Getting Better
Life is about to get better in some big but obvious ways.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard about being an entrepreneur is to “live in the future, then build what’s missing.” This is something I strive to do on a daily basis. I’m constantly examining the world around me, looking for inefficiencies, for things that could and should be better, and would be with some ingenuity and elbow grease.
This isn’t as easy as it sounds! Very often when I try a new app, experience, or service, I’m blown away by how simple the idea is and, in retrospect, how obvious. I remember the first time I used Uber to call a car: like most people, I think, I had never imagined doing this. (Who’d have thought that you could do better than taxis, crappy as they are?) Self-driving cars are similar: it absolutely blew my mind the first time I rode in a Waymo, as the experience is much better even than Uber. (Who’d have thought that self-driving cars are that much better than human drivers?) The same thing happened the first time I drove a Tesla: I’d never in a million years have imagined that it could be so much better than driving an ICE car. (You get the idea.)
It’s fun to channel the entrepreneurial energy and creativity that went into those ideas and try to generate new ones, far beyond just transportation. After all, change is coming to all corners of life. Here’s a few. I doubt we’ll still be using sunscreen the way we are today in a generation or two—something better will surely come along. Before long we’ll probably be able to ditch most cables and switch to wireless entirely for both data and power. It’s pretty obvious that we won’t need to carry physical wallets with physical cards in them for much longer—literally everything will be on our phones soon, from credit cards and bank cards to membership cards to even passports.
These are each a big deal in their own right, but they’re fairly simple and fairly obvious in the grand scheme of things. Here are some bigger, paradigm-shift level changes that I’ve been thinking about lately.
Thing #1: Transportation 🚗
I touched upon this topic recently but I want to visit it again. I’m feeling very inspired by a conversation on techno-optimism between Noah Smith and Patrick Collison that I heard recently. They both mentioned transportation as one of the things they’re specifically optimistic about, and I share their optimism—and not just because of the above examples of Uber, Waymo, and Tesla.
Looking at how we travel today, it seems obvious that things are going to get a lot better soon. As I wrote about last time, they’re certainly a lot better today than they used to be, but they also haven’t changed much in the past few decades. Airplanes haven’t gotten much faster since the introduction of the jet plane ~65 years ago. They can fly further today. They’ve gotten a bit safer, and they’ve gotten more fuel efficient. But if you consider what air travel was like 50 years ago compared to what it’s like today, it’s unclear that it’s actually better overall—for reasons that have very little to do with the technology of flight.
There are two new technologies that are on the verge of totally disrupting travel. The first is supersonic flight. There was a brief era of supersonic flight on the Concorde in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, but it was expensive and niche, and it was never profitable. The Concorde had engineering issues, which led to a tragic fatal accident in 2000. Other than cost, another issue with supersonic flight is the sonic boom: supersonic planes generate a constant sonic boom cone that’s very disruptive to life below, which is why they’ve historically been limited to travel over oceans.
All of this might change soon. A number of new startups, most notably Boom Supersonic, are currently testing new, better models of supersonic planes. Boom already has partnerships with major airlines including United, Delta, and JAL. Boom’s flagship model, the Overture, uses a design that minimizes sonic booms and should allow supersonic flight over land. Supersonic flight might be here sooner than we expect: Boom expects the Overture to enter service by the end of the decade.
Then there’s suborbital earth-to-earth flight, also known as ballistic travel. This basically involves firing a huge rocket up to the lower part of space, then immediately landing somewhere else on earth. It has the potential to allow flights to literally anywhere on the planet in just an hour or two. Major spaceflight companies including SpaceX and Blue Origin are working on this and have viable designs today. Unlike supersonic flight, rockets only generate sonic booms at takeoff and landing, and SpaceX proposes to deal with this by building spaceports off the coast of major cities, which sounds viable to me.
These technologies are still a few years away, but if the rapid development of drones and drone transport in China is any sign of what’s to come, I wouldn’t be surprised if China gets there first and if we begin to see these technologies commercialized within the next decade regardless of the regulatory hurdles. I optimistically expect both to come to market, and to become both cost competitive with and as safe as air travel today, within my lifetime.
