The recent stock market “crash” in Japan validates my hypotheses I've had the past 18 months on why Japan is a HUGE opportunity. I'm ending my 7 year nomading streak to move there permanently. I decided to write try and write down the one of the main parts of my thesis

I've been going to Japan for 10 years. The yen, after the last volatile 6 months, is still ~50% cheaper than it was when I first went in 2015. My decisions aren't based on short term news hype cycle that popped up recently (akiyas on instagram, stock crash last week, ). I’ve spent nearly 3% of my entire life living in Japan and plan on spending a majority of my next 10 years there.

April 2015 - June 2015: Broke ass 19 year old. Spent 3 months WWOOFing in Shimane and Hokkaido. Hitch hiked across half of Japan from Hiroshima to Fukushima sleeping on the highway/streets and surviving on 7-Eleven.

March 2019 - November 2019: Lived in Osaka because they were the nicest, funniest people I met my first trip and they have the best food. Osaka >>> Tokyo. Decided Japan wasnt for me because my environment felt very static / no growth which was no bueno for an ambitious 22 year old

March 2023: Was in a bad mental state so went to Japan for vacation. Healed me beyond belief. Remembered why i wanted to live there in the first place and decided to live there again.

April 2024: Scouting trip for property across the country. Visited Tokyo, Izu, Fukuouka, Goto, and Osaka. Stayed at Akiya Collective and really got to know the founder. Decided to buy property near them.

September 2024: Scouting and starting the process of closing on two properties in Nagano and Hokkaido with two different art collectives I'm interested in working with. Meeting with a VC fund and Shibuya reps to negotiate a visa.

December 2024: Hopefully starting my permanent move there if i can close on properties and visas. Otherwise hopefully finishing those processes.

1. Japan will enact more innovative policies than other countries, especially developed western ones

2. Explosive adoption of accelerationist technologies like nuclear, AI, robotics, crypto, and longevity

3. Japan's strong-culture + isolationist nature will make them a bastion of creativity and innovation while the rest of the world continues to homogenize as "The West"

In the past 200 years Japan has already gone through two major economic restructurings - the Meiji period from feudal to industrialized and post-WWII from industrialized to modern. Both times the transitions were fast and put them at the forefront of global technological where just a few years before they had been dominated by The West. These were driven by strong government, clear visions, and cut throat implementation to achieve their goals. I'm taking the bet that they are on the brink of another quantum leap and their economy will have a massive turn around in the next 10 years

Starting with the most relevant point that inspired this post - interest rate hikes

The BoJ rate change tanking the entire market shows how influential Japan is to the world economy even just from a financial sense. If japanese monetary policy can add $1.4 TRILLION to the US stock market then they can add $1.4 TRILLION to the JP stock market. Its obviouslyeasier said than done and not a direct correlation e.g. no startup ecosystem with IPOs over past decades but instead of funding foreign hedge funds with cheap rates they can change monetary/financial/tax/tech policy in favor of funding domestic startups. And now they have data to prove how valuable these polcies can be to their economy

“But the stock market crash” ok so? US stock market crashed in 2020, 2008, 1987, etc. With a long enough time horizon and a reasonably decent plan a market crash doesnt matter.

Kaguya’s Top Gal

@hayasaka_aryan

Japan rn:

51K

10:45 PM • Aug 5, 2024

They were willing to challenge status quo in monetary policy by persisting with negative interest rates for nearly a decade, even after COVID when even the ECB buckled, and raising rates for the first time in nearly 2 decades stark contrast to ECB who and US who have had positive rates for most of that time period. Long running unconventional strategy AND a rapid, decisive shift to "normal" monetary policy show the government is capable and willing to take extreme steps to fundamentally change the construct of the Japanese economy. While major changes, interest rates are a small and relatively simple change, what will they do next to overhaul their economy? I believe this is only the start. Notably they increased rates because they see positive development in the economy. To be fair this could also be insignificant detail as it was largely out of control since 1. they were no longer competitive on the global market and 2. they were incapable of fully controlling yield curve in the first place.

Increase rates signals confidence in the economy and may attract foreign investment (not me, i was already investing). Some might argue that higher rates might slow growth further but "normalizing" monetary policy may bring long-term financial stability and could encourage more efficient capital allocation to the Japanese market. Yen price increasing, decreases exports which is sending stock prices down because they are an export economy - for now. Not a huge problem if you belive they're moving to an even more isolationist and not dependent on imports for energy (still need manufacturing inputs).

