**Date:** Sunday, 3rd August 2025 [[2025]], [[2025-Q3]], [[2025-08]], [[2025-W31]] --- First journal entry in this new Obsidian vault, created around my experiment to think more in public here on kaytzu.com, as well as social media. Why am I doing this? Well, there are a lot of reasons. Let's start with the obvious ones: 1. My mission is to [[Understand the world well enough to confidently improve it]], which requires a lot of learning. When you study learning as a concept in and of itself, you learn that one of the best ways to learn and actually retain what you learn is to teach, or at least to write about what you're learning in such a way that it might be useful to others. That alone is reason enough to write and create in public. 2. Although I intend to use social media to amplify my voice, I still think that it's valuable to not be completely dependant on external platforms. History has shown, time and again, that [[absolute power corrupts absolutely]] and many creators have witnessed their livelihoods attacked and destroyed just because their primary platform decided that their message was all of a sudden outside of the [[Overton window]]. 3. There is also just something so very "calm" about the idea of [[Digital Garden|Digital Gardens]]. The idea of tending to my growing knowledge graph and [[Latticework of Mental Models]], as [[Charlie Munge]] would say, for decades upon decades is simply soothing to some core part of who I am. 4. Having this "calm digital garden" is also a great way for me to flesh out my ideas in long form without worrying about what others might think of it. Then, when they are "more or less" fully fleshed out, I can break them down into the digestible pieces that social media algorithms love. I can decide to turn them into videos, podcasts, clips, or just good old text. But why post to social media at all? Is digital gardening not enough? Well, the answer to that question goes a bit deeper. The fact is that we're entering a period of great uncertainty, thanks to the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, with all the myriad risks and opportunities that come along with it. The likely nature of that age is such that it will certainly not hurt to have an audience, or a community of like-minded individuals that are interested in what you have to say and what you're up to. On the opportunity-side, this will leverage and empower the individual to maximize the "Returns on his or her Creativity", which AI has the potential of supercharging. If AI is enabling all of us (or at least more of us) to become coders, entrepreneurs, musicians, artists, writers, etc..., then the real bottleneck becomes distribution; the ability to "get things out there". Having and audience can help with that, and it's simply a fact that social media is still the best path we have towards that goal. On the risk-side, AI has the potential to completely up-end the economy as we know it. No industry is safe. I am currently the CEO and biggest shareholder of a very "solid" software business ([[Noona Labs]]), but what does "solid" even mean in the AI age? Building a personal brand alongside companies and the corporate brands and trademarks that come along with them is likely to be a positive diversification strategy in the hyperchanging world we are now entering. And lastly, it's different from what I've been doing in the last decade and it looks like a lot of fun if done right. It also looks like a good fucking challenge, and I need more of those in my life. It's an opportunity to connect with like-minded people and make friends all over the world. I've been lucky enough to be able to do that through my work at [[Noona Labs]], and it's been one of the most gratifying things about running a software startup. If social media can give me just a bit of that, I'd be happy. If I'd learn a thing or two on the way, even better. As long as I keep myself away from the pitfalls and character death-traps that are also part of the social media landscape, I should be good. > **“Fortune favors the bold.”** ... so let's be courageous in this brave new world. --- **P.s:** currently using the "Templater" and "Periodic Notes" community plugins for these Journal entries. Especially like the fact that they link to yesterday and tomorrow, as well as the relevant higher-level periods such as the year and quarter. --- [[2025-08-02]] | [[2025-08-04]]