My Content List #28 | Monday 4/12/21

Opening Rant: Cognitive Biases, Securitization, and Forced Narratives

Hello, friends. Thanks for stopping by.

In this edition, you’ll find another seemingly-scattered collection of contemplations. Maybe they’re all related; maybe they’re not. I’ll let you decide.

Spent the past week in NYC; Spring sprung, head-faked, then gave us a few grayish and misty daze. On the nicer ones, humanity re-emerged. Somehow I’d forgotten — during these strange 13 months since life shut down — how many people there are in the world; what it’s like to see a foot-traffic jam walking around SoHo; folks dining, drinking, dancing, laughing… It was freakin’ awesome to see.

We’re almost through this. Just don’t do dumb shit for the next few months, and we’re there.

Alright, let’s get into it…

I. Yet Another Cognitive Bias

“Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they have heard of” — Chiyo, Memoirs of a Geisha

The summer after Jaws came out (1975), ocean-goers were few and far between, driven away by fear of what may lurk beneath. To be clear, nothing changed in the environment other than the release of the movie.

Statistically speaking, the odds of getting killed in a shark attack are around 1 in 3,748,067, or about .00003%. Compare that to the odds of dying in a car accident (1 in 114, or about 0.8%… nearly 27,000x more likely than shark attack death), getting struck by lightning (1 in 161,856, or about .0006%… about 200x more likely). If folks were perfectly rational, they’d have avoided driving and/or walking in the rain MUCH more than they avoided an ocean dip.

Spoiler alert: as a species, we humans are (quite comically) far from being “perfectly rational.”

The mechanism at work here is known as the availability heuristic (a close cousin of the “recency effect” or “gambler’s fallacy”), wherein events/people/situations/etc. that are easier to recall “spring to the forefront of our thoughts” and thus become generalized to all circumstances we encounter.

Examples abound:

• The public’s fear of nuclear energy due to some high-profile meltdowns, when in reality it’s one of the lower-risk forms of power generation and storage
• Our consumption of news media, which by definition reports on things that are new (i.e. not ordinary) but can still distort our expectations. This can lead us to believe that that certain events (protests, plane crashes, terrorism, kidnappings, etc.) happen with much more frequency than they do in reality. Goddamn fearmongerers!
• The recent mania around r/WallStreetBets and the few familiar names (GameStop, Tesla, etc.) bubbling up to the collective consciousness of all investors.

I encourage you to check out Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s seminal report from 1973 (2 years before Jaws was released) in which the term “availability heuristic” was coined. Those guys are geniuses (… geniui…?).

Let’s get back to Chiyo’s quote above — distinguishing between something great versus something we’ve heard of. This is especially relevant in social contexts.

As I’ve said before, we’re all (sometimes desperately) questing for connectedness, seeking common ground, reveling in mutual experience. So when a conversational counterpart mentions something we’ve heard of, we’re wont to latch onto it. “Oh, you know about XX [company, person, book, etc.] too?!”

I’ve seen this happen when VCs are exchanging notes on a sector of mutual interest: when a company comes up that both know the name of (for whatever reason, good or bad), it renders a sort of legitimacy. Happenings like that can be a version of the availability heuristic, lurking behind the scenes as always. This is reminiscent of what I’ve written previously about validation (and again, on validation part 2).

A final extension: I’ve heard the saying “the best ability is availability” applied both to athletics (i.e. don’t get injured) and the workplace (i.e. don’t get distracted). I’d say this phenomenon applies to branding+marketing as well. If you can find a way to lodge your company into the target customer’s mind — such that they recall of your product+service at the critical moment, even subliminally — you’ve found success. How do marketers initiate that impression →recall effect, though? Is it best to pepper prospective users with ads everywhere they look, or to nudge more selectively? There are also potential downsides to the recall-at-all-costs approach; some will tell ya that “all press is good press”, but obviously you’d rather be connoted positively than negatively.

II. Quick Nerd-Out On Securitization, Derivatives

I want to make sure you’re aware of how damn near everything is becoming “financialized” and tradeable. If you spend time in and around FinTech, SaaS models, the creator economy, hedge funds, and/or crypto, etc., this is is the air you breathe…

Let’s touch on a sliver of the hugely eclectic, oft esoteric, sometimes-speculative range of assets+derivatives that you can access:

➡You can trade recurring revenue contracts via Pipe, which has created “revenue as an asset class.” I love this concept: it allows you to accelerate receivables, saves time+effort of fundraising so teams can focus more on scaling operations, and eliminates dilution. Quite brilliant, IMO.