Japan has focused on strengthening domestic industries and supply chains. While their economic growth has always been lower than US and China and they took a bigger hit during covid due to much stricter lockdowns, their economy has stronger growth in the years since covid than before, in contrast to US and China whose economic growth is lower than before. It may not look like much but outpacing the two biggest economies in the world is opposite to most peoples perception of Japan's economy including most of the investment community.

In addition to making dramatic changes in policies Japan is also starting to experiment with new governance models and ways of creating new policies.

Anno Takahiro ran for governor of Tokyo and used git to crowd source policy changes from voters. Version controlled policy has been a dream of technologist since like forever. He also plugged an AI chat bot into the updated policies so people could ask questions about his platform in the upcoming election. He placed 5th with ~150k votes. This style of campaign is unheard of in the West but based on his success in a major election I think it will catch on fast in the Japanese political sphere.

The Japanese government is also experimenting with collective decision making with cryptoeconomic tooling such as Quadratic Voting/Funding and DAOs. Plurality Institute, a multinational economic and governance policy research group is helping Japan implement changes with their learnings from Taiwan and other markets. Shibuya City, a subset of Tokyo, is proactively experimenting with how to redesign themselves for more public social spaces, industry, mixed use architecture, and other things to make it a futurist city and attract top talent.

Better policies, faster, with public input means faster implementation of novel solutions and accelerated economic development.

I think Japan has a really level headed approach to new technologies even if too conservative for me personally. They balance practicality, economic viability, scientific progress, environmental stewardship, and social issues.

Before a tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown in 2011 which was the biggest since Chernobly, 30% of all energy consumed in Japan was produced via nuclear! Then it went to 0 and they are looking to go back to 20% by 2030. They are an island nation with little natural resources. Energy dependency is a major economic expense and geopolitical threat. E.g. China wouldn't even have to invade Japan, just blockade them long enough until their power grid shuts down. They are ramping nuclear back up to ~20% by 2030 and investing in novel nuclear technology like modular reactors. This would put it back in the top 10-15 countries by nuclear production in the next 5 years

0 people died from Fukushima and estimated a couple thousand were indirect deaths from evacuations and health complications. If "loss of life years" is the risk we are seeking to be mitigated, Japan is losing many more life years from lack of economic development and population degrowth than even 10 nuclear meltdowns so I'm hoping they push nuclear even harder in the coming years.

Japan has some of the best scientific insititutions and biotech manufacturing . Biotechnology Transformation (BX) for synthetic biology, biomedicine, gene and cell therapies. They excel at research, manufacturing, AND, translating to clinical treatments. Power combo.

They are already leading cutting edge biotech like longevity with Yamanaka winning the 2012 Nobel Prize and Ohsumi in 2016 for medicine I'm currently looking at starting a stem-cell injection on my next trip.

(graphic included solely for the power rangers but the paper is good too. Japan Supremacy!)

Japan has been at the forefront of AI since its inception in the 80s, including the first real-world application of expert systems. The Japanese government released the "Social Principles of Human-Centric AI" in 2019, 3 years before ChatGPT and most of the world woke up to AI ( 80s FYI) paraphrased below:

1. Dignity - AI should be used as a tool to enhance human abilities and creativity, not to control or overly depend on it.

2. Diversity & Inclusion - AI should be developed and deployed in a way that flexibly includes diverse perspectives to create new values.

3. Sustainability - Utilizing AI to generate new businesses and solutions to solve social disparities and build sustainable societies including global challenges like climate change

I think these principles and their wording exemplify the well-rounded nature of Japanese e/acc policy. Highly recommend reading AI policy 2023 whitepaper and the 2024 retrospective from the Liberal Democratic Party. They focus on individuals acquiring AI literacy, business use cases, cultural digitization, reduce risks associated with generative AI, such as disinformation and privacy violations, while promoting the beneficial use of AI technologies in various sectors, including healthcare and climate change.

Pretty good, and at the very least clear and underestandable, crypto regulation in terms of personal/corporate finance and taxes. Unlike the US where every government agency unilaterally dictates most cryptoassets are under their purview, Japan says that cryptoassets should be treated based on their function. They have lagged behind in the industry because of bad policies related to equity investing and overregulation but they are starting to turn around on both these fronts.

