And I don’t really like watching charts or figuring out when to sell. It feels like a waste of my time relative to the opportunity cost of working on my own projects for example.

So as tempting as it is to buy tokens when I see them and think they are going to go up in the hours/days to come, I have tried to resist doing so to protect myself from the time/attention suck that comes with it.

Of course, if I see something at a good value that I think I would want to hold for a long time, like months or years, then that looks more like an investment than a trade, and I will still pull the trigger on that.

I enjoy investing and find it to be a worthwhile use of my time. Investing is in large part what has given me the freedom and flexibility to have as much control over what I do with my time as I’ve had over the last several years, outside of ~4 years of full-time employment.

So I’m still investing, just slowing it down a bit on the trading. And that makes it sound like I was trading a lot, which I really wasn’t, but it was seemingly influencing an outsized amount of my time despite not at all being my primary focus. Those are not the kinds of activities I like to do.

There’s no obvious answer to that question.

At least, there is no global consensus.

But doesn’t it seem like an important question?

> What’s the most important link on the internet today?

That’s effectively the most important thing in the world.

On that given day.

So what if we could actually know what it was?

Well, maybe we can.

For the last year, I’ve been building @qrcoindotfun.

It’s a daily auction for attention.

Any number of people from anywhere on earth can permissionlessly start or contribute to bids on the auction.

You can think of it as an open internet auction with “group bidding” built in.

Each bid is tied to a specific link which is set by whoever starts the bid.

Then anyone can contribute to any bid in an effort to help win the auction and drive attention to that link for a day.

All attention flows through what we call the QR coin ($QR).

$QR is a functional QR code which redirects to a different link every day.

The QR code never changes, so it compounds attention over time, accumulating more power to direct an increasing amount of attention to a different link every day, as determined by the winner of the daily auction.

Over the last year, we’ve built this machine from scratch, and a growing number of people have been checking out the winning link every day.

322 days in, the daily auction is still relatively inexpensive to win. The average winning bid through 322 auctions is $596, so many individuals are still able to afford to bid and win the auction all on their own, and they have.

But already we’ve had multiple winning bids with more than 100 contributors, and even one group bid for over $12,000. These are the early signs to me that something special may be developing here. That’s why I have been working on it obsessively, because I think it is interesting, and promising.

In the long run, this daily auction for attention could develop in directions you might not expect or be able to easily foresee. The same is true even for me. Of course, there are decisions I can make and actions I can take which can influence the direction in which this novel experiment in attention may develop, but I don’t completely control it. Not by any means. Already many things have happened involving the auction which I could not have predicted in the hours before they happened, let alone in the days before we launched.

As I alluded to in the beginning of this post, one of the things that I think could be most interesting is the ability for the auction to serve as a global consensus mechanism to answer the question of what is the most important link on the internet every day.

When I say that the $QR auction could become a global consensus for what is the most important thing on the internet each day, you can change the word “important” to a number of other words as well. It could be the most “entertaining” thing, the most “valuable” thing, the most “interesting” thing, etc.. But what it would be, regardless of the specific descriptor, is the single thing on the internet that everyone in the world in aggregate agrees is most worth driving attention to a given day.

So I think that’s interesting. Maybe not the most interesting thing on the internet today, but certainly one of the most interesting things being built in crypto today.

There’s a lot more to @qrcoindotfun than most people think, and probably a lot more than I even know. What I do know for now is that I appreciate all of our $QR holders, our bid contributors, and our daily active users for their support throughout our first year of building this, for joining the experiment.

May the attention machine continue to compound.

The level beyond that is when all of the content you have created has been consumed for more time than you have been alive in all. Assuming an 80 year life that is about 700,000 hours. Consider that Joe Rogan gets about 6 million plays DAILY... so many lifetimes of consumption.

Of course, the goal should not be just to occupy as much of people’s time as possible. The goal should be to fill it with quality content which contributes value in some way -- knowledge, inspiration, entertainment. Don’t just be a net producer. Be a positive net producer.

A positive net producer is a net producer whose content on average is more valuable to the average consumer of the content than the average value of all other content that consumer consumes. Of course, this is not something practical to be measured, but it is something I think about.

I found that a once monthly review was frequent enough to free me from the feeling that I needed to worry about my finances more generally outside of that brief time I set aside to review them, without the negative trade-offs that might have resulted from not thinking about my finances for, for example, 6 months at a time.

This personal finances review typically takes me about 30 minutes or an hour, but this morning it took a few hours because I had not done it in a few months (very unusual for me, historically), and because I also executed some transactions primarily to capture some capital losses before the end of the year (I had more of those than I have had historically as well, unfortunately).

Part of the reason I think I had not done this review in a few months is because it has become more complicated and so I am not as confident that the result of the review is as accurate as it once was. The combination of it being harder to do and less accurate and therefore useful once it is done has probably led me to skip the last few months, but it feels good to get back in sync.

The two main reasons this review is more complicated than it used to be for me are that (1.) a considerable percentage of my net worth on paper is now represented by my $QR holdings and (2.) estimating my tax payment before comprehensively going through my tax prep for the year has become a more challenging task each of the last few years.

