Early August Week in Saigon

Journal Update Friday 07/24/2023 to 08/04/2023

Aug 07, 2023

On the Purpose of this Newsletter

Exploration of Self

The purpose of this newsletter is to tease out what is inside me, to articulate it, to get to know myself more and to invite the world to get to know me. It is not going to be a final state of me, as I am a human being that constantly is evolving. This is an effort and a meditation on the act of creation and discovery using language. When we put things into words, only then do they become real. The fact is that very few people in the world write regularly. It is a practice that is reserved for a small segment of the population. I strongly identify as a person that reads and writes. This makes me feel like I am fully myself, like I am living to my fullest form and potential. This set of essays is not perfect, it is a playground, it is a safe space, it is an experiment, it is an art form, it is a journey. Writing allows you to explore your self more accurately and deeply. With writing, your thinking becomes clearer and more developed.

Documentation

The second big part of the motivation for this newsletter is to document my thinking and life. This is also a journal of my travels, work and whatever I am interested in at the moment. Sometimes when I look back at some old piece of writing, some photograph or piece of code I wrote years ago, I am amazed at how I had gone through such major transformations and shifts of thinking, almost as if in a maze, searching for something elusive. This elusive thing is some kind of wisdom, knowledge, discovery and self development. With this newsletter, I leave a trail behind my travels, both physical in different lands, and intellectual, in philosophy, art, tech and work life. The hope is that this will allow me to gain better self knowledge and be able to fly out of the maze, like the myth of Icarus.

On How to See the Genius Inside of Yourself

One of the most important things to learn as an artist (and in fact as a human being), is to be able to identify the genius inside yourself. Every one of us has this spark of a divine God inside them. I believe that we all have the capacity to be heroes, part human, part Gods as the Ancient Greeks believed. The difficult part, is to preserve that spark inside yourself and to nourish it into a sustaining fire. There is a famous quote attributed to Picasso.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

The same goes for developers, entrepreneurs and writers. The battle is about how to remain an artist once you grow up. This requires special care to value one’s efforts, one’s creations and attempts. It requires spending time in this zone of attention to the process, to what has been created and evolving it into another iteration, to continue the creative output.

It is not a given that everyone is able to see the value in their creative work. It is very possible to consider that you are creating very interesting and beautiful work. The only thing that is holding you back is that you are not able to identify and hold this belief. This ability to see beauty and value in your own work, independently of whether or not others see it, is a key capability that will guide you to nourish and grow your creative talents.

The development of an artist is a journey. The door to the first step of this path is to be able identify what is valuable in your work, to love it and nourish it. Like Frodo going on his quest, this is very similar to the artist journey. In fact I believe Lord of the Rings is an myth that codifies this sacred human value of finding the self worth inside yourself to defeat self doubt, to defeat external value systems that turn you into an orc, or a cog in a machine of corporate world, to find the human beauty and true value that is within your heart. It is fragile, it is in a sense delicate and soft, but it has the seed of beautiful universes of possibility inside itself. This is the artists way.

This is why travel is also very good for your inner artist and inner child. Travel takes you out of your familiar environment and confronts you with the fact that your day to day thinking and mental constructs are products of your location specific conditioning.

On Why I am a Supporter of the American Democracy Project

The internet gives us new possibilities of having your personal broadcasting channel and quickly communicate with people all over the world and exchange ideas. This is a very powerful ability that we are still just in the beginning stages of using and exploring. For all of humanity’s history this was not even dreamed of. Now a teenager in small village in Pakistan can become a YouTube star with the equal ease as a multi million dollar production company in Hollywood. In the same way, you and I can can engage with people from very different parts of the world, with different cultures and ideas.

This opens the possibility to test out your ideas, to try expressing them, explain why you believe such a thing, to receive either a different or agreeing perspective. This is powerful ability to form civilized conversations, friendships, collaborations and exchanges of information. I express my view with humbleness and humility, accepting that it may change, or it may be based on incomplete information. I welcome and invite challenging views and evidence. I come from a place of accepting that we as human beings are fragile, we are intelligences that operate on incomplete information, that is a product of our particular conditioning in and environment.

