I like thinking about new things, and so I like this recent post by Vitalik (the Ethereum crypto guy) talking about what he calls "the tree ring model of culture and politics." The basic insight of the model is the following:

How a culture treats new things is a product of the attitudes and incentives prevalent in that culture at that particular time.

How a culture treats old things is primarily driven by status quo bias.

To explain why the world seems to work like this, he uses the analogy of tree rings, which are also called annual rings or growth rings. Trees grow in diameter each year and the result is a set of successive rings.

Importantly, each tree ring is a result of the conditions that the tree experienced during its growing season. A wide ring typically suggests a favorable growing season and a narrow ring suggests a stressful growing season.

Once the growing season is over, the ring becomes set, which is why dendrochronology is a thing, and why tree rings can be used to tell us about what happened in the past.

The parallel with culture and politics is that it's far easier to shape new things during their initial growth cycle, then to try and do it later. Because once the growth cycle is over and it becomes an old thing, attitudes are then guided by the status quo. They become set.

To quote Vitalik: "What is easier is to invent new patterns of behavior that outcompete the old, and work to maximize the chance that we get good norms around those." This makes a lot of sense to me and it's a reminder to stay open to new things.

Cover photo by Aleksandar Radovanovic on Unsplash

By some measurements, cement production alone is responsible for about 8% of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions every year. And so there is an imperative to find suitable low-carbon alternatives. Here is what is currently happening in the US (via Grist):

On Tuesday, Terra CO2 Technology was picked to receive a $52.6 million federal grant to build a new manufacturing plant just west of Salt Lake City. The company has devised a method that turns common minerals into additives that can help replace Portland cement — a key component in concrete, and one of the most carbon-intensive materials in the world.

In addition to this new facility, the company is set to start construction on its first plant in the Dallas-Fort Worth area:

The project is expected to break ground in January 2025 and begin shipping out materials by late summer 2026, Yearsley said. The facility will be capable of producing up to 240,000 metric tons of SCM [supplementary cementitious materials] per year when completed, or enough to serve roughly half of the local metropolitan market.

And all of this is part of a broader initiative by the US Department of Energy:

The Utah facility is one of 14 projects provisionally selected this week to receive $428 million in total awards from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. The initiative, which is funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, aims to accelerate clean energy manufacturing in U.S. communities with decommissioned coal facilities. Officials said the projects are expected to create over 1,900 high-quality jobs across a dozen states.

For the rest of the article, click here.

I like the way that Scott Galloway describes entrepreneurship in this recent post about why he's bearish on Tesla:

Entrepreneur is a synonym for salesperson, and salesperson is the pedestrian term for storyteller. Pro tip: No startup makes sense. We (entrepreneurs) are all impostors who must deploy a fiction (a story) that captures the imagination and attracts capital to pull the future forward and turn rhyme into reason. No business I have started, at the moment of inception, made any sense … until it did. Or didn’t. The only way to predict the future is to make it.

He then goes on to describe the difference between an entrepreneur and a liar:

This is not the same as lying. There’s a real distinction between an entrepreneur and a liar: Entrepreneurs believe their story will come true, as they are laser-focused on making it true. A liar, well, they know they’re misleading people with false data. Usually for money (i.e., fraud). This is where Tesla turns gray.

Scott continues to say things about Elon and Tesla. But that's not the point of today's post.

The point I would like to make is that real estate development is an inherently entrepreneurial endeavor. You need to be a salesperson and a compelling storyteller, because that's the only way you'll be able to create the future. And creating the future is what developers do.