Chroma #22: Back to our roots, smashing scammers, and a new vision for health

Oh, and a new product (pre-launch) announcement, too.

Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Chroma founder newsletter, where I share my raw, unedited perspectives, without consideration for brand image or optimal marketing positioning. We have a new product I am fairly excited about that I did not think would be viable until rather recently. I’m going to share a bit about how I figured out how to build it, and contrast that with the approach taken by something that on the surface looks similar, which was built by someone whose day job is professionally committing financial fraud, scamming hapless individuals on a massive scale. Finally, I will share a bit about our new approach of slashing prices in perpetuity to impose a standard upon ourselves, even if there is no serious competitor that pushes us to do so — with this approach, we might just be able to get somewhere!

The moral imperative to crush scammers

I do not mince words. Several years ago, I pointed out how Joovv was blatantly lying to their customers about the power of their devices, and how the median customer interested in red light was bizarrely not smart enough to plug in a $10-15 power meter to figure this out. This really turned me off to the industry because how I am going to build and sell a more powerful product if people are too lazy to be discerning customers, and that is really what it is — intellectual laziness. It is simple to say people are retarded, and they are, but it is a sort of general apathy that is responsible for this, not a true handicap of raw intelligence. In fact, raw intelligence is very rarely the limiting factor, and amidst certain incentive structures, there appears to emerge what I like to call functional retardation.

When observing grifters of any variety, there is a temptation to ask, “does this person know that he is a grifter, that his works are a sham, meant to deceive and defraud, or is he simply a hapless fool, a true believer of his own nonsense?” I have asked this question myself many times, but as with science, engineering, or product development, asking good questions is of utmost importance and I no longer think this is one. If a tiger leaps at you and is in mid air, you do not ask if it is acting morally, or if of course there is nothing immoral because it is simply operating within its nature, you do not ask if it is “good” or “bad” to be eaten by a tiger, you simply shoot it then and there without making a fuss and move one with your life, perhaps a bit stirred from the adrenaline. It is similar to the common trope in zombie movies where the friend is bitten and they have not quite transformed yet and you have to go, “sorry, buddy, but I guess we have to shoot you in the head too now” and when they hesitate too much, others get bitten. Compassion for evil is cruelty to everyone.

The 8-9 year journey to the Chroma Skylight

Here are a couple early low-res images of the Chroma Skylight prototype we have been working on. We have a bunch of nicer photos that we are still putting together.

If you just want to go ahead pre-order it before learning more about it, here’s a link:

Like many nerds out there, I figured out a long time ago that it is far too dim in indoor environments, with even a brightly lit area with many lights or windows still only being on the order 1% as bright as direct sunlight, and closer to 0.1% in an indoor area that is not so brightly lit. I made a number of janky setups over the year. I had 5 5000k 18 watt Vivid+ Soraa bulbs connected to a WiFi controllable outlet as a light alarm clock, which was rather jarring. I had a number of lights at my desk shining down at me year before Chroma or the Sky Portal, and I had a bunch of halogen bulbs over the conference room table at my first startup, which annoyed half the team.

The original Sky Portal came from the reluctant acceptance that it is really quite impractical to try to compensate 100x over existing lighting solutions, or even 10x to get closer to sunlight. There were many companies replicating the shape or timing of a solar spectrum, but not the intensity, which is a bit like that video of some kids making a full size replica Bugatti out of mud in a developing country, which actually looks remarkable, but does not even match a Honda Civic on driving. The Sky Portal solved the intensity problem by deciding to only achieve that level of intensity directly on a single person in one small region of a room as a desk light. Moreover, early versions of Sky Portal had a pure light blue cyan channel to concentrate a limited amount of LED power into the wavelengths that have the strongest circadian response i.e. maximizing melanopic lux (the idea of 10,000 lux for SAD lights actually precedes the discovery of the cell in the human eye that has peak sensitivity to cyan so it is rather foolish to continue referencing lux, which relates to perceptual brightness and peaks in the middle of the green range, right in the center of the visible spectrum while cyan is about 25% of the entire visible spectrum left of that).

As early experiments when I was getting Chroma set up proved, you really just can’t get enough power if you are illuminating an entire space — or you could, but you would just use a ridiculous amount of LEDs, and have enough of a power draw that the electricity cost would become prohibitive.