The infamous Mt Gox hack and bankruptcy set global precedent as the first time a companies assets weren't liquidated when a Japanese court allowed Bitcoin to be distributed directly back to depositors on the exchange. Bullish on Japan.

I cant be fucked to finish this part but Peter Thiel and some other dude have a thesis on memetic warfare. People hate being the same. Eventually to distinguish yourself you must consume the other. This is happening in The West with "left vs right" politics, in-fighting on irrelevant just for the sake of schizmogenesis. As soon as one side says they like something, the other side HAS to label it as bad or stupid or whatever even if they never cared before just to feel different. Japan is "strong culture", insists on tradition, and has high agency as a society even if individuals dont really. Japan will win the memetic wars of the 21st century by continuing to refine, adapt, and export their unique culture and heritage. Mother fuckers are crazy and will do ANYTHING. They are repressing their kamikaze world domination desires with squid hentai and hello kitty until they're ready to unload.

Returns are based no asymmetric bets. Ideally you have asymmetric information informing your bets. I dont have much asymmetric information on Japanese market itself, just on the culture e.g. I can speak Japanese conversationally, have friends across the country, understand how they think and act, etc. I can "move among them" even if im not one of them. If Japan does pop off a lot of people are going to try and rush in with their foreigner attitudes, behaviours, and get completely blocked by the natives. And I'll already be fully integrated doing whatever I please.

Soft power and cultural domination can win over a lot. Even now who doesnt love Japan? Just no one wants to move there because its too "weird", too far, too unknown, too risky, etc. But everyone still wants to go there. With some minor changes, and proper integration programs to get the. foreigners assimilated they can transmute their cultural capital into economic capital without diluting one of their biggest advantages.

While people might think the market doesnt have great prospects now, that means I can convince Japan to give me more perks for coming there at this dire time. And i know i can convince my friends to join me there. Not saying we can change the entire Japanese market but I think we could make a significant influence with just a handful of super talented, well capitalized rogue agents. I’m also willing to bet with my background in startups/finance/entrepreneurship/art/fashion that Japan wants me to be there to help improve their economy. And I want to. So cheap house buy.

Apparently the akiya phenomenon is now known via the tiktok/instagram algorithms to the public. To me akiyas are a massive empty container to be filled with creative energy for the new Japanese economy. The government says akiyas are one of the biggest problems facing the country (they are wrong, its a symptom of other problems) and have provided incentive programs to buy these homes in the hope new residents will rejuvinate the desert countryside.

Approximately 12-15% of all houses (9 million!) are abandoned.c

Nagano has one of the highest rates of akiya in the country at nearly 20% abandoned rate! I only went to Nagano for the first time to visit Akiya Collective, a project I've been following/helping for the past year. The crazy part is Nagano is known as a great vacation spot - amazing snow and ski resorts, much cooler in summer than the muggy sauna the rest of japan turns into, beautiful mountains and clean air, and home to one of the most famous Japanese rich towns in the country Karuizawa.

I'm also looking at a place in Hokkaido with another art collective. And of course I'm going to buy a place in my favorite spot Osaka but I'm prioritizing the community hubs first (in general in my life and also as part of my Japanese investment thesis)

As I mentioned in the intro to Jinni dev blog, I started building the app 6 years ago. I didnt continue it at the time for 2 reasons - the first being it was one of the first things I ever coded when I was 22 and knew I needed to be a much better programmer and entrepreneur if I wanted to unlock the idea’s full potential. The second is that it was infeasible to execute on the game’s core idea of programmatic image editing based on dynamic data at the time. 

To have your tomogatchi dynamically evolve everyday requires an army of data scientists and artists working in close collaboration analyzing and redrawing each players’ avatar by hand every day. Obviously time consuming, expensive, inconsistent, privacy issues, etc. I needed a way to programmatically evaluate data based on players’ different goals and intentions in life and then take those generated personalized analyses to programmatically create daily dynamic graphical evolutions of your tamagotchi.

The solution? While I was interested in genetic programming at the time, a form of generative AI, and I knew there must be some way to programmatically generate tamagotchi evolution images, I decided to wait to build the app. Lo-and-behold, Stable Diffusion, DALLE, Midjourney and others came into play with exactly the thing I needed to make this game a reality.

