Hey friends, a few quick updates:

🤗 This newsletter is now open to the public — feel free to share
❤ Bri and I celebrated our 8th anniversary
🥇 Congratz to Bri becoming a top 1% longevity athlete by taking spot #43 (I’m #45 🗡 ❤ ) in the longevity olympics (search us by name here)
📈 Space is progressing rapidly
- camera hardware has been selected
- prototypes have been produced
- a weekly DevLog has been launched

Space

Space, has crystallized and I’m currently heads down prototyping a working example of Spatial Desktop.

When your computer knows where you are spatially, relative to objects and devices, it changes everything. The Spatial Desktop let’s you touch and control IoT devices (like a light bulb or Apple TV) at a distance using gestures — but that’s just the tip of the ice berg (for more see the vision post).

On Moving Fast

Constraint theory says you move fastest by recursively eliminating your bottleneck. My prior bottleneck was my tools, which I solved by switching to hardware that cost 5-10x more expensive but has made my life 10x easier.

I have the hardware and I have the software base, now I just have to put the Spatial Desktop together into a coherent demo.

To do that, I just need engineering butt in seat time.

6 1-3 hour deep work blocks / day
M-F 0900 - 1900
Sunday 0900 - 1300
No meetings, calls, no distractions till after 1300

Eliminating the Unnecessary

The sneakiest version of the unnecessary are things that:

don’t need to be done at all
other people can do

To fight this I’ll:

Create “throwaway” code to avoid premature optimization.
Outsource everything off the critical path with JIT contractors i.e.:
- industrial design
- 3D modeling
- graphics
- VFX
- ad campaign A/B

What else? Less marginal time on nonsense means more spent on the productive by default. Recent sacrifices:

No video games
No TV

Touch the Nerve.

Often courage is the ultimate productivity hack.

Recently, sharing the concept of Space in public made me uncomfortable because it’s a work in progress. What if I have to pivot later? I don’t want to use up my credibility!

To deal with this I created a counter narrative:

What a great opportunity for folks to learn from, why not share it for their benefit?
Isn’t it better to expose ideas as fast as possible so I can get corrected and draw the right people to me?
Bonus, I get to mortgage my social reputation — what’s more motivating than that?

So, I’m building in public now starting immediately via weekly DevLog. 🫡

January Reflection

A productive month but I didn’t hit my targets. I had wanted 100 waitlist signups, but I have <5.

I could make excuses like:

It’s hard — I’m building SOTA defining product with many unknowns 😰
I strained my back 💢 (ironically at PT) and had debilitating headaches
a rat nested right over the bedroom, then it died… and could not be found 😢
etc.

These are not valid excuses. I missed because:

I set the wrong goal. Learning is primary, and the best way I can learn right now isn’t a waitlist or pre-sales, though that will come soon. The prototype of Spatial Desktop is primary combined with direct customer interviews/interaction.
I was worried about price of the hardware and tried to use cheap cameras which were hard to develop with
I didn’t work hard as I possibly could — working at the edge is as excruciating as it is exciting, packages do not exist, you have to work from papers or research or just figure it out yourself. It is easy to work 10+ hours, it’s harder to work X good hours.

Here is what happened:

Space
- 🗑 Created assets for a pre-sales campaign but didn’t launch it since the hardware pricing was wildly off 😞 — it was useful to drive the concept but took more time than was needed.
- 📈 ~50% towards the Spatial Desktop prototype:
  - ✅ “throw” one display to another
    ✅ distributed real-time I/O streaming (codename: Wormhole)
  - ✅ create reconstruction of house using consumer hardware (codename: Big Bang)
    ✅ real time object tracking (codename: SpaceTime)
    ✅ camera hardware provider selected (codename: GravityCamera)
    ✅ plot spatial detection events through time (codename: Timelines)
  - 🔧 real time gesture control of the Spatial Desktop
    3D pose projection
    focus finding
    hover effects
    “grab and release”
    “grab and drag”
- ✅ Launched DevLog — first DevLog post for Spatial Desktop, additional demos to come weekly
Health
- Incorporated Functional Patterns — Went from 1 debilitating headache a month to zero in the last 5 months. I’ll have stats and pics in later updates.
- Added back daily concentration meditation
- Measured microplastic levels — placed in the 2nd to top quartile
- Ongoing Experiments
  - taking Blueprint daily

Overall, I feel that I’ve crested a hill and am starting to pick up speed!

Win February

Plans:

Startup — Ship Spatial Desktop Prototype
- 6 1-3 hour deep work engineering blocks / day
- Record demos for:
  - throwing a display to an arbitrary other display
  - controlling a light or other IoT device spatially
  - focus finding, hover states, grab, drag, and release
- Post 4 devlogs
- (stretch) select Space hardware to setup pre-sales
Health
- Measure
  - aging rate (current is 0.78 years / year vs. target of 0.7)
  - body comp
  - bloodwork
- Experiment
  - Continue taking Blueprint daily
  - (new) Reduce microplastics by stop reheating pre-made meals in the plastic container
  - (new) adding blackout curtains
Influence
- Open (this) personal newsletter to the public, post on social
- 50 (+10) personal newsletter subs
- 2100 (+100) personal followers

Onward

That’s it for this update. Let me know if you have any cool ideas for Space. If you could have someone follow you around all day what would you hire them to do?

Till next time.

— Michael

Recital

This recital will be in every issue.

I’m an Entropist, I believe life is an infinite game. There is no win, only a high score. My score is determined by how much I contribute to our high score which is defined by:

surviving as long as possible together
enjoyment along the way

In this monthly letter you’ll watch over my shoulder as I swing big on civilization scale purpose. My hope is that by watching me rise, you will be inspired to do the same.

Or if I crash and burn you can at least avoid my mistakes!

Either way, I promise it won’t be boring 🧨

My Life Plans at a Glance

Life — eliminate the geographical and biological lotteries that throttle human potential
Win 2035+ — drive a tectonic shift in the institutions that develop people
Win 2025 - 2035 — accrue the power needed to by creating a tech unicorn
Win 2025:
- Startup — 0 → 15 k monthly recurring revenue
- Influence — 40 → 100+ personal newsletter subscribers and ~2,000 → ~10,000 personal followers
- Personal Health — 0.78 → 0.7 PACE of aging (as a rollup of health and well being)

February Issue - Major Updates