The Sky Portal is a one-trick pony

A year and a half ago I decided to move out of my van and into a home as I wanted a space I could use as a workshop as I was thinking about getting back into some aerospace / advanced materials stuff. Like every home, the lighting was trash, and although I had Sky Portals, I was not always at my desk, and the existing lights were rather obnoxious. I tried screwing in some custom LED bulbs I had made into the existing sockets, but that did nothing because all the installed infrastructure is meant to be super underpowered, and from a business perspective, there is no way to transform the way buildings are constructed. Even new buildings that have higher LED power are incredibly lousy, in addition to the spectrum, now with glare, as small LED downlights are incredibly obnoxious since everywhere in an indoor space you will catch them in the corner of your eye.

I had a few round studio panel style lights, simply with ordinary white LEDs that blend together to form any color temperature within a wide range, and I pointed them upward at the ceiling. It turned out this was pretty much the best interim solution. In my living room I had a large panel on a 6 ft tall stand, and in my office I had a smaller panel on the back of my desk pointing up and back (alongside Sky Portals). This made my space way more pleasant, but it could not replace the Sky Portal because it was still vastly underpowered. It sort of took me out of the darkness, but it did not really bring me into the light. The larger panel in the living room was 200 watts, it had fans on it and was about 20 inches in diameter. Not enough!

Then I saw a landing page a friend shared with me, which looked like it might be vaporware, showing a lamp in the exact same configuration I had independently come up with, except it claimed to be 400 watts. I immediately laughed because looking at the photo, it was totally obvious they would not be able to drive 400 watts into it without it getting way too hot and burning out the LEDs. It was just a landing page mockup so the power being an estimate that turned out to be a bit off was not a big deal. The bigger thing that stood out to me though was the total lack of comments on anything pertaining to spectrum, harmful blue light, the cyan gap, lack of r9, and so forth — in fact, due to the mention of CRI and nothing else, an obsolete metric mostly used to mislead, I was 90% confident that if this was a real product being built, it would have the same lousy deep blue rich blue LED phosphor pumps that make modern lighting terrible for human health, even if within that category the CRI was pushed up to not make it quite as harmful. I realized then that I ought to make the product properly to avoid people getting the toxic product due to it being the only option and better than nothing, but there was still the power problem, and the fact that 400 watts seemed sort of ridiculous.

But then it hit me — the energy optimizations I was thinking through were actually vestigial memes from the residue of my leftist brainwashing I had grown up with in California, and energy consumption is actually good, and I had left the suicide cult that despises the existence of human life quite a few years ago. I suddenly found myself asking, what would I want to make and use, if I stopped considering energy and cost, and the reality of it is human life is worth expending as much energy on as possible in ways that consumers desire, in fact, this is the fundamental basis of what it means to be alive. I realized if we did make it that powerful, and in fact, more powerful, say 500 watts in total, we could actually transform the nature of the indoor environments.

I let go of the concern of reflective losses, and suddenly the tall, roof-facing light, extreme diffusion, and zero glare due to it being impossible to make direct eye contact with the emitter was the only sensible option.

I let go of mass efficiency, and a total silent, 10x heavier, massive block aluminum heat sink that we CNC machined for the prototype seemed quite sensible.

I let go of concerns of electric bills and imagined how beautiful a home might look, and all the objects inside a home, if one of these lamps were in every room.

What I did not let go of, however, was my situational awareness of the world at large and the values that exist throughout the world today as they pertain to health, performance, and efficiency — not in terms of energy, but as it pertains to the efficiency with which excellence is achieved, which ironically, is the true form of energy efficiency if one understands what life is. That means that only operating in a limited part time capacity, I did not give the project the attention it needed to proceed at full speed. I instead went off climbing, decided to co-found a defense startup with a guy who discovered something quite profound, and wrote a 45,000 word treatise/prospectus/manifesto for a non-profit research institution to advance the foundations of energy and aerospace via new types of materials & manufacturing technologies — my bitcoin billionaire connections are limited, so hard to say if that will go forward anytime soon, but I am confident it will at some point as there isn’t really anyone else remotely in my position.

With only a single full time person, split between many priorities, it could only move forward so quickly. Now we are recently at 3 full time people (myself not among those) and several part time people, which will allow us to execute far faster. It has however been long enough that we have an excellent prototype and were only 2-3 months from having a launch with some inventory, but we decided to pre-launch ahead of time because the thing that might of been vaporware is also pre-launched and we know that if we don’t pre-launch, a lot of people who maybe didn’t know about us or this product are going to be kicking themselves.