I'm really proud of what I’ve built over the past month (only a week or two of actual work though) and i'm excited to be sharing it with you all. While it doesn’t exceed my exceptional expectations it's a phenomenal start to a very complex problem that i didnt even know how to solve when i first started building the game a few months ago.

High level concepts I wont go into this blog but you can ask an LLM about if you need to:

• LLMs vs image generation

• Prompt generation pipeline

• Agentic systems

• Vector embeddings

• Prompt Engineering

Problems to solve building generative AI for a tamagotchi based self-actualization game

Before diving into what I actually did, it’s important to know all the problems and constraints that went into it. I mentioned some at a high level in the intro but there are many different components that led to the design solution I came up with.

• Need to accommodate the vast diversity in peoples’ goals, lifestyles, apps/services, and preferred tomogatchi aesthetics.

• Do not want to be prescriptive about “good” and “bad” actions. No global algorithm for experience / points / social score / etc. 

• Re #1 + #2: Must interpret players actions based on how they perceive them, not how I dictate them to be.

• Re #3: I've never heard of anyone programmatically generating personalized algorithms for people to run customiz data analysis with subjective view points.

• Accommodate arbitrary data in personal analysis algorithms. We already standardize data from all data sources so they are interoperable to facilitate this and other data analysis. However we must also consider the fact that people with the same intentions might have different habits and data to influence their jinni. 

• Ensure that all this programmatically generated code and artifacts are logically consistent or at the very least internally consistent for suspended disbelief in gameplay (e.g. running more could give your jinni more legs which is illogical compared to making existing legs stronger but if we create more legs for everyones jinni everytime they run thats internally consistent allowing players to update their model of how the game works and reliably adjust their strategies)

• Final output image quality: Does all of this even generate a jinn that is recognizable as a “living thing”? Is it identifiable as the last jinn we interacted with? Does this jinn evolve in the way we expected it enforcing the core game mechanic?

• How do you deal with a lack of data? Do we treat a lack of data as a negative input to incentive players to collect that data or ignore intentions that have no data to associate with it?

• Limiting personal customizations in the early alpha phase to better understand and test how AI interprets intentions and how tamagotchis visually evolve while still players choose their own adventure.

• Theres many more that I haven't come across yet, can't remember at this time, or cant quite grok or articulate myself.

• Which AI models perform better for all the different needs required - generating LLM prompts, analyzing data, image editing (not generation)

I considered using LangChain for all my AI stuff but a simple 5 word comment on a Reddit post dissuaded me. “Just write your own code.” It resonated with me because I’ve intentionally been taking shortcuts on things to get the app pushed out which i dont feel great about the dependency creep on my backend. I also know that this AI component of the app is Jinni’s secret sauce / core competency (I say as I spill all the beans here) and would like to have more control and insight over how it works. So being able to have the most amount of control and flexibility over it, I decided to do everything in clojure on my existing server. No new microservice to deal with devops, not another language to program in, etc. led me to writing it from scratch. I did still use a blog by LangChain to guide the design of my LLM system, mainly their insight that preprogrammed pipelines have better performance than generalized agent frameworks. And TBH im so happy i did, excluding comments and logs for dev, one of the most critical components of the entire Jinni game only takes ~150 lines of code.

Day In The Life Of A Jinn

Now that you understand all the problems I was trying to solve and how they affect how the game can be played, I’ll be walking you guys through the thought process and technical implementation for how your jinni evolves over time. Now you can better understand how to actually play the game and how your actions in the real world affect your virtual avatar. It will be mostly technical with some graphics but you guys should find it interesting nonetheless.

An up to date schematic of my AI evolution process can always be found in the docs on my github repo.

1. Players set their intentions for self-actualization. You can configure how your jinni looks just like every other widget in the game (TK inventory blog), this allows you to customize your jinni for different base models, aesthetics styles, intentions to guide it, what mood or personality it will have, and analytical and artistic algorithms to evolve it over time. Because of the early testing phase to actually monitor the performance of this whole pipeline, all players will pick from a few predefined options during onboarding and use the same base tamagotchi to evolve from to properly.

