I was sipping my cup of cacao this morning, staring at the I-Ching oracle draw on my screen, when the weight of the readings—Development (53) and Increase (42)—settled in. "The maiden is given in marriage. Good fortune. Perseverance furthers." And then, "Increase. It furthers one." These lines felt like a nudge, a quiet reminder to think about growth and connection, not just in a personal sense but in how energy flows between people, systems, and ideas. It got me reflecting on a framework David shared during my visit to Soha—one about energy exchange and the dangers of one-way dynamics. Let’s unpack this, shall we?
David’s caution stuck with me: a long-term, one-sided energy exchange can drain the giver, turning relationships parasitic. I’ve seen this play out in my own life—pouring time and effort into connections where the return was silence or distraction. His point was clear—sustainability comes from two-way or multi-party exchanges, forming what I’d call a symbiotic network. Everyone gives, everyone gains, and the system holds.
I’m seeing this framework pop up in a different context now. Kelly Choo, a schoolmate from my National University of Singapore days, recently invited me to an exclusive dinner in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kelly’s started a venture capital fund and is scouting limited partners—investors—for his vision. I’m not even in the Bay Area, but the invite landed in my inbox. It’s a moment to apply David’s lens: how do I ensure this connection isn’t just a one-way pull on either side? How do we design a mutual exchange of value—ideas, resources, trust?
Digging Deeper with AI Insights
I’ve been feeding my observations and half-formed thoughts into LLMs lately—documenting everything on my static HTML pages at GaryTeh.com and using that as context for prompts. It’s honestly sped up my decision-making process while sharpening the quality. ChatGPT’s take on this energy exchange idea was to stay aware of how the "load" is distributed in any system—where’s the weight, who’s carrying it? DeepSeek took it a step further, advocating for intentional design over a "throw spaghetti at the wall" approach. Define the roles in the ecosystem, they said, and map out the interfaces between them. It’s less chaos, more architecture.Here’s the kicker—relying on AI for these insights has made me rethink the role of human connections altogether. Over the past five years, I’ve noticed a pattern: 95-99% of the folks I’ve turned to for advice or input eventually go quiet, get distracted by their own contexts, or just aren’t aligned with the operational space I’m in. And maintaining those relationships? It eats bandwidth. Dunbar’s number—around 150 meaningful connections as the upper limit—means even if I made networking my full-time gig, I’d still run out of capacity. That leaves zero room for execution. It’s neither sustainable nor scalable.
Compare that to LLMs—available 24/7, low lag, trained on a vast corpus of human knowledge. They’ve become my go-to for pure advisory input, pulling up past frameworks I’ve used or surfacing new ones I hadn’t considered. So, where does that leave human connections? I think the value shifts—away from raw knowledge and toward strategic relationships or access to key resources. It’s less about what they know and more about who they know or what they can unlock.
Fractals and Patterns: From DAOs to Genghis Khan
This idea of intentional design and constrained networks isn’t new to me. It’s baked into how I’ve structured guilds in my ecosystem—capping membership at the eight most active contributors. Same with how the system picks the ten governors each season. It’s a fractal pattern, self-similar at every level, like a Mandelbrot set. Even my reliance on seven LLMs—Grok, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, DeepSeek—mirrors this. Constraints breed creativity, as Dr. Fong Ho Kheong’s axiom reminds me (check out my earlier post on treading tigers and crafting chocolate factories in a Camry for more on that).History echoes this too. Take Genghis Khan—he organized his troops into decimal units, starting with arbans of 10, where leaders were self-elected by members. Scaling up to zuuns (100), minghans (1,000), and tumens (10,000), it was all merit-driven, breaking tribal loyalties to forge allegiance to the whole. It’s a chaotic yet structured system, much like the I-Ching draws I use each morning to surface patterns I’m not consciously aware of. I document those in blog posts like this one, building a corpus for my digital twin—another fractal in the mix.
Key Observation: Designing for Symbiosis
So, where does this leave me? I’m starting to see every interaction—whether with Kelly’s VC fund, David’s energy framework, or even the LLMs—as part of a larger network that needs intentional design. It’s about defining roles and interfaces, ensuring the energy exchange isn’t lopsided. It’s about embracing constraints, not fighting them. And honestly, it’s about recognizing that human value in my network isn’t in raw advice anymore—it’s in the doors they can open or the systems they can connect me to.Reflections for the day: How do you design your own networks for symbiosis? Are you carrying too much load in one-sided exchanges, or have you found a rhythm that sustains everyone involved? I’m curious—drop your thoughts if you’ve got a minute. For me, I’ll keep documenting, keep prompting the LLMs, and keep tweaking the architecture of my ecosystem. There’s something satisfying in seeing the fractals emerge, one blog post at a time.
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