➡You can trade a digital coin that tracks an individual’s overall influence via BitClout. They dub themselves “a new type of social network that lets you speculate on people with real money.” Sheesh; the NYTimes said it best: for creators, everything is for sale.

• This is downstream from BitClout’s current offering, but imagine a sort of “indexing” where you can invest in a bucket of individuals based on certain characteristics (something as superficial as race or gender… or industry, age, region, etc.)

• Certain apps even allow creators/influencers to crowdsource+crowd-fund their decisions on a minute-to-minute basis by polling and auctioning; e.g., NewNew — the “control my life app”.
• BitClout is similar to an idea I wrote about back in 2017… Curate for music. “At that moment of first interaction (i.e. adding a song to your Curate portfolio), the algorithm logs the popularity of it by documenting its number of listens, likes, re-posts, etc. The application would then track that song’s (and others’) performance over time, and the algorithm would develop a number (a “Curating”) that states one’s ability to foresee popular music.” Bitclout and NewNew are evolved versions of Curate.

Note: I’ve already logged Curate under “Companies I Should Have Started”… an ever-growing list.

➡You can share/hedge your future income among peers with Pando, thereby allowing your pool participants (i.e. your friends and “peers you believe in”) to share in the winnings when/if one of you hits it big. Interesting hedge, no? Could be a… fun?… conversation starter next time you and your crew are hanging; if y’all pooled your income streams, who would be the breadwinner? the free-rider? Try it now in your head: which 4–6 friends would you choose pool your future incomes? Better yet, would they want to pool with you?

➡You can invest in fractionalized virtual real estate via SuperWorld, an app that digitized the. entire. world. (64 billion plots of land!) via NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain and GoogleMaps API. Maybe you thought NFTs only applied to digital art or video clips… the truth is, this is just the beginning (or the end). They just raised raised a round from the OG Tim Draper. The digitalization of real estate is upon us.

➡You can play in “futures contracts on U.S. tax rates, a derivative that.. can be used to hedge President Biden’s efforts to raise rates on corporations and high-earning individuals.” Another market-making act from the legendary Jeff Yass.

➡You can “trade directly on the outcome of events” with Kalshi and their new “event contract” asset class. From the weather to the movement of economic indicators (and every binary outcome in between), Kalshi offers users a “daily and democratized experience” to “capitalize on their opinions and hedge against everyday risks related to events.” Another fascinating startup concept, backed by Sequoia, Henry Kravis, and others.

What breadth of options!

A brief ode to the past (which Professor Galloway already discussed): The legendary David Bowie was wayyyy ahead of his time when it comes to direct creator monetization. In 1997, he issued Bowie Bonds and made them accessible to his fans… “What made [the bonds] unique was the collateral, or source of trust: future royalties on Bowie’s music, which the bondholder felt people would continue to value. Moody’s rated the bonds A3 and Bowie used the proceeds to buy out his former manager, shoring up the bonds and securing long-term control of his music.” A true visionary.

One idea I’ve been noodling on for a while could create yet another asset class. This dawned on me while reading Andrew Yang’s The War on Normal People last summer: envision a software offering equipped with best-in-class legal AI to help individuals file for disability insurance. Indulge me briefly as I delve into this…

• In 2020, at least ~$19 billion was outlayed by the government in the form of disability insurance (Social Security). That amount’s been growing at low-single-digit rates YoY (2–4%).
• Per Yang: ~80% of claimants are represented by counsel, up from ~20% in the 1970s — primarily because the process is complicated af. Beyond the up-front cost of managing the claims and filing the paperwork, law firms often take a percentage of the monthly distributions (an average $300K lifetime value in total payouts per claimant). This is a huge cash cow for these firms; one in particular made ~$70mm in 2015 just from this business.
• Imagine a software platform that functions as a two-way market: (1) claimants pay an upfront fee for onboarding and initiating/managing their claim, and the platform collects a percentage of the lifetime payouts (like lawyers do now), and (2) the platform sells this hyper-organized data to law firms and healthcare providers, both of which still want ways to play in this ecosystem.
• Downstream, we could even securitize bundled portfolios of disability insurance payouts, which essentially function as annuity-like streams. Think Pipe but for disability insurance… Then the disability-stricken citizens would have more upfront liquidity and, ideally, get themselves (and their families) better-situated.

If you’re interested in this idea or working on something similar, I’d love to hear from you! It’s rife with some potentially perverse incentives (i.e. rooting for more people get hurt and file for disability!!!), but net-net I think it could facilitate access to a highly-complex service for those who need it.