The $QR part is difficult to deal with because the value my wallet says it is worth is not what I would actually get if I sold it and more importantly that’s irrelevant because I do not expect to sell a large percentage of my $QR holdings near-term and since the value is very volatile it’s current “value” doesn’t really matter at all. For that reason, I exclude it from everything else in trying to get a picture of my personal finances.

One thing which stood out to me after doing my review was something that I already knew. While I continue to bet big on crypto, within my overall allocation to crypto I have transitioned somewhat from an intentionally unopinionated, almost entirely market cap weighted approach to investing in crypto, to layering on top of that still persistent foundation one obviously outsized and therefore implicitly opinionated bet within crypto. That bet is on Farcaster (@farcaster_xyz).

I have invested and continue to invest heavily in Farcaster, not just with my money, but more importantly with my time. From a purely financial perspective, $QR and $CLANKER are 2 of my top 4 largest holdings alongside $BTC and $ETH. My 5th largest holding is $SOL which is just behind CLANKER, which to my previous point is ridiculous from a market cap weighted perspective given that SOL’s market cap is >2,000x that of CLANKER’s. Then $ZEC is well behind those top 5 as my 6th largest as a result of its relatively recent significant appreciation.

As could be surmised from my historical market cap weighted approach, I am not a massive risk-taker. I have long viewed crypto as risky enough, especially with the large % of my net worth that I have invested in it, so I tried to derisk it as much as possible by effectively indexing the top few tokens by market cap. Betting big on Farcaster is the first material departure I have made from that strategy, which still underlies my overall strategy, but not as comprehensively as it used to.

I have written a good amount about why I am betting on Farcaster, why I believe in it, why I believe social is the second most obvious area where censorship resistance matters beyond money, why I believe $CLANKER is the best token by which to invest in Farcaster (since the acquisition), why I am building $QR, why I believe in $QR, why I like other appcoins in the ecosystem, why I believe in the people of this network, etc., and I have to stop writing now, so I won’t go through all of that again here. I am moreso just observing and sharing that as of the end of 2025 I remain heavily invested in Farcaster. And if you are reading this and you are on Farcaster you might be a non-trivial part of the reason why. Let’s go off in 2026.

People’s bags are filled with hundreds, even thousands of coins.

It is impractical for them to do anything for all of them, and most people don’t end up doing anything for any of them.

But we have thousands of holders working for their bags every day with $QR, because we have made it interesting, profitable, and as easy as possible.

I will explain how in the order in which I believe they are important.

1. AS EASY AS POSSIBLE - we ask users to take 1 action every day and it is the easiest action possible on the internet, to click 1 link, the winner of our daily auction.

2. PROFITABLE - we pay people to take this maximally easy action. click the link, claim $QR, every day.

3. INTERESTING - every day people click the winning link, they discover something new. it’s a great way to stay in the know in crypto and often presents opportunities to be early to tokens, apps, etc..

As the creator of a token, I believe you are doing yourself a disservice if you expect people to just work for their bags as a matter of duty. I believe it is your responsibility to make it as easy as possible, and ideally interesting and profitable.

We have done that @qrcoindotfun, so we have thousands of people working for their bags every day. But they probably don’t think of it that way. Because they’re getting paid to do something quick, easy, and interesting, every day. That doesn’t sound like work. It sounds like play.

Whether they are memecoins, appcoins, creator coins, or otherwise, they have their moment, and then they usually die. Occasionally they have another moment, but even if they do, they usually die after that.

Most moment coins have the same moment, in terms of the timing of that moment at least. That moment is, roughly speaking, at “launch”. For most moment coins, the “launch moment” happens literally when the token launches. That “moment” may last minutes, hours, days, or weeks, but it very rarely lasts longer than 1 month.

Occasionally, the “launch” moment is not literally when the token launches but sometime later when a token which launched quietly receives attention from some major catalyst simulating a situation which is comparable to a “launch moment”. It doesn’t happen at the literal launch of the token, but it tends to play out essentially the same.=

If you agree with this premise, from what you have observed “in the trenches”, it becomes natural to ask the question, “why don’t any of these coins survive?” Beyond one, two, or at most a few moments I mean.

I would argue the answer is actually simple: attention.

More specifically, the fact that human attention is fleeting. When was the last time you thought about the Coldplay concert meme which annoyingly took over everyone’s feed for a few days this summer? Probably not since this summer. There are countless examples of this. There is a “current thing” and then it is no longer the current thing. People move on to the next thing. Whether it’s on X or a DEX, that’s how attention works.

So, 10 months ago, I had an idea for a solution to this problem which essentially every token faces, and only an extremely rare few survive. In a world of moment coins, I had an idea for a persistent coin. We would address and attack the problem at its root. Attention is fleeting. No one thing can hold people’s attention in perpetuity. So rather than trying to keep people’s attention on one thing forever, we would change the thing to which drive attention every day. We would not try to be the next current thing. We would try to be like X, the place you go to see the current thing every day.

