Welcome to Block’s bday week. My bday is this week (Thursday, the 15th) and I’m feelin’ balanced. This newsletter is, after all, named #thebalance for a reason, people…
Self plug talks aside, I do make an effort to keep the block talk to a minimum around here (letting the content instead speak for itself), but this things gotta have some personality and individualism embedded within. After all, this fine little newsletter is an extension of my perspective on the world, that hopefully sparks curiosity on new subjects for you along the way.
THANKS to each of you for reading week in and week out. I truly appreciate your readership and support as I work to grow this little passion project of mine. It can be a lot of work to keep up the weekly cadence (especially when trying to build a business), but it makes it a lot easier (any more fulfilling) to do it when you have the support of a community behind you. I consider myself lucky to have an audience willing to read my curated topics/thoughts/opinions each and every week.
So, thanks to YOU for reading. Your continued support is a pretty damn good birthday present.
-Block
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Keeping an excerpt I wrote in last week’s post, as I think its good inspo for all of us this month:
“The power to shape and improve the world for the better starts now. Lets use this time of increasing uncertainty as a wake up call for change… and let’s not forget that with destruction comes creation. There is no better time than now to adjust your outlook and put some positive energy out there in the world.”
With that, I am sending good vibes to all y’all to kick this month off - starting with a playlist of ‘flow state’ tunes. Check it out in #otherthings below, if you haven’t yet!
❤️ Likes, shares, and ‘my contacts’ adds are appreciated! It helps others discover what they have been missing out on while ensuring gmail doesn’t junk this thing either :)
⬇️ #thinkingthings, #followerthings, and #otherthings ⬇️
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🤔🤔 #thinkingthings
🟥 >>>> The End of the American Internet
I live this every day in crypto, working my team (where I am the only American).
I know I am not alone in this. An ever more increasing amount of us operate in a borderless fashion in both our professional and personal lives. The boundaries are blurring not only in our day-to-day work/home lives, but also how we identify with the world. Whether we choose to recognize it or not, we are all becoming inherently more global. More interconnected regardless of our national affiliation.
Have you used TikTok recently? Transacted via the internet? How about interacted with a tech platform while traveling abroad? Browsed a foreign website? Then you, too, are perpetuating the digital first, interconnected, and borderless economy…. and this is something that is just getting started. The implications will be profound across all avenues of society/culture. An example of what the future of citizenship might look like.
We talk a lot about the digitization of the world around here and that COVID is the great accelerator of the internet economy. The borderless economy. The digital first economy. However you’d like to refer to it.
The fact is that our identities, habits, and communities are increasingly more online… the question that remains, however, is who will lead the next phase of growth for the internet economy? A nation state? A union of countries? A corporation? or a company run by code /online communities (this is not as far fetched as you think)? This, in my opinion, is the next battle ground for world power that is already well underway and its shortsighted to believe that the US will continue to maintain its top position globally (regulatory, GDP, innovation, values, etc.) for this next phase of economic evolution unless it can rekindle some of that old innovative fire within the public sector and find a way to quickly adjust to the rapidly evolving digital economy.
>>> The below report from Benedict Evans, a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, argues (via extensive data and charts - we like charts) that the end of the American-powered internet is here. The situation with Tiktok is not a one off, but instead, is the starting point for an increasing amount of non-American companies that will become global powerhouses of their own (see China), reaching to all corners of the globe wile generating tremendous amounts of wealth along the way. Companies like Tiktok are just the tip of the iceberg… Enjoy the read below.
When Netscape launched in 1994 and kicked off the consumer internet, there were maybe 100m PCs on earth, and over half of them were in the USA. The web was invented in Switzerland, and computers were invented in the UK, but the internet was American. American companies set the agenda and created most of the important products and services, and American attitudes, cultures and laws around regulation and speech dominated.
This is not quite so true anymore. 80-90% of internet users are now outside the USA, there are more smartphone users in China than in the USA and western Europe combined, and the creation of venture-based startups has gone global.