OK, enough FinTech for the moment. Now onto more human nature + psychology stuffs…

III. Linear Narratives & Rationalization

So I’ve been running the gauntlet — or, as I like to say, “fighting the good fight” — interviewing for summer internships.

Almost all interviews start out similarly: some version of “tell me about yourself.”

On the spectrum of interview question difficulty, this one’s a softball. To relay an engaging/enticing answer, one must employ the basic elements of storytelling — one of which is tying a linear narrative throughout an answer.

Yes, indeed; we must (at times) force-fit what may be scattered occurrences over many years into something that comes across as cohesive. My “life path” is an easily digestible, well-trodden progression — which at times irks me ineffably and existentially, but that’s a different rant — so I don’t struggle too much to relay it all.

But what if that’s all just post-hoc rationalization? Can a linear narrative *always* be traced? What if I had some massive epiphany while pursuing one thing and had to push eject on that path to search for something different? Linearity can sometimes feel pretty boring.

That would probably make me less appealing to a prospective employer; it’d render me flippant, and they want steadfast. But c’mon… we’re young! Is it really fair to expect us to be solely and exclusively focused on pursuing one career path? Times change; we live and (hopefully) learn more about the world and how we can find work+meaning for ourselves within it.

As I’ve said before, Millennials love preserving optionality, and at times I’m no different. So if I were on the other side of the table and some ~kid~ were telling me how all his/her life s/he wanted to be an investment banker, a consultant, or really any one thing for their whole lives… I’d frankly tell ’em “you’ve gotta get out more.” **

Also worth mentioning that the people who have gone through those step-changes in career/life pursuits (and live to tell about it) tend to be pretty wise have and oft have interesting stories to tell — a ~unique~ perspective. Maybe certain combinations of (1) personal exploration and (2) bravery to question one’s road ahead should be rewarded, rather than skepticized.

This echoes what I’ve written about prioritizing processes over outcomes.

And there it is, another Opening Rant in the books; now the Content List itself awaits you.

I must say, this feels like one of my favorites yet. Not sure exactly why; maybe because there’s a lot more musique-centric articles in this edition. Hope you enjoy!

** N.B. I did my time in banking and have absolutely zero intention of being in a position to interview candidates for that job. Just a hypothetical.

Got something to contribute? Think my reasoning is flawed?

Drop me a note; I’d love to hear from you!

Follow me @James Shecter. Or don’t.

My Content List #28 | Mon 4/12/21

Articles

For Creators, Everything Is for Sale | NYTimes

• “For example, a creator can use NewNew to post a poll asking which sweater they should wear today, or who they should hang out with and where they should go. Fans purchase voting power on NewNew’s platform to participate in the polls, and with enough voting power, they get to watch their favorite influencer live out their wishes, like a real life choose-your-own-adventure game.
• “Creators are burning out, but their fans want more and more,” said Jen Lee, 25, the founder of a popular creator economy community on Discord. “By monetizing each aspect of their life, they can extract value from everyday interactions.”
• Courtne Smith, the founder and chief executive of NewNew, said the company was “similar to the stock market” in that “you can buy shares, which are essentially votes, to be able to control a certain level of a person’s life.””

Clubhouse’s Inevitability | Stratechery

• So much more deliberate/calculated than the (simplistic) explanation I offered in #27
• “Being live also feeds back into the first quality: Clubhouse is far better suited than podcasts to discuss events as they are happening, or immediately afterwards. For example, both Clubhouse and Locker Room, its sports-focused competitor, have become go-to destinations for sports reaction conversations, both during and after games; it’s only a matter of time before secondary market of play-by-play announcers develops, and not only for sports: anything that is happening can be narrated and discussed.
• Make no mistake, most of these conversations will be terrible. That, though, is the case for all user-generated content. The key for Clubhouse will be in honing its algorithms so that every time a listener opens the app they are presented with a conversation that is interesting to them. This is the other area where podcasts miss the mark: it is amazing to have so much choice, but all too often that choice is paralyzing; sometimes — a lot of times! — users just want to scroll their Twitter feed instead of reading a long blog post, or click through Stories or swipe TikToks, and Clubhouse is poised to provide the same mindless escapism for background audio.”

