be prioritized for PtL production over the long term.