whats the meta, son?

are you playing or getting played?

If you don't know what 'meta' is, stick around to see how it changed my life and what it might do to you. But first…

🔭 Weekly Meta

It‘s actually been a bit of an uneventful week!

• Trump said the US trade deal with China is signed, but nobody knows if it‘s true. Last time he said so, it was a lie. Maybe this time it isn‘t?

• Whales kept accummulating ETH, breaking a daily record from 2018 according to this random guy from twitter

• $CLANKER finally broke the downtrend line & doubled in price. Recommend waiting for a retrace to those looking for an entry 🙃

• Joe Lubin & Dr. Nick shared their metas about Ethereum & DAOs respectively 👇

Joe Lubin‘s bigger picture meta

Shifting society from top-down command and control-based trust infrastructure to bottom-up protocol-based trust infra is the biggest paradigm shift in millennia.

It will enable communities to assert genuine financial and political agency. Combining this with AI and automation that is easily accessible to level up everyone and everything, will usher in an era of abundance.

The resulting clarity, acceleration and abundance will enable humanity to focus on improving different measures of health as much as it currently focusses on GDP. As those metrics rise, economic metrics will also go through the roof.

Joe Lubin is a cofounder of Ethereum & founder of ConsenSys. Full post here.

Nick‘s “why DAOs failed so far”

Lots of DAOs got started by teams who didn’t actually want them, or care about them, they just wanted a token without going to jail. As a result, we didn’t iterate enough, most got stuck in the “fork Compound” or “multisig + snapshot” pattern.

They either clung to power, or YOLO exited to community without doing anything other than say “it’s yours now”. Lawyers got in & massively over-complicated. If we spent 2% of what we spent on lawyers, on tooling, we’d be 10X further.

Consequently, we repeated every bad mistake made over a hundred years of governance, but worse, because of terrible tooling, misguided ideas of decentralisation and a layer of crypto degeneracy.

Nick Almond is a DAO diehard and deep thinker. Full post here.

WTF EVEN IS “META”?

Why meta matters

My friends bought ETH at $1400 in 2017, when they saw numba go up. I bought at $10 in 2016, because I understood the meta. That‘s why I paid my house in cash & they‘ll be paying off bank loans the next 15 years.

In this case, I spent preceding years researching how banks & fiat money work, how big internet companies operate, what kind of alternative socioeconomic systems are possible or what makes them fail.

This allowed me to intuitively grasp the implications & potential impact of Ethereum, whereas most normies still don‘t get it to this day.

What kind of meta?

By “meta” in NextMeta, I generally mean two things:

1. The bigger picture - the context around the context

2. The most effective tactic available - what actually works right now

I might have given up on building MetaGame, but I haven‘t given up on playing it & helping others find it. NextMeta is all about bringing you the meta.

Meta = unfair advantage

Here's what I mean:

In investing: Retail follows KOLs calling for “memecoin supercycle". Meta thinkers know that if everyone is talking about something, it probably peaked.

In career: Normies are optimizing resumes, meta thinkers vibe code in public, bootstrap ventures & understand that reputation is the ultimate opportunity-unlocker.

You a player or an NPC?

Are you playing the game, or are you caught up someone else‘s?

Start asking yourself:

• What's the game being played below the surface?

• What‘s the game that‘s gonna be played next?

In your industry, your relationships, your investments, your daily routines - what‘s the meta game that could change how you play the game?

The crazy part?

Once you start, you can't stop. You start seeing patterns & leverage points everywhere. And once you understand the meta, everything else falls into place.

Ready to level up?

Want more meta? Get it once a week!

(Actually, umm… I can‘t really promise I‘ll have it. But we‘ll give our best!)

Most of you will read this, nod along & go right back to playing the same game.
Why?

• Seeing the meta is admitting you've been an NPC in someone else's game

So here's my challenge: Pick ONE area of your life and ask "What game am I actually playing here?" or “What best practice is actually yesterday's meta?" Then do something different this week.

Any concerns or questions about anything whatsoever? Lmk below 👇