Praxis: A Gravitational Force for Interesting People
Praxis: A Gravitational Force for Interesting People
The inspiration to launch something new...coming soon
My last post “Complacency Will Take You Long Before You're Dead” was on 3/21.
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Hi Growers 🌱,
Happy Sunday! I am writing to you from a coffee shop in Santa Monica as I enjoy an iced cappuccino and croissant.
You may have noticed that I sometimes like to highlight interesting people I meet and content that has inspired me.
I share these moments because I believe the content you consume and the people you meet can change your life.
My goal for this piece is to reflect on some recent people I met and content I consumed as well as share an idea that I plan to work on going forward!
My First IRL Praxis Event
I’m a member of Praxis, a startup that has raised $19M to build a city in the Mediterranean for internet workers, with the goal to create a community of shared values. I wrote about Praxis a bit previously, here.
A few weeks ago, Praxis emailed me that they were hosting an event in LA. I never interacted with Praxis IRL, so I instantly accepted the invitation to attend.
At the event, I met a number of interesting people including some familiar faces.
I ran into Ethan Aldrich, who I first met a few weeks prior when we both met the co-founder of YouTube. I wrote about that previously, here.
Ethan is your stereotypical boy genius.
He is a 22 year old Stanford drop out who went through Y-Combinator, the most prestigious startup accelerator in the world. He has been building things for the U.S. government since high school, and now runs a government contracting business doing millions in revenue.
We started geeking out on the future of biotech when we were joined by Andrew Herr.
Andrew is quite literally a mad scientist.
He was honored as a Mad Scientist by the U.S. Army (twice) and led human performance and biotech strategy efforts for the Pentagon, special operations personnel, and professional sports teams.
Andrew now runs Fount, a Founders Fund backed company designed to make humans feel and perform their best. Taking his experience working with Navy Seals, he is applying is skills to help optimize all aspects of human health for everyone at scale.
And finally, I had the opportunity to meet Jesse Michels, whom I followed on YouTube a bit through his channel American Alchemy.
Jesse is esoteric, philosophical, and business savvy.
I only got a few minutes to chat with Jesse as he was heading out the door, but I explored more of his content the following day. His production quality and interview style is world-class and he is well positioned to create a dominant brand. I am very bullish that this channel will blow up (it already has). Beyond making YouTube videos, he also works full time at Thiel Capital.
Following The Praxis Thread
About a week after the event, I caught up with Eric Wollberg, who runs community at Praxis.
We caught up about the event and he asked if there was anyone in the community he could introduce me to.
I told him that I’m interested in deep tech and content creation. He recommended Nasjaq.
Nasjaq covers deep tech in a fun and thoughtful way to a massive audience.
He has a TikTok with over 1M followers and a YouTube channel with 65K subscribers.
But funny enough, when exploring his content I stumbled across his interview with Jesse Michels.
I listened to their whole video and put out a few tweets from it.
The topics they covered were so up my alley, and shared in such a laid back way, that it was actually one of my favorite pieces of content I consumed in a long time because it felt so relatable.
Second Order Effects of Good Content
Listening to Jesse and Nasjaq talk gave me inspiration to begin to record my own interviews!
This has been something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time but I have always had a few reasons that stopped me:
The editing would be challenging
There is too much content out there already and I’m too late
My interviews wouldn’t be helpful to others and not good enough
For some reason, this interview, along with a series of events over the last few weeks, really gave me the courage to actually give it a shot and try.
I need to figure out a few of the production details, but I’m looking forward to launching my first episode in the coming weeks!
Thank you for reading! 🌱
Aidan
Looking forward to hearing/watching the first interview man!