Now I wasn’t going to to try to centrally determine what that thing should be every day. One of crypto’s great strengths is that it enables things to happen in a more decentralized fashion. So we created a daily auction inspired by and originally forked from the Nouns auction, the most successful daily auction in the history of crypto (we have since made a number of changes which I believe are improvements). Instead of winning an NFT, the winner would win the ability to determine the link of the day to which we would be driving all of the attention we could until the next auction ends.

I launched the $QR coin and our daily auction for attention @qrcoindotfun in an effort to create a coin that could never die. When I say “could never die”, I don’t mean that it is impossible for it to die. Of course, that is possible. I just mean that it actually seems logically possible that it could never die. That there is logic to support its persistent survival. So far, it has been 290 days with 290 auctions going for an average of over $600. Our mini app remains top 3 trending on Farcaster almost every day and our coin remains a top 10 clanker from over 500,000 deployed. Hundreds of coins have momentarily surpassed $QR in market cap and then proceeded to fall below it as the attention moves on.

I’m not going to lie and tell you I know this is going to work. I don’t. But what I do know is that where i don’t understand the argument for most moment coins to survive long-term, $QR actually makes sense to me.

We call it the onchain attention machine because we believe it has the potential to compound attention over time and drive that attention to a new link every day. The more attention we can drive to our auction winners, the more valuable it becomes to win our auctions for attention, the more we can make in revenue from the winning bids, and the more we can buyback $QR, fund incentives for users (who we pay every day to check out the winning link from our daily auction), and do other things we believe can be good for the project and $QR holders.

I believe it is still extremely underestimated how early we are into this whole crypto thing. Maybe not the part where we are simply migrating the existing systems from TradFi over to DeFi and bringing offchain assets onchain, but the more interesting parts (in my opinion) where we actually don’t know how things are going to play out, where crypto can actually change the world.

I don’t know if $QR is that important, in the scheme of things, but it is different, and it is interesting, to me at least. Sometimes in pursuing something you are interested in, you end up doing something important.

I’ve been following my interests for years and it’s led me here. I don’t know why, but I have found myself oddly obsessed with delivering a coin that does not die.

We’ll see how it all works out.

Thanks for reading.

I am sharing this publicly so that people can know that I am not just saying no to them but that this is my default response to collaboration offers. And also so that they can know that it is not because I do not want to collaborate or because I do not enjoy collaborating. If I had limitless time on my hands I would love to collaborate way more with many more people and I generally do enjoy collaborating.

This is strictly me trying to do what I believe is best for my project. In the case of $QR, many others are also invested in seeing it become a great success, so I am trying to make it so.

All that said, what I generally tell people is that if they want to do something permissionlessly and it is good I will help promote it and try to boost it however I can within reason. I genuinely love when people do this. Permissionless collaboration is arguably easier than ever with crypto and all of the composability that it brings to the table. To see someone be inspired to permissionlessly build with any of my work whether it be @qrcoindotfun, @BaseColorsNFTs, or anything else is one of the greatest compliments a builder can pay to one another and I appreciate these efforts greatly.

I am not completely closed off to collaborations and once in a while when something makes a tremendous amount of sense to me I will instantaneously reply yes but in the vast majority of cases it’s just a default no. Nothing personal. Might be wrong. That’s just my default. And not just for proposed collaborations but also for most “opportunities”, requests for phone calls, etc.

Some people swear by saying yes to everything and they say that works well for them and I believe it too. Faith is a powerful thing. If you believe saying yes to everything will work out for you, it probably will. I’m a default no guy, but sometimes I say yes. I believe it will work out for me. We’ll see.

I am approaching a stage of life when I understand it can become harder to continue prioritizing working on what I want versus trading some of my autonomy for a job which will more dependably earn significant income.

This “stage” that I speak of involves buying a house with a mortgage, having kids, and starting to build a family, all of which tend to come with an increased cost of living. These are not things that I have to do. They are things that I want to do, in addition to my want to continue to work on whatever I want.

It might seem like I am somewhat successful because I have made a few good mini apps and websites but all of them in combination after costs have not generated nearly as much income on an annual basis as I could have made from salaried jobs in the last 2 years.

qrcoin.fun is the most productive asset I have built thus far. It has made me comfortable enough to forget the question of whether I should seek a job for the last several months. In previous stints without a salary I always answered “no” to that question but was never comfortable enough to forget it for so long.

I am only remembering it now because I am reflecting and thinking about my future and this next stage, not because I am considering that question now. I feel good about what I am doing and I have faith in the path I am making. But if I do not continue making progress on that path, I do worry that question will return.

Moreover, I suppose I worry I might lose the youthful courage to answer “no”, or that my future self will not feel it is a lack of courage but rather a change in perspective leading me to decide to trade freedom for money and dependability, disappointing my current self from my current perspective nonetheless.

These are the natural worries of life and mine while perhaps different from others are not unique in their existence. If I was earning comfortable income from a salaried job I might worry instead whether I am fulfilling my life’s purpose or living up to my potential. All paths are hard in their own ways.

