The ancient struggle was not having enough.

The modern struggle is having too much.

Too much news, too much sugar, too much of everything at your fingertips..There's only 1 way out.

Let's lay it out:

On one side, you have "Team Dopamine":
* 24/7 news cycle, full of clickbait headlines
* Social Media, friend's pics that disappear in 24 hours
* Endless varieties of sugar & porn

going up against your tiny, 3 pound brain running 20,000 yr old software
Even if you are a smart person who tries their best to stay healthy & happy... you are going up against Fox News, TikTok, PornHub, Robinhood, Instagram

These are weapons of mental destruction.
Thousands of our smartest engineers & data scientists work at these companies.

They run constant experiments. Fighting against each other for every moment of your attention. So you open THEIR app.

It's skinner's box, rats pushing buttons for rewards. But you're the lab rat.
So what do we do?

We have everything. More than any species, at any time period in history. It's wonderful...but also deadly.

Food injected with syrup sugar
Painkillers you can't live without
Video games where you can fly and kill
Porn better than any date you'll ever have
we used to live in tribes, fighting other tribes for scarce resources.
now we live alone, fighting our urges against endless options.

How to resist day trading on Robinhood? Swiping on Tinder? Or pushing a button on DoorDash & getting chicken wings delivered to your condo
The answer is self-defense.

Defense from yourself.

Preventing yourself from getting addicted to stuff that's so god damn addictive.

This is a skill. A skill worth building.

Here's how I think it plays out.
Fasting is easier than dieting.

I think people begin to do technology fasts.

Like intermittent fasting. They'll create an 12 hour "online" period, followed by a 12 hour "offline" period (8hrs sleep, 2 eating, 1 exercising, 1 hour offline hobby)

Airplane mode, at home.
More and more people will start to carry "dumb devices" (eg. the Lightphone) and create "Zen Rooms" that have no screens or wifi.

Apps like Calm will grow. Hobbies like gardening, tabletop games, and outdoor adventure will continue to rise in popularity.
Just as most people in America are on track for obesity due to shitty food diets

most people will stay hooked to the fast food information diet of facebook, instagram, slack, and CNN.

But 1% will recognize the problem, and can afford to fight back.
And maybe founders will start building services that ask LESS of you.

> less attention, more intention
> less sitting, more moving
> less options, more choice
> less noise, more signal
> less feeds, more curation

who will build the "Whole Foods" brand of tech?
..of course if you're reading this on twitter... you're already in the wrong place ;)
I send out startup ideas like this 2x a week on my newsletter: https://t.co/hyXkTjtm0Q

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The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.

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