2. Players’ intentions are sent to LLM to generate personal “Analysis Prompt”s. The Analysis Prompt is another LLM prompt generated by the LLM itself that uses a players intentions to figure out what types of behavior a player should have to actualize their intention. An example Analysis Prompt is:

Reflect on my daily activities: Am I engaging in intelligent pursuits, such as learning new things or problem-solving? Am I consistently making healthy choices to support my physical well-being and sexy physique? Am I practicing mindfulness and self-reflection to better understand my thoughts and emotions, and make intentional choices that align with my desired growth?

If my actions consistently reflect these intentions and attributes, I am on the right path to self-actualization. If not, I must reassess and make adjustments to bring my actions in alignment with my goals

3. Generate text embeddings from player’s Analysis Prompt. These can be used for talking to your jinn about your intentions, discussing how your intentions have changed over time, finding other players with similar intentions to match for summoning circles, and many more AI powered features. This also helps optimize the system so we dont have to generate new prompts everyday, we can reuse your old Analysis  Prompt if you havent changed your intentions.

4. Players equip items that feed energy (data) to their jinn. Your jinn can only evolve based on what you do in the real world, so we need to know what you are doing. Obv! Once you equip items you commonly use e.g. Soundcloud, Github it can affect your jinn’s evolutions

5. A player’s jinn “conjures” data into the game database. Based on the items you equip, we pull data from each integration to feed your jinn. Apple’s health data will make your jinn skinnier/fatter, Souncloud data will make you jinn happier/sadder. Data is normalized across all data providers so whether you track running in Strava, iHealth, Whoop, etc. it will always be read the same by your jinn (they are digital wizards remember )

6. Synchronized jinn evolutions are initiated for all players simultaneously. Somehow jinn have some magic thing where they just vibe and do shit at the exact same time. Their daily evolutions is one of those things. They all process the data they have been fed all day and go through spontaneous metamorphosis into their new forms from this evolution process. Idk how it works, I’m not a jinn I just channel their energy through my code.

7. Analysis Prompt evaluates player actions and generates an Analysis Output. Every players personal prompt from step #2 are imbued with data they generated from step #4 + #5 to see how their actions correlated to their intentions. This creates a structured output of how (AI thinks) you’ve changed since last time your jinn evolved. This extra step  to output structured analysis also allows us to rerun image evolutions in the future without having to rerun data analysis allowing players to play around with different image styles and base avatar models without compromising their history. I have an assumption which has been somewhat validated in early testing that structured quantifiable outputs help the AI understand what it's trying to analyze and how it's supposed to think for more reliable results.

   ▼Example Analysis Output

   {:analysis {
   
     :brain 0.1  :reason "Assuming the pet has remained intellectually stimulated, leading to slight improvement in brain development.",
   
     :eyes -0.2  :reason "Assuming the pet's eyes have aged slightly, becoming more expressive and nuanced.",
   
     :heart 0.15 :reason "Assuming the pet's emotional well-being has remained stable or improved, leading to a slight increase in heart size.",
   
     :posture 0.05 :reason "Assuming the pet's posture has remained relatively unchanged, with only slight modifications based on natural aging."
   
   }}

   There are still some prompt engineering kinks im working out for formatting the structured output which can be seen above. This isnt being used by actual code so its fine but not perfect.

8. Augmentation Prompt uses Analysis Output to generate an “Augementaion Output” DALL-E prompt that will modify your current jinn into their new form. An Augmentation Prompt prompt is a completely templatized LLM prompt that only takes in an LLM generated Analysis Output. It generates a new DALLE prompt daily based on what you have changed since last time you evolved. 

   ▼Example Augmentation Prompt

   {:prompt "Based on the analysis data provided, your avatar will have a brighter and more vibrant color palette to reflect your increased creativity and improved nutrition. The eyes will sparkle with a slightly larger pupil to represent your enhanced focus and energy from increased exercise. The heart shape will be fuller and more defined, symbolizing the growth and nurturing of your relationships. Your posture will appear more upright and confident, reflecting your newfound self-assurance and progress towards self-actualization."}

9. DALL-E edits your current jinn image using Augmentation Output

10. Your jinn’s new image is saved as the base model for the next round of evolutions and appears in your app home screen as your new avatar image.
    
    
    

Game Updates

• Initial AI pipeline development almost complete! Still ironing out last details on the recurring image modification. Having issues uploading PNG to DALL-E which is literally the final step and then it’s done. Still need a lot of work on prompt engineering but unclear what direction that will need to take until DALL-E augmentation step is complete.