Meanwhile, of course, the internet became vastly more important. In the last decade it has gone from being interesting and exciting but not really an important part of most people’s lives to being a central part of society. This is my favorite way to illustrate this - by 2017, almost half of new (straight) relationships in the USA started online.
This has two pretty basic sets of consequences.
First, technology is becoming a regulated industry, if only because important and specialized industries are always regulated. That regulation will not only be determined by the USA.
Second, you can no longer assume that the important companies and products themselves are American.
Both of these are captured in Tiktok. This is the first time that Americans have really had to deal with their teenagers using a form of mass media that isn’t created in their country by people who mostly share their values. It’s from somewhere else. That’s compounded by the fact that the ‘somewhere else’ is China, with all of the political and geopolitical issues that come with that, but I’d suggest that the core, structural issue is that it’s foreign. This is, of course, a problem that the rest of the world has been wrestling with since 1994, but it comes as something of a shock in Washington DC. There’s an old joke that war is how God teaches Americans geography - now it’s regulation.
There are many questions that flow out of this. One, for example, is how far and how many Chinese consumer internet companies will spread globally as opposed to being constrained by their domestic environment (this would be the ‘Galapagos Effect’ often suggested of Japanese tech. Tiktok worked, but WeChat failed).
You can argue about the details of these all day, but it does seem clear that we should just presume a global diffusion of software creation and internet company creation. It doesn’t really matter if Silicon Valley ends up as 25% or 75% of the next 100 important companies - America doesn’t have a monopoly on the agenda any more.
Hence, there are all sorts of issues with the ways that the US government has addressed Tiktok in 2020, but the most fundamental, I think, is that it has acted as though this is a one-off, rather than understanding that this is the new normal - there will be hundreds more of these.
You can’t one-at-a-time this - you need a systematic, repeatable approach. You can’t ask to know the citizenship of the shareholders in every popular app - you need rules that apply to everyone. Today, the rules come from Apple, or California, both of which are increasingly becoming America’s privacy regulators by default. But they will also come from the EU, which is increasingly writing laws that, intentionally or not, change how American companies do business in America, and the more different rules we have in different places, the more fragmented and complicated things get.
Regulation is an export industry, and a competitive industry.
🟥 >>>> Decarbonization of the Economy
An optimistic take from one of my favorite thought leaders, Fred Wilson, on one of the sectors of the new age economy that is increasingly becoming one of the most important challenges of our time: decarbonization of the world.
Over the last decade, I have moved away from oil and gas in our homes and have installed solar panels for electricity and heat pumps for heating and cooling. It has gotten less expensive to do this swap out as solar and heat pump costs have come down. My partner Albert told me that when you factor in the financing costs of this swap, the average home in the Northeast United States could save $1000 to $2000 a year by doing this swap.
What this means is that homeowners can and should go to the bank and borrow the money to remove oil and gas powered boilers and replace them with energy efficient heat pumps and put solar on their roofs to power them. They should do this not just because it is good for the climate, but because it is good for the bank account. That’s a big deal.
I saw this chart in Azeem Azhar’s excellent Exponential View newsletter this week:
Electricity generation and consumption in the US has stabilized over the last twenty years and the use of coal to generate electricity is plummeting. In another twenty years this chart will have a huge amount of green and almost no red in it.
The de-carbonization of the economy is a megatrend that is already underway and is highly investable because the unit economics of renewables and energy efficient electrical equipment is now superior to the unit economics of carbon and mechanical equipment. We can see this in cars (EVs>Gas) and heating/cooling systems and many other aspects of our economy.
The narrative somehow has been that addressing the climate crisis is going to hurt our economy. I believe that is plain wrong. I believe it will power a huge economic boom that will look much like the boom that powered the carbon/mechanical/industrial economy from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. So let’s get on with it.
🟥 >>>> Grapefruits are weird AF
Fun fact: grapefruits are my favorite fruit (and a metaphor for how I describe myself… simple, yet complex :)). I eat them nonstop when they are in season. Typically mauled above the kitchen sink - too messy for a bowl (if you know, you know).
To level set: Grapefruit is a mix between the pomelo—a base fruit—and a sweet orange, which itself is a hybrid of pomelo and mandarin.
