🏆 Sharpening Wall Street Wins

The first post was pretty much flawless, and that’s definitely the dynamic I’m going for here. But it was so much effort that I really thought about abandoning this whole project. I have very specific needs in my life that I’ve learned over years of trial and error.

The most formative time in my life was when I discovered markets. They showed me a kind of freedom I couldn’t imagine in my pre-teens. I wasn’t shut out because of my age, and I could channel everything through text chat (or voice-only, at worst) in a way that just let me be another peer participant on the same playing field as everyone else.

That was so special to me, because I grew up in a very centralized and hierarchical household. My dad made a million dollars in 2008, working at one of the bailed-out banks. To say things were on a tight lock is an understatement, and it was evident in the strictness within my parents’ relationship. They only made it a couple more years after that, divorcing around the time that I discovered the TF2 hat bazaars.¹

Questioning Quality

The more I discover about the fandom, the more I wonder about my current situation living with Kayla. I see these incredible love stories that look like pure beauty on the public outside. I honestly didn’t even know that was possible. Kayla’s wanted to get married as far back as I can remember, and honestly it makes me sick just thinking about that. Things changed a lot when she started working full-time. She lost the energy to keep at us.²

I used to get this warm feeling around her; even got hard at sight on her arrival to date nights. But that was a long time ago, and I’m trying to pick up the pieces to see what’s left here to salvage. I plan to get some professional help locally.

Separation

In thinking about whether I needed this creative relationship space, I reviewed how I could work through these feelings myself. I am dealing quite intimately with who I will become, and there isn’t a ton of teaching I plan to do. I’ve been down that path before, and it’s just not the best use of my time, especially in something like relationships.

I thought maybe it was too much to centrally track all the experiences I had here. That I could work through things on my own. And, to an extent, that’s still what I’m doing.³

Shift

But I want to drop all that for now. The thing I’ve been most peeved about lately is that my relationship seems to detract directly from my working efforts. The harder I go in my days, the worse shit I get from her at night. That could be the determining straw, but again I will take some time to think about it more.

I used to like that attribute about her. It was a litmus test of how centralized I was becoming. Anytime I put too much in or became an unnecessary chokepoint or fulcrum, I could remain in her reaction to see where I went wrong.

But I’m approaching the end of my introductory period with the Foundation. And honestly that was what I needed most of this training for, especially now that I have the Commission on my side. I have to decide if I want to spend the rest of my life tiptoeing in bureaucracies rather than shooting into the heart of potential. I think I’ll understand a lot more after I merge in 723. Things are looking really good on the Community Fund side. I’ll wait for the chickens to hatch before counting in a more comprehensive review.

Work

Anyway, I just had to write a post today because it was a huge politicking week. I achieved what I’d been working on for three weeks at the behest of a community introduction.⁴

Response

At first, the response served as an inspiration for the community show that week. It was really fun shooting around with Truth, and I’m so excited to have them in the community.

I’m going to try avoiding the close friends in posts like these because that’s not really what I’m trying to get at with the whole relationship politicking. This is another thing that’s driven me away from Kayla.

I found all these amazing close work friends who accept me for who I am in every regard. And I tried to do the same for Kayla. But I was always filtering with the Asperger’s masking.

Earlier this year when I stopped masking, things really deteriorated. It’s become clear that my most raw form could be too much for her. I’m still living with that to see how she reacts as I continue my examination.

Continued

I was closing out the working items in my agenda like normal when I reached out to the relevant introductory point. We have interacted a few times over the years, and I respect their technical competence. But they aren’t super close, and I actually just cajoled them into joining the Discord actually.

This is closer to the kind of person who I need to apply my skills to at the start, making a good impression. But once I realized their analytical-ness, I knew we were both on the same page. This also came from explicit statements agreeing on the problems with tZERO.

That’s why I closed things out with a brief message letting them know how I was walking away. I put a lot of work into the reply, but I know it could’ve been better. I was sick after the third day of trying to get it perfect, and so I just got fed up and sent it out.

Broadly, I am at the limit of my politicking efforts. I do plan to drop all acts in the coming future, and I think I’m starting that by coming out with a brony profile picture. I honestly just don’t care anymore, and I have a big enough moat at work that I can fucking do it.

Representation

But just as I was about to walk away from the Wall Street assholes,⁵ which I think will just make my life a whole lot easier. After I laid out how everything would collapse to the regulators, I sort of stopped feeling the need to continue down that avenue. Fuck them, you know.

