Optimist.ai, the Hummingbird Effect, SolarMax Weather in Davos, Animal Intelligence over Test, HurricaneRobot & an Up-sWing!
Welcome to the age of the Optimist.
I hope you will enjoy it.
The Battle of the Mist
One is fast, reactive, and feeds on fear of abandonment. What if I am no longer needed? What if I can no longer define myself as a lawyer, a driver, a carpenter? The needle is sharpened, and the poison hits efficiently. Just where the tree wanted you to be.
The other is light, alive, and feeds on hope of abundance. What if I could use my colors for another purpose? What if I could listen to that inner hum the young bird within was singing? One plus one equals a tree, growing exponentially and pollinating me into flight.
This is the story of the poison tree and the hummingbird.
For those of you not familiar with the story and the remarkable writing from future history. The poison tree grows when its fears are watered over time, day-by-day, a dash of fear, until one day you can’t help it and you are swimming in the whole thing. Then comes the cascade, with ripples spreading into places where we no longer know where to begin.
To ground the story in a more real world example, Masaru Emoto had three glasses of water, which he subjected to the following conditions over time: 1) One of the glasses he gave compliments and love to. 2) The second he yelled at with anger. 3) The third one he completely ignored. As the experiment went on, the water crystals hiding beautifully in our water and our waters within got deeply contaminated. The fearful glass ended up turning dark, the crystal structures all broken. The ignored glass, even turned dark and moldy. The poison of fear and ignorance was too much for the water to bear.
Is your water cup half full or half empty?
Is your water cup protected by love or by fear or by nothing?
What does my mind’s weather forecast look like?
Which spiral am I in?
What do I believe?
And maybe even more importantly, how do these poison trees look in the forest of Ai and our current world digital landscape? Where are the thorns, where is the nettle? What does the algorithm feed on? Where is the light completely blocked? Rage gets clicks, that we know, and people getting hurt we know has been around for a while ever since Jackass, or since the reptile brain was born.
So how about we get our Up-Wings?
The hummingbird is not immune to the poison. It simply knows its color. Their mission is to pollinate the world with love. One seed to the other, creating new crystallized forms of water.
So what would happen if we let the hummingbird into our house and our office?
Maybe it is a bit like those blind worms that do not seem to know there is light all around them, so it is with the poison trees. It has just been able to synthesize one tiny part of the spectrum, and had no idea they had wings and the Bridge finally was opened. The entry key: Optimist.
Technology
Every night before going to bed we are recommended to do a bit of peer-to-peer review of the day?? That is a good idea, but I find a weekly recap equally useful or even more so. Let us fly to Davos.
The annual Davos gathering was last week, among many important and interesting discussions, one in particular stood out for us. Elon’s talk, sharing the highs and lows, solar, multi-planetary questions, but also his mindset quest: optimism! Because in the end, what fun is there really if we were to go around talking gloom and doom? So we might as well put on some colors and radiate our path toward the sun, which might be the most fun. While at it; what a SUN week. Some wild nudges on solar. The highest solar radiation (not storm) in the last 20 years, and Northern lights turning Southern across multiple lands. So one might ponder? Do we actually need more energy sources when we solar satellites and solar maximum? Anyways, if you like us are equally interested in the sun and space weather, check out this new website. The human heartbeat for starters.
So lots of talk about solar, how about the rest of the energy sources? Maybe not energy related, but Trump is talking warfare, possibly involving sound. Fusion researchers are talking about fusion with low frequency lasers. The Chinese is trying on a hybrid dress for its nuclear, and/or would geothermal be enough of an answer?
On the AI side, there has been movements, Claude Constitution launch party, Grok decided it could finally translate video and nano “banana” went girls-gone-wild this weekend. +Gemini, Midjourney, Higgsfield all in the high video tier+ These days people are posting everything from cute animal videos to fictional animal rescues, to half-naked models dancing around in the sky. As with all technology, the core belief and intention with the people making it will always carry the frequency of the output. The era of agentic video is for sure on the rise, what wonder will you choose to build?
If you often find yourself pondering, how fast will all of this go? AGI? Peter Diamandis gives us a few tips of skills to manage to be human in the ai revolution, and Demis is explaining what still separates us from an AI scientists.
To wrap up, we'll leave you with Vittorio x from this week: “AGI is here. humanoid robots entering production, nuclear fusion finally working, the food pyramid being rebuilt from scratch, fatness curable, BCIs restoring movement and sight, CRISPR editing diseases out of the germline, cancer becoming manageable, private companies building moon landers, longevity approaching escape velocity.”
I think and hope we will be fine…
When life gives you AI, build wonder?