A little botany, history, politics, supply chain and health knowledge can be found below - the backstory on how grapefruit came to be. Pretty wild (get it) how one fruit has shaped so many different things we accept as the status quo… like how many varieties of citrus fruits there are globally, how grapefruits helped Florida grow, or how influential industry lobbyist groups can be in the state of things.
IN 1989, DAVID BAILEY, A researcher in the field of clinical pharmacology (the study of how drugs affect humans), accidentally stumbled on perhaps the biggest discovery of his career, in his lab in London, Ontario.
That food was grapefruit, a seemingly ordinary fruit that is, in truth, anything but ordinary. Right from the moment of its discovery, the grapefruit has been a true oddball. Its journey started in a place where it didn’t belong, and ended up in a lab in a place where it doesn’t grow. Hell, even the name doesn’t make any sense.
THE CITRUS FAMILY OF FRUITS is native to the warmer and more humid parts of Asia. The current theory is that somewhere around five or six million years ago, one parent of all citrus varieties splintered into separate species, probably due to some change in climate. Three citrus fruits spread widely: the citron, the pomelo, and the mandarin.
With the exception of those weirdos like the finger lime, all other citrus fruits are derived from natural and, before long, artificial crossbreeding, and then crossbreeding the crossbreeds, and so on, of those three fruits. Mix certain pomelos and certain mandarins and you get a sour orange. Cross that sour orange with a citron and you get a lemon. It’s a little bit like blending and reblending primary colors.
Because those base fruits are all native to Asia, the vast majority of hybrid citrus fruits are also from Asia. Grapefruit, however, is not. In fact, the grapefruit was first found a world away, in Barbados, probably in the mid-1600s. The early days of the grapefruit are plagued by mystery. Citrus trees had been planted casually by Europeans all over the West Indies, with hybrids springing up all over the place, and very little documentation of who planted what, and which mixed with which. Citrus, see, naturally hybridizes when two varieties are planted near each other.
Sometimes it didn’t work very well. Many citrus varieties, due to being excessively inbred, don’t even create a fruiting tree when grown from seed. But other times, random chance could result in something special. The grapefruit is, probably, one of these. The word “probably” is warranted there, because none of the history of the grapefruit is especially clear. Part of the problem is that the word “grapefruit” wasn’t even recorded, at least not in any surviving documents, until the 1830s.
Citrus hybridizes so easily that there are undoubtedly thousands of varieties in the wild and in cultivation.
Grapefruit is wild, and wants to remain wild. In 1910, one of Atwood’s workers discovered that one tree was producing pink grapefruits; until then, Florida grapefruits had all been yellow-white on the inside. It became a huge success, leading to the patenting of the Ruby Red grapefruit in 1929. Soon Atwood had become the world’s biggest producer of grapefruit, supplying what was considered a luxury product to royalty and aristocracy.
By the time of the Civil War, Florida’s population was the lowest of any Southern state, and even that was clustered in its northern reaches. It was the citrus groves down there that enticed anyone to even bother with the broiling, humid, swampy, hurricane-ridden, malarial region. In the late 1800s, railroads were constructed to deliver that citrus—and grapefruit was a huge part of this—to the rest of the country and beyond. One of those railroads was even called the Orange Belt Railway.
The railroads made South Florida accessible to more people, and in the 1920s, developers began snapping up chunks of the state and selling them as a sunny vacation spot. It worked, and the state’s population swelled. Florida as we know it today exists because of citrus (of course it does 🤣).
Grapefruit has long been associated with health. Even in the 1800s and before, early chroniclers of fruit in the Caribbean described it as being good for you. Perhaps it’s something about the combination of bitter, sour, and sweet that reads as vaguely medicinal.
This is especially ironic, because the grapefruit, as Bailey would show, is actually one of the most destructive foes of modern medicine in the entire food world.
The human body has mechanisms to break down stuff that ends up in the stomach. The one involved here is cytochrome P450, a group of enzymes that are tremendously important for converting various substances to inactive forms. Drugmakers factor this into their dosage formulation as they try to figure out what’s called the bioavailability of a drug, which is how much of a medication gets to your bloodstream after running the gauntlet of enzymes in your stomach. For most drugs, it is surprisingly little—sometimes as little as 10 percent.