The Desire for Power

Imperfect as it was, Mark was awesome enough to reply to my comment with an exceptional leading question. When I shot back a dead-on answer, we finally got a direct meeting request from the CEO Alan. No matter what happens next, I win.

I can craft this narrative of public information. It’s important in my mind to always take this cautious approach with adversaries, who I’ve found often stop at nothing including future alterations to public information.⁶

Update

However, upon checking my own source for this claim, I realized that we actually hit a straight-shot home run with this. It seems they replied within a couple of hours of my request for a meeting, publicly affirming a speaking appearance. This is literally a first-of-its-kind discussion at this scale criticizing a very important topic in my industry. I have five days to prepare for what will be my introduction to the Executive Branch by means of Patrick Byrne. Honestly cannot overstate how important this is.

I’ll spend the remainder of this post describing the means I used to achieve this result.

Intentional Helplessness

I had a relatively intimidating pilot profile picture on X at the start of this engagement, where I was in the cockpit of an old bomber. I changed this to a naive headshot taken from when I was in high school. This paints me as a much younger, but still suit-and-tie professional in a calming blue light.

Colors matter a lot, and they are well established by commercial branding experts. I tend around black, blue, purple, and sometimes white.

The black is for my day-to-day, because it keeps the stress off my eyes staring at screens endlessly. But it also protects my daily life. Black is the safest color, and it avoids undue attention.

For someone like me that wants a low profile to avoid human interaction, black helps with that. It’s a simple color to style around because you choose to have no creative output. For instance, it’s the pupils alone in my OC, and indeed it is in my mind the antithesis of creativity. For when I need pure reliable stability, I turn to black.

Blue is peaceful. Used to calm enemies or calm myself. And it’s by far the most trustful color I can approach the public with.

I used it a lot more when I was younger, teaching and introducing myself to the world. It’s always what I planned to wear to testimony, and I keep it in mind in daily objects I need to trust. It colors my phone case, water bottles, and refill jugs while matching the color of water and life.

These last months, I’ve also come to interpret blue as a color of childhood youthfulness. As a boy, it was the major color known to the world through Sonic the Hedgehog. I see it more in my older, younger self and the childhood sentiments I carry in blue tint.

White is just for when things need to be clean for bureaucratic review. It’s horrible on the eyes and incredibly easy to dirty, but when you need something that looks perfect for a one-off centralized review, white will serve you well.

Purple is where things get really interesting. My personal branding code is #AC51FF. I love it so, so much, because purple represents innovation and creating change.

It is by all means the color of revolution. The capture of passion. The mix of heart and pure ecstasy as you approach singularity.

Most of my creative drafting material locally uses a purple hue to keep me thinking for the future. I used to have my whole keyboard purple just to promote this concept, before changing the punctuation points to a faster typing method alongside a rainbow-dash-colored theme.⁷

Hah, I used to tell Kayla all about how I want her to go blonde, and she looked absolutely stunning when she did. Gold is definitely another color for the accent signaling the best. That is until I bust in with my palladium.

It’s a hue I use sparingly, but I try to avoid the hubris of being the most important person in the room. I do a whole lot better lurking around in the corners until I have a unique opportunity to achieve my objectives.

Calming Effect

So, I did a few things to make sure an individual read of my profile would calm down any management review. While I must disclaim that I don’t know exactly how much of a difference all this made, I think it mattered a lot. That’s the thing with politicking: it’s like trading with none of the intermittent PNL.

When you buy a stock, you can track how it goes up and down, seeing in real-time how good your decisions were. Should I have waited a little bit longer? Tried a heavier weighting? Etc.

With politics and people, you basically have to shoot your shot and wait for a response. I learned this in the bureaucracies, where any additional context submitted after a grant proposal would weaken my position by making me look needy. I specifically remarked emotional sentiments about Wall Street in a gut reply to public media during a review process, which ended up costing me $9,000 earlier this year.

The core of it is that you need to wait to let things settle. This is all a game of wits and confidence, and facts grow in conviction over time. Like with the SCF politics around introducing the first round of the Public Goods Award.

Here, I spent hours constructing a few sentences backed by practically years of primary research efforts. Nobody really said anything to respond to my post because people will not interrupt or immediately react to prescient revelations. They need time to process what took you ages to formulate.

Despite needing over a month to mature, I diligently followed the social signals to cease talking about my points, which had been entered into the time record. I use time a lot in my work. I find that backlinks to when you introduce a point even just a few weeks ago (although a year+ is ideal) give you 1000% more credibility than just saying something equivalent on the spot. People seem arbitrarily amazed that you can think of something beforehand, document it, and then bring it up in later chats.