Platforms like Twitter enable you to interact with a very broad audience instantly. Recently when I had encountered a colleague expressing that America is a dangerous place, it is backwards and not a good place to live, I had a response that I believe deserves a longer form exposition on. While it is indeed true that there are serious issues with the current reality there, with a frequency of gun violence only seen in war zones in other parts of the world. Of issues with the health care system and the polarization of democratic government system. Of high rates of poverty, homelessness and crime. These are realities that are indeed alarming and for some like myself, heartbreaking.

When someone expresses this criticism and states a view that America is a place that should be avoided and not valued I take the opportunity to point out my view that, despite these serious problems, a democratic system, with a culture and laws of seeing all human beings as equal before the law and giving them equal opportunity to contribute is an enlightened system that deserves to be valued, admired, cherished and protected. This is because it is special among all other governments in the world, which have a culture and system of laws that are based upon principles of ethnic and religious commonalities. This means that the organizing principle is a common DNA or a common world view of the participants. If you think of a government as a meta organism, these kinds of meta organisms are based on seeing themselves as meta-being that strive for competition with other meta-beings for resources. This was exemplified most clearly by Hitler and other fascists philosophy in the 30’s, that inevitable lead to the manifestation of this belief in reality, of fascist states attacking one another and democratic states, moved by a philosophy or in other words an ‘algorithm’ of competition of meta-organisms.

On the other hand, democracies hold at the center the individual. The collective meta organism is an algorithm that solves for getting to states where the largest number of individuals are free and have a happy life. The United Sates culture and history is shaped by immigrants from all over the world that recognized the nobleness of this system and how refreshing and enlightened it appeared to them, coming from kingdoms big and small, which both are petty in comparison, which compete with each other in endless cycles of war. These were largely the European kingdoms, where each ethnic group coalesced around a king, and periodically invaded one another seeking to enslave, pillage and destroy each other. These meta-organisms as described earlier, survive to this day in the forms of dictatorships and nation states with theoretically democratic or communist forms but in practice are groups of ethnic peoples, that in their operations are bonded by common DNA origins.

The physicist and popular scientist Michio Kaku, has expressed a view that humanity is in it’s early stages of development and that great things await it. He classifies us as a type 0 civilization and that next is the type 1 which is able to wield the power of the Earth. The following stages include having control of the Solar system and Universe. He claims that democracies are the system of government that will bring us to these future civilizational states, as only they don’t seek war, but dictatorships do.

Democracies are slow to anger and hesitant to go to war: Voters don't want to sacrifice their children for the glory of a selfish king.

Michio Kaku

There is much more to go into, about exploration of the observations of recent events in 2023. How specifically China is building up it’s military capacity with a specific aim of destroying democracies around the world and invading Taiwan. How Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is another example of this fight of freedom seeking individuals in a democratic system versus a group-think of ethnic group organized in a dictatorship. There is more to explore on the topic of how an Ethereum based system of open source governance is an appealing use case of blockchain technology. These topics will be explored in future posts.

Travel Journal

This week I spent in Saigon was quite routine and ordinary.

During the weekdays I went to the coworking space near my hotel. In the evenings I attended Muay Thai Training and usually worked late in my hotel or in some cafe or bar. On the weekend I went to see Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. It was kind of hard to follow the plot, but it was an entertaining movie. I feel like these large blockbuster films are a medium for the current zeitgeist to manifest itself and a place for the current topics of the global consciousness to reveal themselves, to engage with each other and play with ideas. I feel that this movie had themes of Russian submarine disaster, rogue Ai, international tension and conflict. Things that are very much in the public psyche in 2023.

On Thursday I attended another edition of the Saigon Entrepreneurs Game Night. It was great to learn about what other startups people are working on and compete in a fun board game.

On Saturday night I attended the kick off of nights and weekends a kind of school for making your idea a reality. This is a very innovative and powerful program that is open to anyone and is really a world class community. It is on it’s forth iteration and I am excited to take part in it after watching the first four season on the sidelines on Twitter.

My hotel room is a really nice place for working late into the night. Here I am coding on a Saturday in the golden hour of dusk.

Living in Japantown is very beautiful and exciting. I love walking through these colorful and bustling narrow streets to get a some sushi or ramen.

Most of the weekdays are spent sitting in this spot in the local coworking space called Dreamplex. It is pricy ($55 per week) but has the perks of allowing you to network with some local developers and professionals.