Grapefruit has a high volume of compounds called furanocoumarins, which are designed to protect the fruit from fungal infections. When you ingest grapefruit, those furanocoumarins permanently take your cytochrome P450 enzymes offline. There’s no coming back. Grapefruit is powerful, and those cytochromes are donezo. So the body, when it encounters grapefruit, basically sighs, throws up its hands, and starts producing entirely new sets of cytochrome P450s. This can take over 12 hours.
This rather suddenly takes away one of the body’s main defense mechanisms. If you have a drug with 10 percent bioavailability, for example, the drugmakers, assuming you have intact cytochrome P450s, will prescribe you 10 times the amount of the drug you actually need, because so little will actually make it to your bloodstream. But in the presence of grapefruit, without those cytochrome P450s, you’re not getting 10 percent of that drug. You’re getting 100 percent. You’re overdosing. And it does not take an excessive amount of grapefruit juice to have this effect: Less than a single cup can be enough, and the effect doesn’t seem to change as long as you hit that minimum.
Here’s a brief and incomplete list of some of the medications that research indicates get screwed up by grapefruit:
Benzodiazepines (Xanax, Klonopin, and Valium)
Amphetamines (Adderall and Ritalin)
Anti-anxiety SSRIs (Zoloft and Paxil)
Cholesterol-lowering statins (Lipitor and Crestor)
Erectile-dysfunction drugs (Cialis and Viagra)
Various over-the-counter meds (Tylenol, Allegra, and Prilosec)
And about a hundred others.
This is even more dangerous because grapefruit is a favorite of older Americans. The grapefruit’s flavor, that trademark bitterness, is so strong that it can cut through the decreased taste sensitivity of an aged palate, providing flavor for those who can’t taste a lot of other foods very well. And older Americans are also much more likely to take a variety of pills, some of which may interact with grapefruit.
There’s plenty of really helpful, healthy stuff in a grapefruit, especially vitamin C, which it has in spades. He just makes the case that in a time when more than half of Americans take multiple pills per day, and 20 percent take five or more, grapefruit-drug interactions are just something everyone should know about.
The United States produces more grapefruit than any other country, from Florida and now California as well (and elsewhere, though in smaller quantities). The industry is not unaware of this issue. In fact, citrus growers have been working for more than a decade on a variety of grapefruit that doesn’t interfere with drugs. But the industry has more pressing problems, especially the disease called huanglongbing, or citrus greening, that’s ravaging groves, and the citrus lobby certainly doesn’t want more drugs labeled “Do not take with grapefruit.”
📲🧑🏽🤝🧑🏻 #followerthings
(continuation from the first article in #thinkingthings above)
(^dis me)
Well when you put it like that….
📚⏯️🎤 #otherthings
With my favorite month of the year coming up (but not because I was born in October or anything), it just felt right to make a playlist. I will continue to add to it over the coming weeks, but give it a listen/follow if you’re feelin’ musical.
FALL FLOW 10/20: The playlist has more of an overall chill flow vibe, with some of my timeless favorites sprinkled in. It only felt right to name it ‘fall flow’ given this being the year of ebbs and flows… 2020 has been a balancing act for many of us no doubt.
Give it a listen 👂, fade out, and find yo’ flow.
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Stay safe out there. Peace and love to all y’all.
Curiously,
-Block
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About me:
My friends call me Block. I am the CSO & Cofounder at Alkemi.Network, a company focused on bridging digital finance for institutions. This newsletter is my passion project.
I am endlessly curious and blissfully dissatisfied. I love new ideas, obsessed with all things technology, and am always seeking to broaden my perspective while striving for balance, of course.
I am a futurist, investor, entrepreneur, builder, advisor, life long learner, hockey player, traveler, podcast addict, hip-hop head, e-newsletter junkie, event planner, and comedic-short producer. Follow me on Twitter here and Instagram here.
“Find a question that makes the world interesting.” - Paul Graham