Not to mention, it gives you the opportunity to get others binding down your prior documented work, which pretty much inevitably brings them to your side if you document things well enough. In a way, you force them to ask if they agree with all the things you’ve said in the past, or at least the effort and rigor you’ve put in to develop it. If they appreciate that, then it now becomes not only saying no to your current request but (in their mind) declining the authority of all your past work which they’ve just discovered.

This is why I don’t like in-person or phone-call first impressions. They don’t give me the toolset of submitting substantive introductory materials. I do a whole lot better not needing to explain myself over and over again because others start with a reasonable reputation.

Repetition

I learned this over the years selling my book and educational courses. It was just never enjoyable to repeat my “original story” of dropping out of high school to trade stocks full-time. I always embellished it with tons of emotions and hooks, refining it based on nonverbal feedback. And man, that just exhausted the fuck out of me and I hated it.

Will Bring You to Your Knees

Aside from the profile pic change, I updated my banner and strategically made recent posts and replies. The banner is such an obvious and easy first step of effective politicking on a social platform like X. It is the biggest and first thing people see when visiting the profile because they already clicked on your image.

When I say see, I mean the visuals, not the textual substance. People are surprisingly lazy and I don’t think they give as much weight to the written items on a first run-through. That’s where the banner shines as a giant image shown at the very top of the screen, where their eyes naturally lean.

You could try to make it some photo with text that says something, but I think that’s wasting this opportunity to embed an emotional message.

So I set it as this cute blue uwu drawing of Dash. It’s just so perfect for the message I’m trying to convey. Someone with Wonderbolt-level speed hiding behind a mask of voluntary deprecation.

Using yourself as a deceptively unable form works really well. Last year, during the heat of AMM drama, I extracted a confession from high-level community members that AUA was centralized by naively (to them) asking my opponent’s arguments of decentralization in question form. I literally took their ridiculous claims, asked them like I was a total n00b idiot, and watched my deepest rivals make my entire argument for me.

It was beautiful, and that’s what I love about lil’ politics. When you get these trades right, they are just as magical as a 10X call. Albeit they take a lot longer to show up in your bank account.

Posts

This was during my transition to the brony fandom, which I will admit was probably influenced by this event. During the SEC review period, I had a series of commits and PRs explicitly demanding this strategy for the sake of looking professionally acceptable. For instance, I set my pfp to Flawless and Chad Soarin (gay) on X and GitHub during the review, which I knew would be the places staff visited while exploring my source links.

I learned to consider surrounding sources when I was applying for bank accounts to access fiat transfers. The Syndicate had its old .io site where I could change things super quick and track a little more about visitors’ actions. The approach mirrors the BTCS CEO story about how they used tracking they built to see how 90% of their website traffic came from the SEC, watching exactly which pages they examined for securities compliance.

I found that hilarious, and for clarity I do not do or plan to do that. But like, it’s totally true. You have to get down to the level of IP tracing or other gimmicky hacks to really track political progress.

I don’t think it’s worth going that far. It’s a slippery slope from there down to Snowden-level constant surveillance. At that point, it’s a full-time job which requires authority and leads to dictatorship totalitarianism.

I could justify that with twenty pages. It’s just not fucking worth it. It’s like running an investment committee surrounded by huge bureaucracies.

Will you get better results? Yes, probably maybe. But it’s not worth the cost on human productivity and prosperity that you leech away from society.

Evolving

No matter the inspiration, I decided to just be myself, and I started reposting pony images (again, images lead to easier and faster first impressions) and replying to image content, in case they looked at the reply tab. People get most of their first impressions within five seconds of a real conversation. I think the same applies online, where you are stabilized above the fold.

The fold is a digital marketing term which just means what you can see when you first load a page. On mobile, this is a much smaller amount of space that makes the job a little easier, assuming you know how to simplify your message well. In this case, it would be the headshot, banner, and pinned post.

I made sure to pin an only brony content I had, explaining a headshot I used for my pfp during the review period. I was fortunate to have that, because I think a more recent pin would’ve prompted further investigation into my anti-Wall Street post history.

Fuck, I even posted an anti-Goldman Sachs meme like a few days ago, which should have been an OBVIOUS turn-off for this CEO guy. I didn’t think we’d get it when I sent it out. But it’s clear from his reactions (at least to me) that he never even checked back on my profile updates when accepting the meeting because my intro was so strong.

Anyway, the fold on desktop, which I presume professionals like him use, is a few posts. I made the retweets or posts with brony content spaced along a few days so that it didn’t look like I was rushing to fill up my timeline with intentional deception.