🔤 Macro Decision Making & micro decision making
Being intentional is the way to win
“One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.”
—Steve Jobs
What's Inside This Week:
ALIGN: New developments at the intersection of AI and longevity
BUILD: Progress updates on our belief system quantification SDK
CULTURE: The concept of “no-self”
🤖 ALIGN:
A few curated links and resources of recent topics around AI, health, longevity, business and product frameworks, cool tools, and general stuff I find interesting.
More money comes to AI healthcare: Qventus nabs $105M at $400M+ valuation
Start With The Press Release—The Amazon Method for Shipping Value
🛠️ BUILD: Macro and Micro Thinking for Decision Making
First of all—we’re live: https://github.com/Epistemic-Me
My teammates, Deen and Jonathan, have been instrumental in getting our GitHub ready for open source contribution. You can read everything in documentation in the GitHub and here in our intro docs. Thanks to them we’re LIVE! Woohoo.
As I reflect on this milestone, one of the biggest reasons we’re here is decision-making throughput. Because there were many decisions that we had to make to get to this point.
Do you find yourself overwhelmed by all the decisions you need to make for work?
Which vendor should you choose?
How do you prioritize features when customer interviews are pouring in with new ideas?
Should you pursue this partnership or that one?
etc.
Me too.
Because there are so many micro decisions and macro decisions to make when you're building something from the ground up.
I’ve learned to work backwards from the future, to find signal in the noise.
Many respected entrepreneurs advocate for this method:
Steve Jobs
Jensen Huang
Brian Chesky
Jeff Bezos
etc.
Envision the ideal customer experience—whether it’s two weeks from now when they’re using your product or a hundred years into the future when your legacy is part of their daily lives.
Imagine that future clearly, and then trace the steps to make it real.
So how are we adopting this for Epistemic Me?
I look at it on two horizons: the macro and the micro.
The Macro
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s legendary CEO, once said, “I go forward in time, and look backwards. I would look backwards and kind of read my history.”
The same principle applies whether you’re making choices on technical direction, launching a product, or solving a day-to-day issue.
As co-founders, we spent HOURS and HOURS discussing and debating what the future would look like before a line of code was written.
We talked about how an AI-aligned humanity future would have to mean that we've solved some fundamental problems that haven't been solved yet today.
We asked ourselves in this moment, at this time, "What are the fundamental problems we can solve with the unique combinations of skills, perspectives, and experiences we bring to the table?"
One of those problems is hyper-personalization of any system to a particular individual based on what makes them who they are and why they are the way they are.
In a future not too far away…
As you get ready for the day, your AI syncs with your calendar and various social media and gives you one feed with social circle updates, work updates, and important reminders and notifications for family affairs. You see the updates in a visual feed in your semi-permanent VR contact lenses. You think about making some changes to the calendar, the AI senses that, and presents to you a draft of changes to confirm. You make a thumbs up hand signal, and the changes are committed.
A lot of sci-fi books have written some flavor of the above even 50 years ago.
So my question is, what needs to be true to actually make this reality?
One of the things we talked about for Epistemic Me is the fundamental question of, How can systems truly personalize experiences without understanding us?
And then I came to a question that provokes curiosity to most I talk to: How can AI understand us if we don't fully understand ourselves?
And then, how CAN AI understand us?
Okay, we need programmatic representations for everybody.
Okay, we need those to be unique, because everyone is unique.
Okay, everyone’s beliefs at any point in time are context dependent (nature and nurture), and also evolve.
In the macro, we envision Epistemic Me as the standard protocol for belief systems and models of self, similar to how TCP and USB 3.0 are standards across many products of many different entities. That even gives context to our decision to open source—the product itself can grow much larger that way than if not.
And that way, it will be more useful to the world.
Going through this exercise helped us get clear on what it could be.
So then, we could work backwards through the big boulders of work.
Then, we could tie it to real problems in real markets today with stepping stones to that future we envision.