I share this because I was curious and inspired to think and write further from the first sentence which came to me this morning as an explicit realization of something I have been implicitly doing for years now. I hope this perspective is helpful to others who may share some of my wants, my worries, and my faith.

even if it does not seem important, just being interesting i think is enough

i think people working on things they are interested in can lead to them working on something they are interested in that is actually important, often in unpredictable ways

but even if the interesting work never leads to important work i think a world in which lots of people are working on things that they are interested in is a better world than the alternative

plus, depending on your perspective, it arguable that everything is important, or to the contrary, that nothing is

i am just formulating this perspective now as it just occurred to me

$QR for example is not that important in the scheme of things, but it is genuinely interesting to me

it has been enjoyable and challenging working on it

i hope it leads me to doing work that i feel is more important

but if not, at least i am getting to work on something i find interesting

better than uninteresting and unimportant

i try to do this reasonably often.

the opposite would be to say it’s inevitable or that it will work as a matter of fact.

i understand the value of doing this, of delusional confidence, both held and shared.

i understand it can be self-fulfilling.

and sometimes it is.

but most founders who express such confidence constantly and publicly end up failing in the end, not because of that specifically, but just because most founders fail, and so the result for them is that the “inevitable” “sure thing” that “will happen” did not happen, disappointed followers, and lost holders money as a result.

you said it was going to work.

when you said that, you lied.

even if you didn’t know it, even if you didn’t mean to, and even if you genuinely believed it was true, you did.

i don’t want to lie.

i consider myself to be an unusually reasonable person, perhaps to a fault, if unreasonable thinking is a prerequisite for success as a founder.

i am open to the idea that it may be, or at least, it may help your chances, but i am going to try anyway without that unreasonable certainty, without trying to change who i am, and without trying to fool myself into the kind of confidence which if shared could fool others.

i can tell you that i think $QR has massive potential, and i certainly believe that potential is possible, but i also believe that the outcome could fall anywhere between that great potential and a total failure.

i could probability weight a bunch of possible outcomes on the spectrum between those extremes but there is no way i can sit here and tell you which one it’s going to be.

moreover, i am aware that there are many possible outcomes which i am not currently able to foresee.

such is the nature of the future.

so you won’t hear certainty from me.

there is no inevitable future I have to sell you.

what you can trust is that as long as i am working on $QR, i must believe that doing so is worthwhile, in the context of a universe of an infinite number of other things that i could be doing with my precious time, because i am not beholden to do so by anything or anyone other than myself, but rather, motivated by a desire to live up to my potential.

for now at least, i have not raised money from VCs with the understanding that I would be working on this for some number of years, and i have never promised that publicly to you nor anyone else.

i know that i have never done this because my word is very important to me and if i told you i was going to work on this for 10 years no matter what then I would expect to actually do that.

there goes my freedom.

i’d have made a 10-year commitment.

i may do that some day, but not today.

i do not say things like that lightly at all.

it is easy to talk but hard to follow through.

those who talk without as much care for their word can say they will do more because they don’t need to follow through.

that may be an advantage as well, like delusional confidence, for being a founder.

i don’t know, but it’s not for me.

if you’re going to get on board with me for $QR or for anything else i do in the future i want you to know what i’m about.

that’s a part of why i share my perspective so publicly.

200+ blogs posts, 200+ podcasts, and however many casts and tweets.

i would rather have fewer people get on board with a better understanding of what they are getting on board for than more people get on board with some misunderstanding.

i have some of the best supporters in the world and i greatly appreciate them because i know they appreciate me for who i am and how i think and why i do what i do because it’s not some fake version of me that does all the blogs and the pods and the tweets.

if you’re reading this to the end, you’re probably one of those people.

thank you for believing in my uncertain success with me.

i don’t know that it’s going to work, but i do have faith.

Fast forward 8 years and investing in people has once again become a hot concept, once again in crypto specifically. This time, we are calling them “creator coins”, a name which I am not a huge fan of because the shortening of “content creators” to “creators” I think does a disservice to the act of creation, which obviously applies to more than only the creation of content, which has always sounded low value to me, even though I guess I am one myself with all the tweeting, casting, blogging, and podcasting I have done over the years.

Anyway, the first time I made one of these kinds of coins myself was a few years ago through a platform called Roll. I remember how excited I was to launch $JAKE at the time. Launching tokens was not nearly as easy or popular back then. But Roll did most of the work for me. They called them “social tokens” at the time. Then there was BitClout, and I made a profile which came with a coin there too. After that came FriendTech, Wildcard, Stack, and a bunch of others you probably never heard of. Point is, I’ve had a personal token on many of these platforms.

More recently, a few months ago, I created my creator coin on Zora, which is largely responsible for this latest “creator coin” craze. And today, I am launching my “writer coin” via Paragraph. I like to launch early on these platforms because I like to operate at the edge of what’s happening in crypto and I do believe something in this category will work massively. I’m more confident in that than I am in my ability to predict which one it will be, so it seems wise to try all of them. I don’t know how it is going to do in the long run, but there are at least a few reasons I am interested in trying this Paragraph version.

First, it allows me to easily reward subscribers to my blog, collectors of my posts, and other supporters alike in a way they probably didn’t expect when they took that original action of support. This is one of the beauties of crypto to me. It passively compounds a permanent and publicly legible record of support, almost like “onchain karma”. And then various people and projects can use those records to reward the people who backed them before it ever seemed like doing so may pay. I think that’s pretty cool.