The Chroma Skylight features

There are a number of different things that go into making the Skylight an incredible product and most of them are hard to share in ordinary marketing materials because a lot of it is minutiae — the same sort of “minutiae” that means you can buy a $200 million private jet, and look forward to lousy LEDs inside of it, or walk into the restroom of a Starbucks, a $100b company, under a lousy LED where you will dry your hands with an air dryer — in those 30 seconds you are being told: “Your life is worthless. Your time is worthless. We save one penny, while you lose a part of your life, and we laugh in your face. We are parasites running the world who hate life, and we are forcing you to undergo this humiliation ritual so you do not ever forget it.” Yeah, that was about 30 seconds. Anyway, I am just going to try to list all/many of them here in no particular order:

1. Violet phosphor pump instead of blue phospor pump. This is the core of making a high fidelity light instead of a shit fidelity light. 95+ CRI with blue phosphor pump is still junk with a toxic dark blue (~440nm) spike.

2. Custom tuning on the violet phosphor pump, adjusting the violet peak, making sure we are hitting the neuropsin (opsin-5) receptor that is integral to the dopaminergic response of sunlight in the POMC pathway at the foundations of metabolism.

3. Taking a ~5000k high fidelity white light and making it even higher fidelity, optimizing for real metrics instead of peak lumens per watt, which would be maxed out with a monochromatic green. Hitting a fidelity index of 98, the metric that is based on 99 reflectance curves instead of CRI’s 8. A gammut index of 100.6 to allow everything illuminated to be vivid in terms of proper color saturation rather than dull and washed out. A boost in r9, around the 97 mark, the first reflectance curve CRI ignores, which is all about red light, and its absence is responsible for making your skin look less flattering given the criticality of red light to human skin tones.

4. Taking something that solves the massive cyan gap of a typical high CRI blue pump LED, and noticing the ever so slight cyan dip that remains, adding 2-3% pure cyan to totally smooth things out, even though it makes less of a difference than just making the whole thing 20% more or less powerful.

5. Having a YAG phosphor LED for an amber channel that simultaneously has deep red, the YAG enabling ZERO blue light, whereas a typical 1650k amber white LED with a blue phosphor pump still has a tiny blue spike on it.

6. Having a 3rd channel that is pure deep red for evening use to go below 1000k color temperature, though pure red is not actually white light, it is similar enough to think about it in terms of color temperature. Prototype has two channels, but we are adding the 3rd channel in first version because it will be really nice to get that deep red instead of orange later in the evening.

7. Having a Gallium Nitride (GaN) power supply instead of silicon, which means you get a more stable output, you definitely do not have the buzzing that people get concerned about with certain silicon power supplies, and it is just all around better. The entire world is switching to GaN and SiC, but if you’re in LEDs, you’ll still be given silicon unless you go out of your way to make it GaN, which we did. It is also lighter, though the lamp is gonna be around 60 lbs so that won’t matter much.

8. Constant current reduction (CCR) because everything you see about flickerless or flicker free is usually a lie. A fluourescent light at 60 hertz (i.e. on and off 60 times a second) is truly awful and flickerless LEDs usually means PWM (pulse width modulation). They just think that if it flickers thousands of times per second to the point most people cannot perceive it, then it is ok. PWM is how dimming is usually done because LEDs like being driven at full power, but you don’t have to. CCR is a way to have a steady state, reduced output and that it is what we do.

9. Fully manual controls with no WiFi because every smart device and remote control seems to always not work as well and have HIGHER LATENCY. I just want to be able to use a knob, because it’s faster. Maybe I’m old fashioned and it’s like wanting to drive a manual, and I don’t do that, so I get that people will insist for “smart” connections and that they don’t care about WiFi (tbh, I like telecommunications a lot more than I am concerned about them, but I get that others find a different balance there). So probably we will have something smart a lot later, but core functions must come first.

10. A custom made heat sink because if you message the suppliers that make the standard ones, you find that the actual power is not quite what they say it is. But that’s not enough. Our prototype is pretty chonky (and a bit prettier than other stuff), but it’s not big enough. 500 watts with an 18 inch diameter is not quite enough if you have a massive living room with high ceilings in a $10-30m mansion. So we are pushing that up to 24 inches before we finalize molds for production, which will allow us to very comfortably reach 750 watts total power (600 watts 5000k white channel + 100 watts amber/red + 50 watts deepest red), but we will push the actual number up as high as possible within thermal constraints. I would love to hit 900 watts.