The Memeification of American Capitalism | Digital Native

• “These are kids who grew up watching their parents struggle in the aftermath of the Great Recession. They’re skeptical of institutions and the elite. Their families, after all, worked within “the system” and were promised good lives and stable jobs — until those promises disintegrated under Wall Street’s greed.
• Albert Einstein once said that compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. Not in 2020, when interest rates hover around 0%. American capitalism used to be built on the expectations of affordable education, homeownership, and compounding savings to create a nice nest egg for retirement. For many Gen Zs, this form of capitalism is an illusion or outright lie.
• We’re just beginning to see the ripple effects of the financial crisis, as young people come of age with a radically different worldview than older generations. These people aren’t interested in traditional career paths or in “renting” their time; they’re much more interested in using their hustle and savvy to dictate their own futures.”

What Do Near-Death Experiences Mean, and Why Do They Fascinate Us? | The Guardian

• “Greyson presents his research in a book, After, which is bound by a series of case studies. The accounts are mystical, like those we know from TV and books, but there are common themes. After a bad reaction to anaesthesia, one patient recalled: “I found myself in a meadow, mind cleared, identity intact.” The meadow, she went on, was “lit with this glorious, radiant light, like no light we’ve ever seen,” and “a gentle, inner glow shone from each and every plant.” Most episodes involve similar feelings of wonder, mental clarity and bliss, Greyson says. Some people recall out-of-body experiences, or report travelling through a long tunnel; others meet entities they think of as God or Allah or long-dead family members; some feel time bend and warp, as though it were elastic. Once, a policeman who almost died during surgery asked Greyson: “How do you describe a state of timelessness, where there’s nothing progressing from one point to another, where it’s just all there, and you’re totally immersed in it?””

The Five Universal Laws of Human Stupidity | Quartz

How Covid-19 Supercharged the Advertising ‘Triopoly’ of Google, Facebook and Amazon | WSJ

• “The Big Three of digital advertising — Google, Facebook and Amazon — already dominated that sector going into 2020. The pandemic pushed them into command of the entire advertising economy. According to a provisional analysis by ad agency GroupM, the three tech titans for the first time collected the majority of all ad spending in the U.S. last year.
• Beneath the shift are changes driven by the pandemic: more time spent on computer screens; more e-commerce; a jump in new-business formation, and a steady improvement in tech giants’ ability to demonstrate a return on ad investment.
• Success breeds success for what some call the “triopoly.” The increase in shopping and spending on Google, Facebook and Amazon’s platforms is adding to their already voluminous data on users, giving them even more appeal for advertisers that look to target their messages.”

2020 In Review | Howard Marks

Your Face Is Not Your Own | NYTimes

• “Computers once performed facial recognition rather imprecisely, by identifying people’s facial features and measuring the distances among them — a crude method that did not reliably result in matches. But recently, the technology has improved significantly, because of advances in artificial intelligence. A.I. software can analyze countless photos of people’s faces and learn to make impressive predictions about which images are of the same person; the more faces it inspects, the better it gets. Clearview is deploying this approach using billions of photos from the public internet. By testing legal and ethical limits around the collection and use of those images, it has become the front-runner in the field.”

State of the Cloud 2021 | Bessemer Venture Partners

1. “Cloud companies have not just reset in the New Normal, but have thrived with a record-breaking market capitalization of more than $2 trillion.
2. There’s been a changing of the guard afoot: MT SAAS has overtaken FAANG.
3. Cloud multiples are rising to new heights, with both public and private cloud trading over 20x.
4. Cloud growth rates and access to capital are at all-time highs, with the average Cloud 100 company growing 80% YoY and $186 billion going into private cloud companies in 2020 alone.
5. Good-better-best of growth endurance is 70%-75%-80%.
6. GTM strategies have adapted in the New Normal; best practices include product-led growth, usage-based pricing, and the adoption of cloud marketplaces.”

In Defense of Thinking | Cal Newport

• “Part of the disconnect, I eventually became convinced, comes from the reality that we’ve lost our familiarity with the concept of “thinking” as a concrete and isolatable activity; something that can be prioritized, and trained, and even cherished as a valuable pursuit in its own right. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle identified rational contemplation as the highest and best of all human activities. In The Intellectual Life, Thomistic scholar Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges spends over 200 pages detailing how the serious thinker should organize their process of thinking.
• Today, we’re not nearly as comfortable with this most fundamental of activities. We talk a lot more about information — how we can get more of it, how we can spread it faster — than we do its processing.”