Second, while Paragraph is calling these “writer coins”, I think they could just as well be called blogcoins. This is supported by that fact that Fred Wilson (who partially inspired me to begin writing my own blog back in 2019) called his writer coin $AVC, named after his blog, as opposed to $FRED, named after himself (the writer). Blogcoins are a little different from personal tokens or “creator coins” as they seem scoped to represent the publication more than the person. I am most interested in tokens which represent the entire person, but i suspect there will only be one power law winning platform in that game, and it’s probably not going to be Paragraph. However, if you asked me a week ago, before I knew Paragraph was going to launch writer coins, which existing platform I thought was best positioned to successfully build a winning platform for writer coins, blogcoins, or whatever you want to call them, I would have said Paragraph, and I wouldn’t have known a second best option to even suggest.

Third, I think it’s possible that having a coin attached to my blog on Paragraph will lead to me publishing more blog posts on Paragraph. While I have been more focused on building than writing in recent years, I really like writing, it’s a very helpful activity for me especially while I am building, and it is one of the most fulfilling things when a stranger lets me know they enjoyed something I wrote or found it useful or inspiring. “Blog of Jake” is now 5 years old with more than 200 blog posts and I consider it to be one of my greatest works and contributions.

In closing, I don’t know how this will go, but I guess we will all find out together. Please do not buy more than you can COMFORTABLY afford to lose. This coin can “go to zero” even if I end up becoming tremendously successful personally because this is not necessarily an effective way to bet on me personally, nor has been any creator coin or the like which has existed to date, in my opinion. These are all extremely platform-dependent bets until that platform proves to persist, and then maybe over time they will actually come to resemble a real long-term bet on the person, or in this case, their writing. I don’t know. We’ll see. Finally, to those who have supported my writing via Paragraph over the years and received some % of my new blogcoin ($JAKEBLOG), thank you for experimenting with me. I am thrilled to send these literal tokens of my appreciation for your support.

I write that number down next to the day’s date whenever I write in my morning journal.

It’s an easy way to keep life in perspective.

Over the years, whenever I go a while between journal entries, I need to look that number up again.

I feel like it’s always a different site, and I’ve never found one I particularly liked, so yesterday I decided to make one myself.

What day of your life is today?

Find out now @ dayof.life

The combination of these three traits brings us back to a future of bartering in the sense that you will ultimately be able to pay for anything with any of your digital assets, as long as they are of the right value.

In traditional bartering, both sides have to be interested in what the other has to offer, but that is no longer the case.

With crypto, there is a free, instant, and automated "middle man" available for any exchange of goods and services such that both sides do not need to be interested in each other's assets.

The buyer can choose to pay with one thing (or even a combination of things) and the seller can choose to receive something else of equal value at that moment. The necessary exchanges will happen in that moment.

In other words, you can pay for anything with anything.

There's no need for a uniform medium of exchange.

When everything is money, nothing is money.

which is weird because quitting is the opposite of persistence, and i consider persistence to be one of my greatest strengths. so it's sort of ironic. but it can also be reconciled.

persistence is invaluable when you are persisting on the right things but persisting on the wrong things is one of the worst mistakes you can make.

for example, if peter thiel persisted in law he would be a lawyer, not the peter thiel you know. i would be an investment banker.

the hard part is knowing what's right vs. wrong. you can always do some logical analysis, but this is where faith comes in.

this is why "keep going" can be some of the best or worst advice, because it completely depends on the context.

that is true for a lot of the super short-form advice you see on X, it's totally context dependent as to whether it's good or bad.

you have to think for yourself.

I got a drink of water from the fountain. It’s a good working water fountain – nice pressure, strong stream, clean, cold water. You can tell a lot about a town by its water fountains.

My heart rate was coming down from around 185 bpm. The average for the full run was closer to 160 bpm. I’m not rounding in this case. I just can’t remember. And I don’t particularly care to look back at my phone to find out. Because I’m not using my phone right now. And it doesn’t really matter. Actually, it was 169 bpm. I know because I was going to write that I can’t check that information in the limited version of the Runkeeper app on my Apple Watch. But I wasn’t sure if that was true. So I checked. And there it was.

I generally don’t run for speed. I run for pleasure. I think it’s good for me and it makes me feel good. I like running more than lifting. I used to hate running. I’m still trying to figure out how I can learn to like lifting like I like running. No answers as of yet.

The reason my heart rate was higher at the end of the run than on average is because I gunned it a bit for the last half mile or so. I don’t do that all the time. A lot of people do that, but I heard once that the end of an experience has an outsized impact on your memory of that experience, so it’s good to make the end part positive for things you want to remember positively so that you’ll do them some more. In the context of running, if you leave yourself totally gassed by gunning it at the end, you’ll remember it as being a lot harder than it was. Not fun. On the other hand, if you make the end easy, you’ll remember the whole run as easier than it was, even if you were running hard the whole time before that. I’m not sure that any of this is true, but it makes sense, so I’ve kept it in mind for several years. Regardless, I felt like finishing fast today.