The scammer approach to products

So that other company I alluded to, well, they are making an actual hardware product so perhaps your reaction would be that I am using too strong of a word, or that it is bad form to be calling out a “competitor” like this, but let me explain: the founder of this company is a bad person — now, he is not, let’s say, running a child sex trafficking ring, or anything quite so terrible, but he exists within the category that does transgress into actual evil.

This man behind the brand Brighter, Simon Berens, is something that in the technical field of the art, is known as a shitcoiner. This man does not hide that fact, he actually presents it gladly, suggesting he falls more on the retard side of the retard vs sociopath question for shitcoiners, but as I suggested earlier, it is a silly exercise to try to tease out the difference. You might now be thinking, what is a shitcoiner and why is it at all relevant to some lamp, even if lamps and light are related to health… but let me cook. Just like you choose not to be intellectually lazy on health and light, you can do so here as well.

There you have it, working at a venture capital funded startup that works on the scam that is Ethereum, one of the world’s most popular shitcoins. Those venture capital dollars really representing government employees wasting government funds rather than private industry as this is ultimately state pension money, including the pensions of teachers and firefighters that get funneled to scammers like this.

Oh, also, the other main guy on the team also doesn’t list Better lamp on their LinkedIn and says he is Open To Work. And it says "he/him,” lol. I guess he didn’t get the memo the whole woke thing is over.

Ethereum is a bitcoin affinity scam i.e. the scam is premised on taking something valuable and suggesting some likeness to it, an attempt to sow confusion, which is quite easy here as the number of the people who really have a clue what bitcoin is, is practically a rounding error to zero. There is a good chance you have never met someone in person who actually has a decent understanding of bitcoin.

I don’t have time to explain it to you here, but I did put together a website if you want to learn about bitcoin. https://theofficialbitcoinwebsite.org The key thing is that there is only bitcoin, it is not “technology”, and it actually us fundamentally impossible for other “coins/blockchains” to have value, and I don’t have time to explain to you why all those things are the case.

The more important thing to understand is the meme that bitcoin fixes everything. So when you think, “lighting in the world is lousy” or “why are healthcare and medical institutions such obscene failures” or “there is a better way to do this, and no one even gains anything from it being done poorly” these are all observations that are downstream from the money being broken. It is not a problem of where the money is, but the actual properties of the money itself and how it shapes behavior. The money you know today will go to zero, almost certainly in your lifetime if you are under the age of 50, and when only bitcoin remains, the dynamics of how things get done will fundamentally be changed. So this obviously is not utopia at the flip of a switch, but you can think about this as the things that ought to get done get done faster.

Someone who is too lazy to figure out all these things of course will be too lazy to go beyond “make it brighter.” Moreover, looking at the new heat sink, I remain highly skeptical the hardware that can hit 400 watts. Not a zero chance, but 200-300 watts seems a lot more believable with how thin the heat sink is. Very likely standard PWM dimming and silicon power supply. Finally, the tiny base looks like it is ready to crush a puppy or small child when it gets bumped over since these are heavy.

The thing about evil is there is multiplier effect — even if one says “screw all the victims, it’s their own fault they are retarded” there is still the matter of global destruction and devastation, which that human attention and time is finite, so retards being retarded, with access to a money printer, are able to suck out oxygen from the room, impeding productive people from getting on with whatever real thing it is they are doing.

The reality is the retards are not intellectually handicapped. This guy worked at Facebook and I am sure his code compiles. But he is too retarded, and in fact, we all are too retarded, to operate intelligently when the fundamental incentive structures are broken and stolen through a monetary system in which a small group of people can conjure new monetary units at whim for themselves and their friends, and this guy doesn’t realize it, but he is part of that communist cartel, albeit, a low ranking member, as are the various familiar face on Twitter he has roped into endorsing the product — really, if you don’t know how good things can be it actually isn’t a horrible product, I mean, it’s the same roughly as the janky thing I was doing when I didn’t have a better option.

So are these shitcoiners as bad as the migrant gangs raping children throughout Europe? Directly, know, but there actions perpetuate a world where those things happen, and arguably, compared to those animals, the silicon valley shitcoiner / VC grifter (most are grifters who are paid above market rates for delivering below market performance) has greater culpability in that they should know better. If you tolerate evil, you allow it to grow, so I do so a moral duty to call it out, and a moral duty to destroy evil wherever possible. Now imagine everyone cancelled their Indiegogo order and switched to us, sure, that’s a drop in the bucket, but it would build mimetic momentum for us, and it would build mimetic momentum for those customers, rippling out across other actions they take and throughout the world.

