Definite Optimist Weekly Roundup #4

Rare Earths, Next in Crypto, & a Primer on AI

SBF On Crypto

SBF talks through the future of crypto, being a founder, and his focus as a member of the EA movement:

More from SBF on potential use cases for crypto. He highlights 3: payments, market structure, and social media.

SBF @SBF_FTX

1) To what end? Some potential use-cases for crypto.

The New American Frontier

South Park Commons is going to be putting on a speaker Series on the New American Frontier - this starts tomorrow, July 18th!

South Park Commons @southpkcommons

We're excited to announce the New American Frontier (NAF) Speaker Series! NAF focuses on industries that will have outsized impact on the future, like energy, space, housing, defense, climate, & more. And we're opening the series up to the public.

blog.southparkcommons.comAnnouncing the New American Frontier Speaker SeriesA new speakers series, open to the public, exploring the intersection between government & tech—and the industries that will shape the future.

Engineering the James Webb Telescope

The James Webb telescope photos took the internet by storm last week. But how the hell does it work?

Real Engineering goes deep into it:

Innovation in US Defense

Palmer Lucky & Anduril team on their focus and current mission:

This episode of Solarpunk with Hermeus founder AJ Piplica is also critical on the topic of hypersonics:

ITS TIME TO MINE?

I knew that rare earth metals were important, but I didn’t know the scope & scale of their importance to our technology and defense sector. I also knew that China had a majority of control over these supply chains, but I did not realize their level of dominance. This is a critical issue for geopolitics & the future of energy production.

Control the Metal, Control the World

AI

A great primer on AI with Alexandr Wang - the founder of Scale AI. One really interesting takeaway from DALL E, Github Copilot, and GPT-3 is that the jobs which are most likely to be automated or augmented first are white collar jobs. Wang explains why this is and delves deeper into the AI market landscape in this episode of Invest Like the Best:

New hardware is also being built to keep up with innovation in ML.

(Asianometry is such a good Youtube channel btw. If you’re interested in advanced hardware, manufacturing, and Asia, you should check it out)

Good Times

I came across the Good Time Show this week, and found 2 really A+ episodes.

Cleo Abram runs the show Huge if True* which does some really great explainer content and explorations into new technologies. In this episode she walks through her reasoning behind starting the show, and her desire to bring more optimistic content around tech to the world.

This conversation with Balaji goes wide ranging - but it’s excellent as always.

What Should You Work On?

I’ll leave this episode here without much comment, but if you’re a very objective oriented person - this might make you consider following your curiosity more often (regardless of where it may take you)