Hello my fellow futurists!
Have you seen La La Land? If not you should, the cinematography is beautiful. There’s a ton to take away from the movie, but one little snippet is passion.
People love what other people are passionate about.
In a city like LA, there’s enough people that will go to a jazz club that opening one still makes sense.
The nice thing is that the internet is much bigger than Los Angeles, so whatever you’re passionate about, no matter how niche, there’s an audience for it.
As the internet expands to all of humanity's population, and as we cruise into the Metaverse, there's an audience out there for your niche passions.
I write you from Phoenix, Arizona. My sister in law lives here and we came to visit along with my wife's other sister and everyone's families.
While it's great to visit family, I don't like Phoenix.
Phoenix is a rapidly growing metro area in the US, and yet hopefully not indicative of the future of development here.
It's #carlife on steroids: super spread out, drive everywhere, enormous parking lots, massive freeways, and endless suburbia.
It's not good for the environment, it's not a way to build community, and it's not how we should be building cities.
The future of living should look a lot more like a European city, or solarpunk and a lot less like Los Angeles.
In fact, even LA knows the future isn't LA and is investing heavily in public transportation, more dense housing, and more bike and pedestrian friendly streets.
We're in a very interesting place right now with the media, the internet, global communications, and free speech. Where Elon Musk fits in? I'm not sure, no one really is, but it's going to be interesting.
CNN
Energy storage is just as important as energy production, almost moreso as we move towards more renewable / sustainable energy production means like wind and solar.
Some scientist have potentially created a nice, cheap energy storage solution using molten salt.
Not a ton of details available at the moment, but it makes a solid amount of sense. Epic makes an amazingly versatile video game engine + has a kid favorite game with Fortnite, Lego makes an amazingly versatile build blocks toy + now has tons of Lego movies and games.
The two companies teaming up on a kid friendly virtual space makes sense. In a sense that's what Roblox is, right?
Still not sure you understand any of this stuff? CoinDesk put together a nice, easy-to-read series on crypto, defi, ethereum, etc.
Definitely worth a skim.
CoinDesk
When I lived in San Francisco my house had like 3 electrical outlets for the whole house. We'd run extension cords all over the place. When they built the homes in San Francisco over a hundred years ago they just weren't thinking we'd need so many electrical things.
Now as new housing developers are building homes for the future they're thinking about dedicated VR space, and hopefully a lot more electric outlets.
WSJ
I don't think I've understood the value of my Second Brain, the processes and routines I've built up for writing this newsletter, even just having my home computer setup until I tried to write this newsletter issue while on vacation on my wife's laptop.
My hat's off to the digital nomads who have everything in one laptop and work from anywhere, but I've found that it's taken 3X longer to write this than usual and I'm an additional day late.
There's value in having your setup and routines, but also figuring out a solid mobile setup.
Let me know. Just hit reply, I read and respond to everyone!
As always, if you think a friend would like Trends, just forward them the email.
If you were forwarded this email and want to subscribe just go here.
Have an awesome week and see you next time!
Daniel
In urbanization, you think big because you are thinking decades ahead.
Kushal Pal Singh