Antonio Franca

It's hard to watch a man fight a war he doesn't believe in. It feels like a waste.

But in this elegy, Yeats suggests it might actually be the only way to be free. The airman isn't driven by hate for the enemy or love for his country. He's driven by something much simpler: the fun of flying.

He's balanced his life, the past and the future, and decided none of it matters as much as this one specific "impulse of delight." Most of us drift through life on momentum, doing what we're told. This guy is doing exactly what he wants, even if it kills him.

My take on a @dcurtis blog post of the same title and topic.

The best way to predict the future is to think about desire. The problem with desire is that it tends to be bounded by what's actually possible; as we grow older, our imaginations seem to develop artificial caps that limit our ideas to things that are reasonably achievable in the short term. But who cares about what is reasonable? Here's what I want.

So, ignoring physics and politics for a second, here is what I actually want.

I want biology to be totally programmable. Whether it's an internal bug (e.g. cancer), or a malicious code injection (e.g. a virus), it shouldn't matter. I want to get to a point where curing a disease is an information problem. No one dies from disease, we just need to patch that particular biological system. I want to live past 100, and without the decline.

I want the cost of basic needs to hit zero, and retire the concept of money. Money is just a way to allocate scarce resources. But if artificial machines handle the marginal cost of production (e.g. energy, food, goods) scarcity is replaced by abundance. "Work" is just what we call it when we're working on something we're curious about, not something we do to pay rent.

I want to travel anywhere on Earth in under an hour. And I want it to be totally frictionless: no lines, no cramped seats. It should be as comfortable as sitting in my own living room. Geography is no bottleneck on what and who we can see or where we can work.

I want to sleep for four hours and wake up feeling like I slept for ten. It feels like a design flaw that we spend a third of our lives unconscious just to function.

I want computing interfaces so intuitive and fluid that they feel like an extension of the real world. I don't want to type on a keyboard or tap glass. I want a JARVIS-like layer over reality that provides context and meaning without me having to ask. It shouldn't distract me from the real world; it should make the real world higher resolution.

I want governance to function like open-source software. Right now, politics feels like running legacy code from the 19th century. I want to replace bureaucracy with transparent algorithms. I want a world where coordination problems are solved by math, not by committees, and where the state is a thin, efficient platform rather than a bloated operating system.

I want to make war structurally impossible. Violence is usually just a fight over resources or a failure of communication. If resources are infinite and we're all connected, war becomes unfeasible. I want a world where attacking a neighbor makes as little sense as attacking yourself.

I want high-bandwidth learning. If I want to learn algebraic topology or global geopolitics, I don't want to spend six months reading linearly. I want to download the context directly.

I want a search engine for people. Right now, finding the five other people on earth who are obsessed with the exact same niche things as I am is a bottleneck. It should be as easy as googling a syntax question.

I want a truth filter. A way to strip out the signaling, the ads, and the noise from the internet, so I'm left with just the raw signal.

Hi, I'm Antonio. A few facts about me:

I'm Spanish, from a small rural town in Zaragoza. I've also lived in Barcelona, Amsterdam, Singapore, Cambridge, Buenos Aires, and now Vienna.

I've always loved building things and understanding the world around us. At 12, my cousin and I built tree houses in the forest. I'd also collect things from nature and study them under my microscope (I did some terrifying experiments).

I've always loved sports. At 14, I played football at Athletic Bilbao's (spot who I am) youth academy. Now I enjoy swimming, tennis, running, surfing, and HIIT. Sports are my most important source of energy.

I love exploring new cultures and spending time in nature. I've traveled to over 40 countries across every continent except Antarctica.

I love music. My Spotify listening age is 84 years. I lean toward old music and used to make my own.

Some top outdoor picks: surfing Cloud 9 in Siargao (video), spending a week in the Balearic Islands sleeping in hammocks in the pine forests, and getting stranded deep in the Andes with a flat tire on the Chile-Argentina border (Sunday night, zero battery, and speeding trucks).

How I Confront Life

I intend to live with purpose. My life mission is to live with integrity, push our understanding of the universe forward, and make a positive impact on the lives of others.

I value health and wellness. I monitor my body through Whoop and blood testing. I eat food that comes from nature and use products as close to nature as possible.

I'm a techno-optimist and a libertarian. I believe capitalism, defined by respect for private property, contracts, and free trade, is humanity's greatest engine for prosperity. We solve problems through innovation and freedom.

I try to live in the fullness of rationality. I hate drama. My goal in human interaction is to find the non-zero-sum game where everyone wins the most.

I'm curious and interdisciplinary. I love reading non-fiction: philosophy, ethics, economics, geopolitics. I've tried fiction multiple times, but it doesn't stick. This world is already too interesting.

I believe suffering is always going to be present throughout our lives. We can't avoid it. I've learned to take the pain upfront. It is always better to get the hard part over with early rather than letting it hang over me.

What I look for in people

I'm pretty easy to get along with. Honestly, your chances are good that I'll be nice to you, whoever you are. But there are a few things that matter to me when choosing who to get around with:

I like people who are ambitious. Not in the status-seeking way, but in the "I want to do something that matters" way. People who act in good faith and have a good heart. This sounds abstract, but you can actually spot it when you interact with someone. It's hard to fake.

I like people who are genuinely self-fulfilled. The best relationships happen between people who are already whole on their own. This is when interdependence (in the Covey sense) can only happen.

I value humility, curiosity, and simplicity (making things 'as simple as possible, but no simpler'). I dislike artificial complexity and arrogance. I respect people who take serious care of themselves, because you can't treat others well if you don't start with yourself.

I don't do well with disloyalty. I'm deeply loyal, and breaking integrity (this has many shapes) is the one thing that is almost impossible to come back from.