I started walking back home along the sidewalk between the parking lot and the woods and I heard some plopping on grass behind my right hip, low to the ground. I turned around to discover that it was a big fluffy bunny responsible for the sound. It wasn’t big in absolute terms. I don’t want to make it seem like some giant freak bunny or something. But it was about as big as any bunny I’ve ever seen, as far as I can recall at least. Its body alone was about the size of an NFL football. You probably are accustomed to throwing smaller footballs. NFL footballs are quite big. It was probably about the length of my elbow to the tip of my middle finger, just in its normal posture. I didn’t really see it stretch or lunge. And it was proportionally big to it’s length. It wasn’t fat or anything, but it certainly wasn’t skinny. Plump would be a fair description. Thick.

In addition to its notable size, I would also say it was an abnormally good looking bunny. Too cute to call a rabbit. I don’t throw around the word “cute” that often. But this was a really plush and fluffy bunny. Clean too. It was honestly a little concerning because it made me think it might be a domesticated bunny lost in the wild. It looked as fresh as a puppy after a grooming. I’ve never had any interest in owning a rabbit, but I would have taken this guy into my house if he wanted, or she. I think it was a he. I’m almost certain it wasn’t a they. But who knows.

Something notable about this experience was that I did not have my phone on me because I have not been keeping my phone on me recently. To be fair, I’ve run without my phone a lot over the last few years, before this new, more general no phone thing. That was the primary reason I started wearing an Apple Watch again. I wanted to be able to go for a run and listen to a podcast without bringing my phone with me. Running with nothing in your pockets is great. Today I didn’t listen to anything actually. I didn’t even bring my headphones. 27 minutes and 6 seconds without any audio entertainment might sort of be regarded as a psycho move these days, but I’ve been doing that a bit more recently. It’s fine. You can hear yourself breathe and watch yourself think. Old school.

Because I did not have my phone on me, I couldn’t take a picture of the hare. There was nothing to do really except hang around or keep moving. I decided to hang around. It was really something to see this bunny. I started about 7 or 8 feet away from it probably. And I watched it eat the tops off clovers. It seemed to be having a grand ole time. I am trying to think of the human equivalent of its situation. I can’t come up with anything great. It was basically just hopping around eating the tops off clovers. It looked like heaven for a rabbit.

I didn’t want to scare it. There was no need for an unnecessary adrenaline rush. But I decided to try to get closer. I crouched down and grabbed a clover with a long stem and threw it about halfway between us. The bunny noted my action. It didn’t seem scared at all so I got closer and reached out with another clover. I forget the exact sequence of events but penultimately I got it to eat one of the clovers that I threw. And, finally, it actually touched the clover that I was holding with its nose. It didn’t actually eat it though. I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t a good one.

The nose touch was enough for me so I stood up and started walking away. I was surprised to see it actually followed me for 10 yards or so. Maybe it became fond of me over the course of the five minutes or so that we were hanging out. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. Either way, I circled back to grab another clover to try to feed it again but by the time I turned around it was gone, back in the woods. I was relieved actually because the way I was headed was towards the street and I didn’t want it to follow me towards traffic. It’s better off in the woods.

I posted on Warpcast the other day, “Crazy what happens when you don't have your phone on you and come across something photoworthy. Instead of rushing to pull your phone out to capture the moment in a photo you are unlikely to revisit later, in a way that pales in comparison to the actual experience, you just experience and appreciate the moment itself.”

That was what happened to me today. It was nice, but I got to thinking about where that desire to take a photo comes from, and I think there may be something more to it, for better or worse. There’s some part of it that is just trying to capture the moment, and it doesn’t really work, so it seems kind of dumb. But there’s another part that I think comes from a desire to share the experience with others, and I don’t think that’s so bad or wrong.

I went to a baseball game by myself once and I remember saying how I enjoyed it but it would have been better with friends. I think that’s the case for a lot of experiences, most of them probably, but also not all. To take a picture on my phone could have helped me communicate the experience, but it’s kind of just the fastest and easiest and laziest way to do it. There are other, maybe better, ways to communicate it as well, like storytelling or long-form writing, like this.

Had I had my phone on me, I would have taken a picture and shared it with my wife. I would have told her the story and showed her the picture, and that would have been that. But I didn’t have my phone, so I couldn’t do that. Without an easy outlet, my desire to share this experience needed to find a new means to that end. It inspired me to write, and so I did.

They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. I don’t have a picture, but this was more than 1,000 words.

I shared online that I was doing this fast and got a few questions to which I responded. Then my friend Phil said he was excited to hear my reflections, so I figured I should write down some reflections. Here goes nothing.

The most important thing I think I have to say about fasting is that I have done a few day+ food fasts in the past and I have always found them to be well worthwhile. As for why, I’m not exactly sure – it’s a combination of things I guess. It provides a nice reset on your diet. It can break any bad eating habits you may have accumulated and allow you to more intentionally start some new ones if you’d like. You can lose some weight pretty quickly, even though you might quickly gain half of it back. You can focus on hydration and develop better habits around drinking sufficient water through the day. Nothing makes me drink more water than when it is the only thing that I am allowed to consume.

