What Is The Bleeding Edge?

Edition #1 - An ever-evolving newsletter about cutting-edge tech, observations of life, plus general info about dope things and dope people.

I wanted to make the first edition of this blog/journal/newsletter perfect.

I wanted to make sure the message was profound and intelligent. Not to mention perfectly well written.

Earlier today, I was reminiscing on the fact that I wanted to release this newsletter the night before. But one thing happened, and it led to another, and I woke up the following day with no newsletter.

So I’m working on the couch, and an Instagram Reel pops up. It’s the Rock talking about a speaker I like, Inky Johnson.

The Rock quotes Inky Johnson: “Be brave enough to fail.”

Damn.

Heard.

I then thought, “Why am I afraid to fail?”

I want to sound smart. I want to be correct. I don’t want to look like a fool.

I’m sure that’s a trait most humans have.

But maybe we don’t need to have all the answers all the time. There’s value in just listening. There’s value in asking questions if you’re unsure. Even if you think you’ll sound dumb.

So, here’s edition #1. The idea is to share my human experience. I have a lot of interests, so I can’t guarantee the entire series will cover one specific niche.

I do, however, foresee myself being interested in the bleeding edge of technology for a while. The bleeding edge is when brand-new, life-changing technology begins to trickle into society on the fringes. But, unfortunately, most people don’t know anything about technology at the bleeding edge, so naturally, these innovations are met with disdain and dismissed by default. The ironic part is I’m not afraid to show my conviction, but I dislike getting into arguments.

But why the hell would anyone want to hear what I have to say?

I've been following my natural curiosities all my life. Recently, that led me to be at least 2 years ahead of a lot of the tech entering the mainstream right now. Metaverse, crypto, AI to name a few.

I owned a Virtual Reality (VR) headset in April 2016, commonly showing my friends and family their first experience in VR (widely referred to as the metaverse now). For extra clarity, VR is the screen you strap over your eyes, and you can move around in another world.

Another thing that caught my attention early was crypto in 2017. I believe in Bitcoin so much that in 2018 I traded a portion of my salary for Bitcoin. I earned $153 per week before tax. I’d get another $8,000 in Bitcoin at the end of the 12 months. I was so obsessed with crypto I became ‘the crypto guy’ to all my family and friends. One year my aunt gifted me a coffee mug that said ‘Ask me about Bitcoin”. NFTs became an interest of mine in late 2020, and I bought and still own a handful of different NFT projects: VeeFriends, Curio Cards & Book Games.

Another noteful endeavor - I’ve dabbled with chatGPT since late 2019 (inspired by this video). Back then it was simply called gpt2. I experimented with some AI image generation in late 2020. My favorite AI creation is this animation I made by training an AI algorithm on 700+ photos of the sky I collected throughout the two years before.

So far, I’ve been a construction worker, artist, writer, computer science major, videographer, social media director, and investor. I’ve had a net worth of over $1,000,000 (on paper) and watched it melt away. Besides having a family one day, I’ve achieved the highest goal I set in life, working for my idol Gary Vaynerchuk. Now I’m figuring out what’s next. I’m a son and oldest brother from a small farm town in Michigan (shout out to Webberville) and a citizen of Earth.

Like most things, it’s impossible to summarize what I am in one word or phrase. Therefore, it’s hard for me to give you a concrete answer for what this newsletter will discuss every week. If I share my life experience, I believe others can learn and improve theirs. Not that I think I’m some genius that deserves to give the holy gospel of how to live a life. I wouldn’t consider myself a straight-up expert in much of anything. But I like to share information with people, and if there was a gun to my head and I HAD to identify an expertise of mine, it’s being interested in things.

If you’re an open-minded person who wants to share lessons from this life journey that we’re all on, I’ll be sharing things I find interesting here.

It will be an ever-evolving newsletter covering cutting-edge tech mixed with observations about life and info about dope things and dope people.

Follow along by subscribing.