In our increasingly globalized, connected world, travel, especially over great distances, is only going to matter more. As someone who travels a lot, I’m excited for a future where traveling to the other side of the planet doesn’t take 30+ hours as it does today. These exciting technologies are mature enough that we can have confidence that they’ll be here sooner rather than later. I’m hopeful that humans will reach Mars in my lifetime too, but I’ll take faster, better earthbound travel as a starting point.
Thing #2: Money 🎰
The original promise of crypto, as a fundamentally better form of money outside the control of the nation state or any single institution, has been clear to me for a long time. But for a long time it seemed like no one else outside the industry cared.
All of that began to change over the last year. The best example of this is the rapid, sudden proliferation of stablecoins. Anyone who’s ever tried sending money abroad using traditional finance rails, and who then tries doing it using stablecoins, will probably never go back to the old way of doing things. Crypto UX in general is still a bit more complicated than it should be, requiring as it does the use of crypto wallets, key management, etc. But over the past year more and more mainstream, institutional players have announced stablecoin support or begun rolling out stablecoin products and platforms.
This isn’t just crypto native and crypto adjacent firms like Coinbase and Stripe. It’s more traditional, conservative firms like JPMorgan, Visa, Walmart and Amazon. It’s nation states, including Russia and Venezuela, which are increasingly trading with one another on stablecoin rails. Stablecoins feel inevitable, since they’re strictly better than traditional finance in so many ways, and crypto feels inevitable if for no other reason than that it has its first killer app.
What does this mean for the world, and for ordinary people? Well, the biggest and most obvious thing is that in the not too distant future we might finally be able to avoid using dismal banks. I expect that, over time, stablecoins, stablecoin native apps and companies will do to banks what Uber did to taxi companies. Whether banks truly get disrupted like taxi companies did, or whether they’re able to reform and improve, remains to be seen.
I welcome this future with open arms. Banks are legacy institutions. Their business model is fundamentally broken, they’re increasingly over-regulated, and they’ve been unable to innovate meaningfully in a long time. The customer experience is a mess. More innovation should mean much better products and much lower prices than what traditional banking can offer today. There’s zero chance that a generation from now we’ll still be paying a 3%+ tax on literally every credit card transaction.
Stablecoin-native, crypto native neo banks won’t be perfect, of course, but we should see a lot more innovation in banking. Most obviously, unlike traditional banking, you shouldn’t be forced to use a bank that happens to be in the same city, state, or even country as you. This is one of the beautiful things about crypto and internet native money: it works everywhere the Internet works. This will be a major enabler of another form of innovation: regulatory innovation and arbitrage. Customers and deposits should flock to the companies that are able to offer the best products and services at the cheapest prices, and those neo banks should in turn flock to the jurisdictions that offer the best, most friendly regulatory environments. Smart regulators take note! Retail capital is about to become a whole lot more mobile.
Even better, the best crypto native banks should offer non-custodial or joint-custodial products. This means that, rather than giving up custody of your funds to an institution that can seize them at any time and choose not to give them back if they feel like it or are compelled not to, you’ll still be fully in control of your assets at all times. If you don’t think this matters, talk to a friend from Argentina, Cyprus, Lebanon, Venezuela, or any of the dozen other countries that have arbitrarily and unilaterally seized retail deposits in recent decades. The first such products already exist: see the Metamask Card and Gnosis Pay Card.
Cryptocurrency is getting better and the infrastructure is maturing every day. Privacy technology is rapidly getting better on crypto, increasingly allaying concerns about the privacy of on-chain transactions. And then there’s the fact that Bitcoin has much better monetary policy than any fiat currency. Most stablecoins today are indexed to the USD which is anything but “stable” over the long term, but eventually we should have other stablecoin options that, like gold, better hold their value relative to rapidly inflating fiat currency.
Thing #3: Health 💊
Health and wellness are on my mind more and more these days, probably because of my age and because I’m a parent and want to stay young for my kids for as long as possible.
I’m of two minds about health today. On the one hand, it’s almost embarrassingly easy to be healthy (assuming you have the necessary raw ingredients—having resources obviously helps). Drink enough water. Get enough sleep. Eat well, not too much, and avoid alcohol. Stay active. Prioritize time with friends and family. Touch grass. Be mindful and prioritize your mental and spiritual health. That’s 80% of what you need, and if you manage all of this, you’re easily in the top 3% of healthiest people.