• Starting to go harder on community engagement and direct/structured user questioning. First initiative is for signaling which image people want as the first base tamagotchi which is an obvious thing to crowdsource now that core idea, tech, and UI is validated. Maybe I’ll even do a community call before I fly to Japan next month. I’ll post in the early adopters telegram chat if I do so join if you want to participate. Next will probably be more  feedback on abilities, widgets, and integrations people want. 

• Bank account created!!!! Now we can make real $$$$$ not just crypto . Now I’ll be exploring grants and MOU contracts harder.

• Got a $2.5k grant in credits from Open AI for image editing!

• 5 users onboarded to Android App. Not all of them have accounts in the database due to early config issues. 2 players with complete profile + customized homepage widgets setup.

• Almost 50 waitlist signups! Mostly for iphone :/ Great data signal to get that up asap. I want to get the core game more streamlined and tested before rolling out to a larger audience but it's great to know I can 10x my players instantly once I want to.

• Product analytics dashboards is developing. The top chart shows daily total players, average activity per player, and total activity across all players. The bottom chart lets me see who has created accounts, who has added integrations, and who has started customizing their homepage as steps in onboarding flow and engagement with game mechanics.

  

  Most of this is me of course. get-playlist must be 0 because i haven’t built homepage playlists yet. Me and everyone seems excited for this feature so that’s why its my target metric for onboarding.

• Updated widget config to allow customization per jinni instead of per player. This was mostly to allow for communal jinn which dont belong to a single player and would need different config than the owner. It also allows unlocks the ability for every player to have multiple jinn to customize with different gameplay styles, personalities, and homepage layouts.

• Added API endpoint to automatically conjure all data from a player across all existing integrations they’ve added. Now I can very easily update every players’ jinn with no scripting, in app actions, etc. so tomogatchis constantly evolve without players needing to check in everyday.

• Created redirects (portals) with analytics tracking. I’ve been making arbitrary links to Jinni owned pages for campaigns or partner sites for referrals. Better analytics for marketing campaigns, cleaner sharable urls, and branded URLs.

• Last month the Jinni dev blog on substack had a 7% increase in subscribers, 14% increase in views, and 10% bump in open rates making it almost 50%!

  

• Made my first breaking change to prod server! Had to happen eventually, just a  minor syntax mistake when adding some Cypher to an existing database query. With all the changes I’ve made to :Avatar and :Widget which are pretty core to API and backend I think its great this is the first thing thats broken. (it was on a :Widget query but nothing to do with logic, just syntax)

• Using my hand as an onboarding tool. I got an NFC chip implanted in my hand at Vitalia and have programmed it to use my new portals to bring people to the new install page on the website

• Results for Zuzalu quadratic Funding round are almost finalized. It looks like I’ll receive somewhere between 4-8 ETH in addition to the 1.3 ETH (now $5k since i hodl’d) in direct donations I received. This makes me one of the largest recipients in the round! Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone that donated and make sure you DM me your donation tx if you haven’t already!

Next steps

• Figure out DALL-E image formatting to finish AI divination pipeline. Its a super annoying and basic thing that is blocking literally the most important thing in the game. Classic software development.

• Finish home page playlists feature for Spotify. Mostly UI/UX work, backend logic and API should be done already

• Integrate Soundcloud. Most players ive talked to use it voer Spotify which is my preferred platform thats currently integrated. Mostly just a copypasta process from Spotify code with new data transmutation spells

• Do more user research with Zu event organizers about what a communal jinn would look like, what widgets and actions they want players to take on their profile, what insights they want into community health and how they want to improve it,

• Build summoning circle features on backend + frontend for communal jinn. Already have most of it pseudocoded out, just need to refine it based on user research, finish code, and test in the app with Jubmoji cards.

originally posted on my substack dev blog for Jinni

Health >>> $$$

GDP is what people usually use to measure the success of regions but it can be gamed, misreported, or increased out of inefficiencies instead of actual productivity gains. It's explicitly not tied to the happiness or success of individuals. You can have an increasing GDP with an increase in suicide rates like the US is experiencing now. Happier and healthier cities, like those with more green space, are correlated with higher GDP.  But you can’t measure the GDP of a park, or you could but that would be missing the forest for the trees literally. 

