🧵 The Phase 2 VENTURE study of VK2735 in obesity demonstrated up to an approximately 15% reduction in body weight from baseline following 13 weeks of dosing, as well as promising safety and tolerability: ir.vikingtherapeutics.com/2024-07-24-Vik…
My personal motivation:
My mother died from obesity. She could never break the vicious cycle.
She would be alive today if she had access to these drugs,
I haven’t yet done a 180 on bitcoin but I’m about 135.
I was early (even mined in 2013), then became enamored with smart contracts (still am).
2 factors that are making me revisit my old friend:
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1 - The Lightning Network addresses the fundamental deficiency of bitcoin- requiring 6 blocks and taking an hour to process a payment. With Lightning it’s instant. And adoption is happening around the world, enabling peer to peer decentralized micro transactions.
2 - I started to think absence of utility was a liability, that being a digital store if value outside of govt controlled fiat wasn’t enough. I’m coming around to believe the opposite. The way Bitcoin performed inverse to the SVB bank run was mind boggling. Soo…
🧵 The 4 questions you need to ask yourself before going all in on your wildest dreams:
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1/ What’s the absolute worst outcome of going all in?
We all catastrophize and think disaster will befall us. Looking at the worst possible outcome in the eye, instead of ignoring it and hoping it goes away, actually helps alleviate the anxieties we have.
2/ What would I do if the worst thing DID happen?
Create a plan as if the catastrophe did occur. What would you do in the aftermath? Where would you go? Humans underestimate our capacity to endure pain until we are forced to survive.
I think AI, deep fakes, whatever hodgepodge of terms are tossed around interchangeably, is our salvation because counterintuitively it raises the stakes so dramatically for a problem that actually does threaten our very civilization:
Lying is respectable.
The truth has become so cheapened that the ability to manipulate it is seen as a virtue - at least politically.
But deep fakes threaten the liar as much as the lied to.
Everyone will soon have a common interest in figuring out what’s real.
Tech that flawlessly impersonates will evolve so quickly that society will literally breakdown if we don’t soon have a global standard for verifying the authenticity of everything.