On the other hand, optimizing that last 20% is much harder. This is where things get very complicated very quickly. I have a lot of friends who are at least as health-conscious as I am. I suppose we’re aging as a cohort, and health optimization seems to be something people focus on once they’re materially pretty well off: call this the Bryan Johnson effect. And they seem to have radically different approaches to health which they’re all equally fervent about.
I have friends who have decided to become carnivores and cut plants out of their diet entirely. They swear by this choice and offer lots of evidence to show how much healthier they are now. By the same token I have friends who are vegans and also swear by veganism. I have friends who are terrified of seed oils, and friends who are terrified of sunscreen. I also have friends who take a daily regimen of dozens of supplements. Some take 40-50 a day, and they also swear by this. There’s the folks who regularly do IV drips or go for stem cell treatment. There’s the folks who are obsessed with saunas and cold plunges, and make sure they spend time in the sauna every day. There are folks who are into sonic therapy, cryotherapy, and sensory deprivation. The latest craze seems to be peptides. I’m in several chat groups where friends compare sources and “stacks.” And don’t get me started on psychedelics. (For my part, I tend to avoid almost all supplements and try to keep things as simple and natural as possible, but I do love hearing stories from friends who experiment more than I do.)
I see two reasons for this experimentation. First, every body truly is different and what works for one person doesn’t work for another: the example of the vegans and the carnivores drives this point home because the two diets are mutually exclusive!
Secondly, and more interestingly, beyond the proven basics I listed above—sleep, water, etc.—we really don’t know what works. We know shockingly little about our own bodies and about how to optimize them. New treatment and therapy modalities are emerging all the time, and it often takes a very long time for the science to become established because studies are, naturally, difficult for a bunch of reasons. There are ethical concerns with many modalities, most obviously things like psychedelics, but it’s an issue any time a treatment involves putting a novel substance into the body. Informed consent is hard. Running true double-blind RCTs is hard. And it takes a very long time, and a lot of dedication, to collect the sort of long-term, longitudinal data that we need to draw firm empirical conclusions. Actually, for this reason, I strongly support personal experimentation, within reasonable guidelines, and with the understanding that what works for one person won’t necessarily work for anyone else.
Anyway, it seems clear today that all of this is about to get much easier. I’ve been experimenting with “quantified self”—with data-driven tools for measuring and optimizing your own health—for nearly two decades. I’ve been collecting data since then, and I never really knew what to do with it. That was always the failure mode of “quantified self”: you can collect lots of data, but not much of it is actionable.
Recently, I finally began really using that data with AI: creating visuals, running regressions, looking for correlations, etc. I’ve looked at the impact of sleep, diet, location, weather and season, travel, and gear on my running. With the help of AI, I’ve found and corrected several major dietary mistakes, such as an acute imbalance of macronutrients and unnecessary supplements. And I’ve begun to analyze my workout data in a way that wasn’t possible before: planning my gym sessions and my run routes much more carefully, balancing load more carefully, scheduling the hardest workouts when I’m peaking, etc.
Yes, some of this was previously possible using tools like Strava and Whoop. I still use some of those tools and I find them generally useful. But when I give the data directly to an AI agent to analyze, it’s so much more flexible. I can have a conversation with that data, pick it apart, double click on things, ask the agent to explain theory and cite research, ask it to propose new ideas, etc. AI tools are amazing at this sort of work and they constantly impress me. One random, recent example: given just a single run data export, an agent was able to download and cross-reference local map data, traffic data, weather data, elevation data, and run heatmap data to help me design an optimal run route that I had never considered before. It took three or four prompts and about 20 minutes, and cost basically nothing, and the result was significantly better than what I get from paid tools like Strava. I’m not aware of anything today, other than spending literally millions of dollars and having an entire team on staff, Bryan Johnson style, that allows this.
It seems obvious that we’re soon going to have much more powerful health tools at our disposal—and as with all other software we’re going to be able to build our own, better, custom tools. And a lot of this sort of experimentation and optimization is about to get a heck of a lot easier. It’s going to be a golden age for biohacking, too.
I fully expect and hope that my children will live in a future world where they never have to learn to drive and can reach anywhere on earth in a couple of hours, where they never need a traditional bank account, and where they have much more knowledge about and control over their health. It’s a glorious future, but we have a lot of work to do to get there.
This post inspires me to keep building !