Paraphrased from a Harvard article - “GDP measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” GDP adds the value of the sugary drinks but fails to subtract the health problems they cause. It adds the value of building new cities but does not subtract for the natural habitats they replace. An example metric that is better than GDP is Vitalia’s goal of adding 1 TRILLION life years to living humans. Of course you need a reason to want to live forever (like self-actualization ).

What defines the success of a society isn’t GDP, it is what they do everyday with their time. America’s work ethic is due to the Puritan pilgrims that first settled it. Mimetic learning, the social context of what those around us do and what is expected of us, is what creates our thought and action patterns. The people around you and their habits impact every form of health and capital every second of the day, not just your financial reports at the end the year. Holistic health has many categories to focus on, financial health being just one of them. Financials are the easiest to quantify and what can be tracked will be managed. GDP is also what nations care about so it’s a way for startup societies to try and get traction in conversations with them. However we have to look past $ as a metric to create societies and policies that engender new lifestyles with exponential impact.

If startup societies want to be truly innovative and capture the best talent in the world, they need to focus on the lives of their people, not just the products/services they creates. Social ecology is upstream from national economy. When we talk about “innovative societies”, we should be talking at least as much about the social and cultural layers as we are about the technological or governance layers. If you just moved to a new city, is the best strategy to make friends 1. to install an app to match you with someone nearby or 2. to say hi to someone in a local shop? Option 2 of course.

Community Tamagotchis

The simplest way track community health is `Time * People * Density`. Yet in the era of data as oil and surveillance capitalism we can’t even access this critical information. Currently Facebook friend suggestions are the only way  we get to see this metric and its only an approximation. We need better ways to track individual + community health, understand how our environment + policies + customs affects them, facilitate habitual changes through play, and help everyone understand the impact they have on themselves and others. A simple open source tool to track and visualize community health over time is necessary for startup societies to see how much they are actually functioning as a society rather than a financial/legal optimization. The goal of “multiplayer mode” in Jinni is to expand self-actualization past the individual into the social and environmental context that contains them.

While people are more motivated by things that benefit them personally, they often perform better when there is social pressure, social rewards, or sense of belonging associated with the action. Strava users are 83% more likely to set a personal record in a group of 2 or more vs. solo. Players in Jinni will perform better because they know they are participating with and contributing to their communities’ health dashboard. 

“A healthy lifestyle is also a technology—one which works best as a social technology—and this too improved quickly at Zuzalu…Technologies that have a heavy cultural component, where new software tools and new human habits are being developed at the same time, are likely a great fit for this approach…given that many software engineers have made enough money and now desire personal spiritual progress” Vitalik Buterin - Why I built Zuzalu

Your health is determined by your environment and through mimetic learning the habits and health of the community around you are one of the biggest environmental factors. Startup societies as intentional communities need to harness mimetics to drive specific behaviors for their residents. Part of why I came to Vitalia is because I’ve had an interest in biohacking for years but never done it, now in one month of living in this startup society I have an NFC chip embedded in my hand. The other reason I came to Vitalia was to show people how I’m self-actualizing through the Jinni game and get people to join the game too which is also working.

Zuzalu’s “pop-up playgrounds for innovators” are the perfect place to beta-test Jinni because of the perfect cross section of crypto, AI, and longevity which are the core inputs and outputs involved in playing the game providing great feedback and insights across the entire gamestack. Pop-up city residents are already in the self-actualization phase or primed to enter it. They’re financially comfy, passionate and successful, focused on health, connected to community, and have the freedom and desire to take weeks away from their normal life to experience something new. 

That’s why I believe the Jinni self-actualization game will become core infrastructure for startup societies and pop-up cities. They cover all the lower sections of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. While having community is important to an individual’s health, community health is measured by how many people are living their best lives and contributing back to the community through self-actualization and self-transcendence. With Jinni they can cover these crucial final steps. 

By gamifying life with cute tomogatchis to drive prosocial habits improving individual and community health, Jinni will pioneer social innovation in startup societies.