Escaping the shackles of engineered incentives

When Pablo Escobar recruited people, he gave them a choice, plata o plomo, meaning they could get paid off, or they could get a bullet to the head. Not a hard choice. But it is problematic in that you might say “well, really, I would prefer not to become a murderous thug at all if I could have that option!”

For many people in the modern era, it is far more subtle that one is being put into that sort of position, with the illusion of choice, but incentives that impose a sort of enslavement. For instance, consider a founder of a company that achieves some level of success. A large company might come to them and offer to buy the company, and the incentives suggest a sale is the more favorable outcome: why? — well, the buyer, being larger has more access to “free” money from the money printer that the smaller company does not have, and they do not face much of a cost in spending this money that they got for free. Moreover, the smaller player must consider the diminishing marginal utility of wealth, which indicates that he must discount the upside of further wealth, and operates in a way that is more tied to loss aversion. He must do this in a world that lacks sound money because market volatility means the exposure an individual has to the market is non-ergodic i.e. his outcomes over time do not match the outcomes of the average market participant at some moment. In practice, that means small players cannot capture the aggregate returns of the market (which are quite small to begin with after one adjusts for real inflation rates), and even billionaires are “small players” compared to the market. Only a sound money (i.e. a thing that only bitcoin can do with its 21 million supply cap) can act as an index for the growth of everything and achieve ergodicity, and that is an escape valve!

This is one of many examples, but the underlying point is that by simply going with “the default” mode of operation in various domains means operating within the constrains of a subtle incentive structure, which someone else may be exploiting to their perceived advantage, and possibly to the detriment of the entire world if ones endeavors relate to fixing things that are in fact problems. So fixing everything is really a shorthand to mean that the people who would naturally go and fix things are free to do so without contrived encumbrance.

I remain highly skeptical of whether any such thing might happen in human health & wellness, but I like to be open-minded, and I have a perpetual optimism, despite the repeated failures (of others, which impact me, haha). My thinking is that predictability is the center of control. It is legibility and invasion of privacy that are the core of the tyranny and violence, whether exerted by private cartels or by a tyrannical nation state. Air Force pilot and famed military strategist, John Boyd, came up with the idea of the OODA loop: Observe Orient Decide Act, and his premise was that in a dogfight, whoever can get inside the other’s OODA loop first, wins.

Today, RFK Jr. was finally nominated as the Human Health & Services director, and there are many reasons to be optimistic about the future, but I do not believe sufficient change will come top down while the fundamental building blocks of the world that guide incentives are themselves broken. In all likelihood, Chroma will not be a global force in shaping the wellness of the world, but the more I look at things, the more I get the sense that “no one else is going to do it” — that was what \@ beautyon_ told me when I had the great fortune to run into him at an airport where we both had a layover from El Salvador. That was in reference to a bitcoin startup, and given there is still no one else talking about composite currencies as the core part of the transition, it looks more and more like he was right each month. Could it really be that no one else will make the right lights, the right consumer oils, figure out which oils are actually scalable rather than forming a niche lifestyle brand focused on luxury — while still having its affluent LA customer base subject to high linoleic acid in restaurants we are told are “high end” — compared to what? Why are standards and status relative? Will no one else set an absolute standard and strive toward that? Will no one tire of this apathetic approach to life.

I really did screw myself by stumbling my way into the world’s highest performance structural aerospace parts, and then on top of that, transforming the capabilities of the world’s most advanced weapons systems because that high water mark is hard to come anywhere close to. I do not claim to be better than others or intellectually superior, I just happened to make a few good choices that had unexpectedly outsized outcomes. Perhaps it is the chicken and egg problem that people cannot stop their degeneracy that keeps them from using the tools to escape degeneracy, because they would have to already be using them in order to have that incentive structure, and in fact, even today, the world is on the fiat standard & incentives even amongst people who chose to use bitcoin!

Setting my own standards

Anyway, a few weeks ago I awoke in Valencia, Spain (it’s close to an incredible rock climbing location) and decided enough was enough, this whole red light therapy consumer product thing with obscene price markups is ridiculous. It is not really too out of line with various other consumer products, but it’s too high for where it should be if it looked like we were on a trajectory where the world is going to be transformed in any sort of meaningful way at lease within this area, and I suppose all of health branches out of that. I spent the next hours writing a long thread on twitter in which I described my decision to slash prices 30%, with 30-50% additional price drops to be phased in over the following 6 months. This link is pinned at the top of our profile.