Fasting from food for more than a day or two reminds me how it feels to be truly hungry, in a literal sense, but I also think this translates in a figurative sense as well. A lot of people don’t really know what they want a lot of the time, myself included. It may be because they don’t have any strong wants at the time, and that’s fine. Arguably, that’s great — it means you have everything you want. But you can refresh your memory on what it feels like to really want something by starving yourself for a couple of days. By the end, you will really want some food.

By default, a fast provides a change of pace from your typical day-to-day. That, in and of itself, is valuable. People can get a little too caught up in routines. Routines can be great, but once in a while, you might like to change things up a bit. Removing food and/or your phone from your day will force some changes, at least for how you live those days, at least in a couple of ways. Even if there are no secondary impacts, which there probably will be, I did not eat or go on my phone for the last few days. Typically I eat 2-3 times per day and check my phone countless times, spending hours on it. So these days were different. Compared to all the rest of my days in the last several years, these days were outliers. It’s good to experience outliers. And it’s good to step out of your typical day-to-day. It gives you some perspective on things. It allows you to see things with fresh eyes. At least, it does for me. Traveling is another thing that can do that. You may have had the experience of coming home from some travel and seeing things differently in your day-to-day life. It’s a similar phenomenon I think, resulting from the change of scenery, perhaps a change in culture, and the general difference in your days while you were away. I believe change for the sake of change can be valuable. Even intrinsically neutral changes can be positive.

Previously, when I’ve fasted from food, I’ve felt a sense of euphoria for some time. I did not really experience that this time, but it’s happened multiple times before. At a certain point, it feels like your body is really running clean. That has been the case this time. It makes me feel as though food is a burden on your body, and not having to deal with it, your body can really take out the trash. I believe there’s some science for this.

On the other hand, you might have low energy at times if you fast for a while. I only walked for exercise over the last few days but I walked a decent amount for about 90 minutes per day on average. I know that lifting makes me hungrier so I didn’t want to do that, and running to some degree does the same. I didn’t want to make 3 days of not eating harder than it was going to be already. Besides curtailing my usual exercise a bit, my energy for the purpose of working and reading and writing and whatever else I’ve been doing has been perfectly fine. My ability to focus has probably been better than normal, likely from the no phone.

I wrote more about doing a phone fast here but the main takeaways for me were two-fold. First, the day goes by slower. The first day felt a lot slower, but the next two as well. That is a great thing in my book. I would love for life to feel like it is going by slower. If you can make your perception of time slower, you can basically live longer. You might live 20 years less than someone else, but it could feel like twice as long. After a while, I suspect the perceived lengthening of my days by going phone-free would normalize, but more tangibly speaking, it is also saving me hours and hours of time spent on the thing, a lot of which I don’t think is well spent.

Second, I don’t miss it much — my phone, that is. I don’t think I’ll use it tonight, even though I could, and I once again plan to re-examine my use of my phone, deleting my social apps from it, perhaps trying to use it much less often for specific scenarios that involve leaving my place, and maybe also implementing the digital sabbath-like 24 hour no phone period over some stretch of the weekend which I’ve considered doing consistently for probably 7 years now but have only actually done for a few weekends in that time.

Another thing I’ll say on fasting is I think it is nice to do it at an inflection point. It’s good if you have the freedom and control over your time during those days to not have to do anything else, and to be able to do whatever else you want, or nothing. Fasting lends itself well to doing some deep thinking about some of the important things in life, if you want, but I wouldn’t go into the fast with an expectation that you have to do that. It’s good to make the fast itself the only expectation for those days, again, if you can. That makes it as easy as possible. If that’s your only expectation, then all you have to do is not do one or two things —in this case, consume any calories or go on your phone.

I should note that this was the first no food fast where instead of just drinking tap water I had a bottle of topo chico sparkling water everyday. I am generally not one to ask for sparkling when the waiter asks what kind of water you want at a nice restaurant, but it did provide a decent treat each day around dinner time. Next time I would try one of those flavored ones that still has zero calories like a Le Croix. Compared to water, anything sparkling with flavor is pretty exciting.

Lastly, I should have mentioned earlier but fasting is also a great exercise in discipline. And it’s relatively easy because it doesn’t involve doing anything, just not doing something. It’s a lot easier to not do something than to do something because not doing it is technically the default. So if you want to practice discipline, try not doing something. Try fasting – from food, from your phone, from anything that comes to mind. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions and good luck. It’s just about dinner time for me.

Another example like this is carnivores vs. vegans. There are plenty of passionate believers on both sides who believe that their diet is the best. Some people on both sides even have the physical metrics and bloodwork to back up their argument. So what gives? How can opposite approaches each be so incredibly effective?

Perhaps it is because the thing that a person has faith in is of little importance compared to the strength of their faith in that thing. It may sometimes matter less what you believe, and more that you believe.

At least, that’s what I believe.

The People of Farcaster

This podcast scratches two itches which I have had for at least one and three years, respectively. The first was to start a podcast focused purely on the people of Farcaster. I think Farcaster is an interesting network of people which can continue to grow in quantity while retaining some of its early community's common qualities such as civility and curiosity. Ultimately, I believe Farcaster has the potential to become the power law leading, sufficiently decentralized social network of the future. More importantly, I generally enjoy meeting and talking to new people I meet on Farcaster, and I hope to meet many more as a result of starting this podcast.