Then, we had further hypotheses and a working definition of our Ideal Customer Profile.
Then, we could experiment further, with more conviction in direction.
There's a price you pay to save time to make decisions in the micro. And that price is by spending hours and hours and hours discussing, researching, debating the macro.
And that price is worth it a 1000 times over in value when you get into day to day execution.
One of my fundamental beliefs is that Epistemic Me is going to grow into a global open-source project with thousands and thousands of contributors (maybe you’re one of them (;), so getting aligned on the macro now is going to pay dividends in that future.
The Micro
There's a lot of startup and business advice out there.
There’s a lot of noise.
One clear signal though, is that successful teams ship value quickly and consistently. We’re aiming to ship something weekly, to build that muscle.
Human coordination, is a problem to say the least.
Information comes at your team from all directions, insanely fast, and new decisions prop up every moment it seems:
What’s going on with X partnership?
How are we thinking about capturing data for Y use case?
IDK WHAT TO EVEN EAT I HAVE SO MUCH DECISION FATIGUE—ok I’ll Door Dash my favorite unhealthy junk food
In my mind I think of an “alignment” coefficient.
It’s like every pair of hands rowing a boat, and 100% means all work output is rowed efficiently towards the X on the map.
When you leave a meeting, a kickoff, a sync—the alignment coefficient starts decaying.
I'm sure many have experienced this.
So how do we stay aligned in the micro, now that you’ve gotten aligned on the macro?
There is no solid rule, and no one tool to rule them all. I will just share what we’ve done.
We started using the Press Release method by Amazon for Epistemic Me to get started. These press releases may never see the light of day, but they are our “X on the map”.
This approach ensures every effort is aligned with the customer experience we’re aiming for.
We work backwards from the customer experience, and we make it a reality.
We meet weekly, and I come ready with the press release that we envision goes out with our weekly podcast. We have a few in the backlog for future weeks that we read through asynchronously.
We reach shared understanding, we discuss and debate, and then we commit to then next week.
So far we haven’t been the best at documenting all of our tasks sporadically between Linear and Coda (there are so many tasks at this stage… another optimization to be made).
The press releases have kept us very well aligned. We’re going to continue this for the near future.
Last week, I was a bit late with the newsletter and podcast launch. I mentioned some challenges we ran into, and that I would share a post-mortem. The above is a screenshot of our original targeted press release, after we didn’t reach it.
Here’s my raw, unedited post-mortem of the marketing launch (newsletter + podcast).
I broke it out into Pre-Production / Production / Post-Production to wrap my mind around which parts of our process needed streamlining.
Epistemic Me Marketing Launch - POST MORTEM:
Pre Production (20-60 min depending on agreement and topic complexity and prep required):Having an agenda of questions is good. Need to optimize an AI prompt to help make this efficient, and also cover this as part of our weekly syncs.
Production (1-2 hours):Descript video feeds work well. Need better lighting and audio for Jonathan and Deen
Post Production (20+ hours):Need more time. Too much surface area. Should’ve started a couple weeks before hand with my own personal brand changes. Better planning will help.
Need an SOP to follow so it's less stressful to do a marketing launch.
Think through what aspects I worked through, could be outsourced made more efficient in process with AI (AI prompts for the podcasts.
Substack email import did not go well. I should've tried this days ago. Mistakes were made. I didn't realize that the subscribers didn't import over the publications. Never again. That was stressful. Lol.
Definitely took on way too much. Perhaps we can outsource some mechanical work like transcript correction?
Descript AI feature around multicam settings could be optimized better: no cutaways, active speaker only. Lesson learned.
Also learned that Substack can post RSS to Spotify, YouTube, Apple. That would’ve saved me like 4 hours.
By far the most time consuming post production task was trying to correct the transcript, due to poor audio quality (can be solved by microphones) I had to manually go thru and select different active speakers cuz the AI couldn’t detect it. It would think Jonathan was Deen or me, and I had to manually change it. Transcript is still not perfect because I didn’t have time to fix all of it, not as important. Will look to outsource that one for sure.
