thought I’d jot down a few ideas I added to my todo list’s inbox which I won’t be able to do now. i’m going to write these out in the form of “I’d love to…”
I’d love to convince FTX’s Future Fund to fund ‘Problem Tour Guides’ across their areas of interest. The basic mandate: get more people to map, evangelise, and teach others about the idea maze related to various areas of interest. Turn certain scholars into walking literature reviews and then distribute them and their knowledge far and wide. Ideally this’ll induce other risk heavier, more operationally hungry people to take on unexplored attack vectors they otherwise wouldn’t have considered.
Relatedly, a friend and I are going to start crafting a ‘Frontier Markets Tour’ that is a combination of The Mom Test meets European Grand Tour in Frontier Markets meets Vice. I think it’ll be very fruitful to get on-the-ground understandings of institutional and personal landscapes in these nations, with the intention of finding under-resourced areas to potentially contribute to.
Would love to host more topical dinners. One category oriented around ideas, coming up with better ones, seeding projects, prompts for things to do etc. The other category oriented around process. How do you do X? What are the simple secrets? etc.
Research group on State Secrets and their nature.
A conference that’s just a bunch of people giving tours of (a) their bookshelves/PDF stashes and (b) tours of specific books and their contents, ideas, stories, implications, etc.
Education oriented search funds that buy mid sized businesses in opaque industries — Corporate espionage firms, Military contractors, Law firms in tax havens, etc.
Essay on ‘Unbundling the CIA’ which covers private activities that would fall under historical ‘CIA op’ definitoin, and seeing what that means. Think Wagner Group x Flock Safety (domestic police as a service?).
More media incubations, narrative projects, etc. Playing with synthetic media.
There’s more, but I’m about to leave the study space. This was my first issue of Unperturbed, where I write about whatever I want (it’s fun!!) — See you next time.
best
krish