The reality is that I am not sure if it will work, and in fact, despite all the reasoning, I am not sure I truly know why I did it, but I did feel that I had to do it. But that’s a feature, not a bug — if I don’t know why I did it, and everyone is telling me it’s insane and irrational, you can be damn sure it was not all that predictable, and being unpredictable is the core of becoming ungovernable, unsteerable, and if we can not be so easily curtailed, it is not so easy for narratives to be shaped. For instance, people paid by pharma might start jumping in the blue blocking, the red light, and all the other trends while oh so conveniently never broaching the topic of “vaaaxzin3s” and the role they may have in surging cancer rates among young people or other devastating effects.

I’ll be honest, I felt a bit clownish about our prior pricing approach. Yes, we built unique products, and yes, from a value perspective, many people were getting 10x the value of the prices we were charging, but it was unnatural and there should have been more competition, and without any serious competitors, we have to play both sides and be our own — we need to act as if we live in the world that is coming, the world in which things are swiftly fixed, and capitalism exists, with ruthless competition from all sides. Just because we can keep playing on easy mode does not mean we should.

But I am going to flip that feeling around on everyone else operating in this space, often making products that are highly derivative of mine, and offering incredibly lousy value even compared to our prior pricing. By systematically and aggressively crushing our own margins, we will make it impossible for anyone else to be taken seriously, because we are still going to make the best products. Making better products here is not actually more expensive — the biggest input is my time, really, anyone who wants to be truly thoughtful, and the variation in raw hardware costs are not that big, especially as a percent of price given the markups in this industry, as well as in eyewear. Take Andrew Huberman for instance, who ignored the advice of Jack Kruse after going on a podcast with him (I too have made the mistake of ignoring Jack before) — he launched a brand of blue blockers, but his product is incredibly lousy, letting in lots of green light — this influencer, and yes, that’s what these medical doctors are, slightly higher IQ than the median influencers (recall the affinity scam concept? — that’s largely all Stanford or Harvard are good for these days, and that’s the same reason I built stuff relevant to hypersonic weapons, while the Stanford PhDs in materials science did not) have been able to get away with this shtick because the consumers fail to be sufficiently discerning when it comes to price.

Now that I am curtailing pricing while pushing performance, there is no choice, but to talk about our products (and even if we don’t pay you), or make yourself out to be a total clown. Enough of the paying FB ads and influencers, with everyone doing teaser gradual drops across an industry — we are defecting. You will support us and thrive, or become irrelevant and not be taken seriously by serious people. Of course, this only works if we reach critical mass organically from enough discerning people. I suppose it is a bet on the density of the people who actually want to be serious… but if it is the wrong bet, what’s the point? So I will take the bet.

For people trying to run a lifestyle business in this space, whether the peak cringe like Joovv, Kineon, Novothor, or Swanwick, or the more basic boring ones like EMR-Tek, Ra Optics, or Hooga, time to find a new line of work!

I am still going to be focused on defense, the area I know has a critical mass of serious people. The bitcoin OGs may not be quite ready to inherit the Earth, but I realized, there are several hundred of them, and only one of me, so when they are ready to become active participants in human civilization rather than passive ones, when their own mortality hits them (at 31 I feel close to death given how cognizant I am especially in the past 4-8 years how much I have been slowed down) but perhaps other people do not feel the same looming sense of mortality I do, perhaps it is because they are aimless and not really trying to do anything for which the idea of time running out is even intelligible. Defense is the area where people are serious, and in particular, the exquisite side i.e. the shit that really matters if push comes to shove, not just the dinky drones, regardless of the pace at which their relevance is growing and the amount of mindshare they have amongst the masses. Because in the drone level stuff, you get the revolving door effect more than the domains where if you have it, there is no other option. It will be nice when that can bridge more into energy and aerospace more broadly, as the foundational technologies are related, but perhaps today is not yet that day.

As always, I look forward to contributing in areas where my contributions actually materialize into something, and these days, Chroma has been increasingly “a real thing.” Heck, Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador will be wearing my Nightshade glasses in a week or two — well, I know they will be handed to him and one of his brothers will love them, can’t say for sure if Nayib will actually wear them (though he does love blue blockers and the style was made with him in mind).