Thumbnail took super long. If Jonathan and Deen have better lighting, it’d be good enough to upscale with less processing time (that takes a while in Canva). To be clear, this did not have to take long, but I’m following the philosophy of creators like Mr. Beast / Alex Hormozi on putting 80% of the effort on the “packaging” to get viewers in the door. This makes me think we need a reliable way to generate thumbnails. Next up is A/B testing the thumbnails.
Need to try out short clip makers. Descript is OK at it. Maybe I can optimize better. There are many other things on the market: OpusClips, etc.
Need AI prompt for: SEO optimization, title of pod, subtitle of pod, adding part of our externalized press release (that is nice, doing the press release to target, and taking copy from it that made it). I don’t like the show notes from Descript.
Takeaway: if you are launching a newsletter or podcast, give yourself way more time than you think. It’s kind of like any home renovation project—2x or 3x the budget and time just to give yourself a buffer. Otherwise, you will not have fun and be very stressed. I can attest to that.
And here’s a screenshot of the course corrected PR. I think it’s a good idea to keep both, so we can revisit this in the future.
Kind of like how some people collect newspaper clippings.
And of course, the REALLY real podcast release with public press release…
How can AI understand us, if we don't fully understand ourselves?
The question sounds interesting if you flip it the other way too: “How can AI understand us, if we don't fully understand ourselves?”
It was useful to write out this post-mortem because this week's newsletter and podcast took a fraction of the time.
And as I mentioned in the podcast, I'm really happy about how streamlined the process has gotten even after only a week. (:
All about that continuous improvement 💪🏼💪🏼
✌🏼 CULTURE: No-Self
In Eastern philosophy, particularly in Buddhist thought, there's a concept called "anatta" or "no-self" – the idea that what we consider our "self" is actually impermanent and constantly changing.
Flowers are made of non-flower elements, including water, sunshine, the soil, the weather, the gardener, the florist, etc. Without these elements, no flower would manifest.
A person is also made up of all elements except the self, including parents, human ancestors, plant ancestors, animal ancestors, water, sunshine, food, education, life circumstances, etc. The body is constantly changing. Thoughts and feelings are in constant flux. Only our notion of a separate self imprisons us and holds us apart from everything that is.
This ancient wisdom surprisingly aligns with our approach to development at Epistemic Me.
Speaking of decision making, we've built this concept into our core architecture: allowing our system to understand that users have different "selves" in different contexts.
It’s fun to leverage knowledge and expertise from many fields together into technology.
Have a great week!
Be sure to check out Episode 2 of our Podcast, with deeper reflections on building the future in the open.
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P.S. If you haven’t already checked out my other newsletter, ABCs for Growth—that’s where I have personal reflections on personal growth related to applied emotional intelligence, leadership and influence concepts, etc.
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💪🏼 How You Can Help
What's Next?
We're building something unprecedented: kind of an operating system for human understanding and beliefs.
If you're an engineer or builder who's ever felt the gap between technical capability and philosophical aspiration, we're building this for you.
We’re currently in private beta, sign up here if you are interested in contributing to the SDK or building products on top of it: https://epistemicme.ai/
GitHub here: https://github.com/Epistemic-Me
EM acts as a personalization layer that allows you to understand your users better. We have built a model and set of interfaces from first principles thinking in philosophy and epistemology to accurately map human belief systems.
What can that do for you?
→ Perhaps increase sales conversions.
→ Perhaps optimize copywriting in your automation funnels, depending on the user.
→ Perhaps helping researchers and scientists better quantify subjectivity in their experiments, for better science.
And… if you are looking for the “next best question” to evolve your beliefs, it could help you too.
In a few weeks we are going to rapidly get the structure to ship new features constantly, with new releases tied to this newsletter and our podcast.
Check out our first podcast on YouTube or Substack for a heavier deep dive into our “Why”.