Walking Recordings

The second itch was to figure out a way to record podcasts while walking outside and still retaining a high enough audio quality so as not to be less than satisfactory for the average podcast listener. I think I finally figured it out. So I plan to record most, if not all, Purple People episodes while walking outside using my Ray-Ban Meta glasses to record. If you are aware of a better walking recording device, let me know what it is. Otherwise, I am as surprised as you are to find that a pair of glasses ended up being the form factor which, after years of sporadically searching, finally seems to have satisfied my criteria for a lightweight, high-quality audio device I can use on the move. Fittingly, I was recommended the glasses by one of my good friends from Farcaster, @phil.

Minimum Preparation, Maximum Spontaneity

Beyond the fact that it will be focused on Farcaster people and recorded while I am walking, Purple People will differentiate from Pod of Jake in a few other ways as well. Most significantly, I will intentionally limit my preparation for each episode for the sake of enabling myself to do more of them and seeing what happens when the conversations are maximally spontaneous. Unlike an episode of Pod of Jake for which I might prepare anywhere between a couple of hours and a couple of weeks, I expect to limit my explicit preparation for an episode of Purple People to a maximum of 30 minutes. I am optimistic about how these conversations may differ as a result. I don’t know that they will necessarily be “better”, as if conversations could be judged so objectively anyway, but I do expect that they will be substantially different. I expect the increase in spontaneity to lead the conversations in less expected directions, with my questions coming more purely from a place of curiosity than an intention to drive the conversation in certain directions I have predetermined might be interesting (which, to be fair, still comes from a place of curiosity in the first place).

Other Small Differences

Since I will be walking while recording, I will be recording Purple Purple as an audio-only podcast just as I did for the first 140 episodes of Pod of Jake (since then, I have included video as well for most episodes). I have always preferred recording podcasts audio-only for a number of reasons, so I am excited to return to that simpler format as opposed to forcing the addition of video. Another small difference is that I will not commit to a publishing cadence as I do with Pod of Jake, where I have expected myself to publish an episode every week or two for the last 4 years, and roughly have done so with some exceptions here and there. I want Purple People to feel low pressure and just for fun. So I want to strip out any unfun parts of the process, most notably the various parts of post-production and publishing, which I mostly have minimized for my main podcast already, but will seek to do even moreso for Purple People. I don’t enjoy editing or making clips or doing the kind of overhead-type work that most people consider a prerequisite for getting an episode published. And I don't think it really matters either. So I’ll decide what matters and what doesn’t for myself and I will aim to release the conversations I record as simply and as quickly as possible for anyone who wants to be able to listen to them anytime.

In Closing

I officially decided to start this podcast a week ago. Since then, I have set everything up and recorded a few episodes. My next step is to publish the first one. I could have never predicted all of the good things which have come from starting my original podcast, Pod of Jake. So now, as I start this new podcast, I am excited about the unpredictable potential for Purple People.

If this sounds interesting, you can subscribe to the Purple People podcast on Apple or Spotify.

Thank you for reading, and if you do decide to tune in, thank you for the listening.

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No matter how many people claim they can do it all, I have doubts. Sure, Zuck and Bezos are jacked now. And yes, Steve Jobs seemed to have been a pretty good family man in the end. But these great founders were not how they later became during the years in which they rose to greatness.

I’m not certain of what I am saying, that you can’t become a great founder without some significant sacrifice in fundamental dimensions of life such as health, relationships, and perhaps “happiness”. And it’s a dangerous idea if it’s wrong, because it is limiting upon one’s own idea of what is possible. I hesitate to share it for that reason. But what do I write for if it is not to share what I think?

I share this idea because I am as pragmatic as I am optimistic, and this is a question I have considered for a long time.

I think about it because I want to create something great, but I also want to be a great husband and a great father, and I want to live a long time, and I want to enjoy the ride. In other words, I want it all.

And the optimist in me believes all these things are possible, together in parallel, in a single lifetime. But the pragmatist doubts whether that is true. So the optimist presses forward under the assumption that I can do it all while the pragmatist looks for signs of unavoidable sacrifice.

If sacrifice was required, and you knew that up front, at least you could make a conscious choice. More generally, if you could know what your various paths in life would look like, you could choose. But of course, you can’t. That’s not what life’s about, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

So I move forward, knowing that I do not know, trusting my gut, and doing the best that I can.

The pragmatist started this writing but the optimist finishes. At the end of the day, I still believe it is possible that it is possible to do it all. I have my doubts, but without doubt, there is no place for faith. So that’s what I have. Faith.

I also think there's something to be said for when it's hard to explain the "why" behind what you're doing. That means it's hard to justify in logical terms. So it's unlikely to be something memetic or something you're doing for social proof. You must genuinely want to do the thing.

Working on Base Colors, it's hard to explain both what I do and why I'm doing it. I believe these are positive signs that I'm headed in the right direction, doing the right things for the right reasons. I can't explain why but I'm working as obsessively as ever. Not work really. Play.

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