Health
It has been clear for a while that we can learn a lot from the animal kingdom, from UV colors of the hummingbird, to high frequency pitch from the dolphins, to directional maps from the bats. We are just waiting to the point when we are finally there that we can say hi to the whales and have a coffee with the trees. One thing though, we clearly share a lot of the foundational code, but it is also pretty clear that we are looking a bit different. So animal testing, with all its ethical concerns, plus how good research idea is it really? For once, mice (which we have based most of our health research on) are nocturnal, meaning they do not absorb light. Already there something should ring a bell. Testing sunscreen on rats, hmm… Also, the scenery is also rather interesting, testing mice in a lab versus mice living around in nature makes quite the difference. Research are saying that mice responds positively to grounding. So yes, before medications, products, or solutions, how about a recheck of the research grounding? Plus stating the obvious, they are all really cute.
From labs and nocturnals to research assistants. Last time it was Chat GTP health, now Claude has released its own functionality. It can now connect to your health data. ”Four new integrations are now available in beta: Apple Health (iOS), Health Connect (Android), HealthEx, and Function Health.” And of course, Amazon could not be left behind — Amazon One Medical’s Ai Health Assistant guiding you 24/7 based on your medical records. Not sure if they do sleep analysis? But if you are in the need for that, Stanford models have you covered.
Another interesting discovery this week is from University of Cambridge, where they have been developed a wearable that uses AI to help stroke patients communicate naturally without any brain implants. “The device captures throat vibrations and heart rate to reconstruct speech in real time, achieving a 4.2% word error rate in tests with five patients.”
The ancients knew, light and sound, they will keep you covered. A small chest implant device that performs vagus nerve stimulation has supposedly been helping people with severe depression. As many as 69 % had great benefits from it, and 20 % were feeling completely fine after 24 of treatments. Also vagus nerve massage is free and simple, and it can help with everything from severe depression to stress or sore neck.
I’ve walked with both inside my chest, the poison tree, the hummingbird. One names the storm, one counts what wants to grow.
Science
Fire and Ice. Balance.
The sun is fire? At least a hot ball of plasma. One more solar advancement this week from a group of Korean scientists. They have built a solar-powered seawater evaporator that produces drinking water without electricity. The company is saying that at full scale, using photothermal material that absorbs 97% of sunlight, it can produce, per square meter, up to a gallon of pure drinking water per hour.”
Fire, then Ice. Ice equals water. Crystallized water. This is water. Two cool new ocean discoveries this week. Oshen, a new sailing robot, is able to collect data from within a Category 5 hurricane. Three of the bots were able to cover the entire storm with data minus a few spots. A big step into preventive and better storm monitoring.
Moving on to the ocean ground, there has also been some new discoveries. Last week there was quite a bit of debate if the microplastics problem has been blown out of proportions. Whether that is true or not, has nothing to do with how important that work is, and we for a fact that microplastics are present in a lot of places. So very happy to see this ocean startup is “intercepting 2 to 5% of global plastic pollution,” and that is just the beginning of the journey.
Last. Geometric unity? Eric Weinstein’s proposed theory of unity . Einstein + Bohr = in a triangle of goodness? Intriguing, to say the least.
It's better for your quality of life to be an optimist who's wrong, than a pessimist who's right — Elon Musk
Did you know…? that there are worms that are totally blind? “They live without any ability to see or even know about light… but we humans, we know that light exists all around them, right on top of them… so perhaps some humans, rare humans… have another sense, a spirit sense, and can perceive a world that is right on top of us… everywhere? What do you think, are you one with Sophie from I Orgins?
Did you read…? the handbook for magic? It does not involve Gandalf, the magician from Jung, but a good dose of Qi-Qong, a Tuning fork, and oh the most important? Belief and a good cause.
Did you invest…? no, not yet? According to Human Progress “the International Monetary Fund’s global economic growth forecast has grown more optimistic, with the world economy now expected to expand 3.3 percent in 2026, up from an earlier prediction of 3.1 percent in October.
Did you watch…? the awesome cow that was able to scratch her own back with a stick? The age of only-human-intelligence has been passed for a long time, but thank you Cow, we sometimes forget it!
Did you apply…? for the launch sequence? “A collection of concrete projects to accelerate science, strengthen security, and adapt institutions to future advanced AI.”
Did you ever see…? that axe commercial back in the days? Maybe it beautifully encapsulates the hummingbird versus the poison tree view? Or? "I think you know it is true," Uncertain Eric at least believes so.
Also, please take it away Up-Wingers!
My regret is that I am not optimistic enough. It is not possible to project the fantastic worlds which will continue to open up to us in the coming years. Worlds which far transcend my most daring optimism. No one today can be too optimistic — FM 2030, Up-Wingers
Brilliant. The distinction between fear-driven abandonment and hope-fueled abundace is so well articulated. This really resonates with how I see personal growth.