Jinni is a fun, social, and interactive way to stay healthy, engage people with similar interests, enjoy the real world together, and display your identity/aesthetic in privacy preserving ways. The next iteration of the game will be even more  community focused with communal jinn that people take care of together, separate from their personal jinni. The communal jinn will support community health by visualizing community health as a tamagotchi, data analysis on how community habits get adopted and shift metrics over time, reinforcing habits with IRL social activities,  giving notifications about workout classes, rewarding people for cooking potlucks, and any other goals communities program into their jinn.

Even better, with the decentralization of Zuzalu into global villages, we can gamify community health on another level with inter-commnunity competitions. What if Zuzalu could brag that they have better health metrics than Vitalia? This could be tracked across common shared metrics or we could see which aspects of health each community performs best on. For example Vitalia might be better at individual health while Zuzalu is better at communal health.

Community jinn brings a new of data science, psychology, and gameplay. They allow us to achieve collective intelligence across dimensions of community life from food choices to architecture design. Jinni creates societies where caring for your community and your community caring for you is not a forced obligation or an unfulfilled promise but an organic outcome of having fun in the game of life. Jinni will transform startup/popup cities into places where personal and community development is a daily reality. Instead of being stuck in the constant rat race of wealth and status like NYC/SF/London/Dubai, you can live in a city where people actually care about holistic wellbeing and becoming their best selves, not simply what society wants them to be. 

By gamifying life with cute tomogatchis to drive prosocial habits improving individual and community health, Jinni will pioneer social innovation in startup societies.

Game Updates

• Jinni was accepted into Zuzalu’s Gitcoin round as tech for popup cities to monitor their individual and community health during colive experiences. So far Jinni is the largest recipient of donations on the first day! Still 2 weeks left

• Onboarding wizard done and homepage customization with widgets 80% done (minor UX stuff Frontend mostly done

• Made a video demo of the Jinni app for beta testers

• Officially approved and listed in Android app store! Now available in 160 countries. 

• Already pushed 3minor  updates to Android store with features like onboarding and minor UI/UX bug fixes. Surprisingly fast updates given the multi-month process to get the approved.

• Got a legal entity set up! Will be making a bigger push to get grants/revenue in Q3/Q4 after buidling all Q2.

• Tentative confirmation from a GDPR lawyer that my laborious technical architecture design does in fact exempt me from GDPR compliance despite collecting massive amounts of personal data. Cypherpunks for the win again!

• Traffic on website starting to pop off. I;m not sure what the two spikes in mid January are but the last and highest spike was on the day that Zuzalu announced their Gitcoin round with Jinni whitelisted for donations

  

• I officially onboarded the first ever player to the game! Successfully approved their in app burner wallet with my jubmoji card. This revealed a tiny bug - a legacy API url variable in my Expo CI/CD which has been resolved. User Testing FTW! Also shows the issues with only testing sideloaded developer versions. 

• 5 players downloaded and onboarded to the game. Been fixing a bunch of bugs from untested CI/CD path for production like mentioned above so going to make a bigger push the last 2 weeks of Vitalia once everything is smoothed out.

• 1-hour fireside chat about Jinni at Vitalia on Monday to describe the game, process behind creating it, concepts im exploring with it, onboard users, and get donations on gitcoin round. Im still working on how to explain all the dope complexity of concepts and research that went into the app hence chat instead of a presentation. ~20 people were pretty engaged, asked great questions throughout and at the end, we had a lot of laughs together, and maybe 50% of attendees were people i hadnt directly talked to about the game before which shows latent interest from community.

• Made a profile on adimverse to get feedback about Jinni worldbuilding

• Accepted to Segment Analytics startup program receiving $50k of credit for 2024, free pro plan, unlimited analytics pipeline, and ~15,000 tracked users for free

• Started pseudocoding :Divination code for player API calls and Neo4j<>LLM integrations.

  • Decided on using Mistral API for prompting and embeddings

  • Made a vector index in Neo4j db for storing intentions and prompt embeddings

  • Started prompt templates for analyzing intentions + tamagotchi image mutations

Next steps

• Write actual code for tamagotchi evolution pipeline during Vitalia AI hackathon

• Come out with testing and evaluation framework for evolution precision and quality 

• Figure out calculations for costs per player per month based on running AI pipeline daily or weekly.

• Design and build the Summoning Circle feature for remote player to get my signature and popup cities to register players for a communal jinn. Already have it partially built because its similar to the onboarding flow getting my personal signature but requires some API, database, and UI work. 

Originally posted on my substack