How Billie Eilish Rode Teenage Weirdness to Stardom | NYTimes Music Issue

• “Billie, 18, and Finneas, 22, have an easy, unabashed intimacy. They were home-schooled, and Billie likes to joke that had they ever attended public schools, Finneas — eccentric and sweet-natured — would have been bullied, whereas Billie — coolly charismatic and sharp-tongued — would have been a bully. In conversation, though, they’re more likely to pay each other compliments, plainly and earnestly, than to reroute their affection through the kinds of sarcastic needling siblings often engage in. Finneas, leaning over the couch in an extremely L.A. ensemble — multicolored camp shirt, skinny trousers, perforated brown loafers with no socks — gave Billie a hug. “Missed you,” he said, to which she replied, “You smell good.” He took a seat on a coffee table facing her, and she stretched out a leg so that her right foot rested on his left inside thigh.”

The Great Amazon Flip-a-Thon | NYTimes

• “Eco-Baby, TrailBuddy, Quility and TapeKing aren’t exactly household names, but they’re working on it. Their products are among the most popular in their categories on Amazon, accounting for millions of dollars in yearly sales.
• They’re also owned and operated by a single company called Thrasio, which recently raised $750 million in financing. It’s just one among dozens of firms snapping up successful Amazon brands for millions of dollars.
• Several of the largest firms, including Perch, Branded and SellerX, aspire to become, loosely speaking, the Unilevers and Procter & Gambles of Amazon’s third-party seller economy.”

The Digital Renaissance | Digital Native

• “The internet connects billions of people around the world, but the infrastructure of the creator economy largely looks the same as it did a century ago. The next decade will be about reclaiming creativity, agency, and self-expression. It will be about reshaping the architecture of art to (finally) fulfill the internet’s promise of removing gatekeepers. The future of the creator economy is the patronage economy: direct value creation and value exchange between creators and communities. Blockchain technology is central to this future. With it, creators will:
• (1) Monetize creations, and
• (2) Monetize individuality.
• The first is about capturing value from a creator’s work through non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The second is about capturing value from who a creator is — from their very state of being — through social tokens.”
• Related: What People Misunderstand About the Creator Economy

Roger Federer as Religious Experience | David Foster Wallace

• “Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.”

You don’t know the half of it: The family that gave us Anderson .Paak | The Undefeated

I’m Not Done Yet! | Prof Scott Galloway

• “Modern-day “capitalism” in America means flattening the risk curve for people who already have money by borrowing from future generations with debt-fueled bailouts for companies. We have consciously decided to reduce the downside for the wealthy, thereby limiting the upside for future generations.
• CNBC guest: Equity holders deserve to get wiped out.
• CNBC host: Why does anybody deserve to get wiped out in a crisis like this? This is a natural disaster, why does anybody deserve to get wiped out? Wouldn’t that be immoral in and of itself?
• “Immoral,” here we go. Morality for CNBC, and the current administration, is not capitalism but the worst type of socialism: Cronyism. Rugged individualism and capitalism on the way up, privatizing the gains, then “we’re all in this together” on the way down, as we socialize the losses with bailouts.”

Do Drake’s Melodramas Still Matter? | NYTimes Music Issue

• “Yet the most crucial element of Drake’s endurance as a pop-cultural figure has been the way he insinuated himself into the emotional life of millennials like me. One night, when the cheesy 2013 single “Hold On, We’re Going Home” came on during a party I threw, all the dancers in my kitchen audibly sighed as if their most private desires had been sated. Drake reflected back to my generation the scattershot and confused nature of our romantic pursuits in the era of dating apps and social media, when we were all suddenly on camera, the subjects of our own reality shows. Is there a musical artist who has more accurately conveyed the distorted sense of emotional investment we can have in a text exchange, or the satisfaction in knowing that an ex is checking our Instagram stories?”

Viktor Frankl — Why to Believe in Others | Farnam Street

• “If we take man as he really is, we make him worse, but if we overestimate him …. If we seem to be idealists and are overestimating, overrating man, and looking at him that high, here above, you know what happens? We promote him to what he really can be.
• So, we have to be idealists in a way because then we wind up as the true, the real realists.”

What Critics Don’t Understand About NFTs | The Atlantic

• Shoutout to my cousin Will Marks, the writer of this piece!
• “By these terms, many NFT purchases are akin to acquiring a piece of art that nevertheless remains in the gallery where it was sold, open all the time to members of the public, who may grab a free print of the work after their visit — a replica so perfect that it can be considered an original for many purposes. Moreover, the museum might not happen to take care of “your” piece of art: It could lose it, damage it, replace it, or destroy it. Indeed, enough linked NFT assets have failed to load that a website, checkmynft.com, has been auditing some of the items sold on major platforms and hosted on IPFS.”

It’s Easy (and Legal) to Bet on Sports. Do Young Adults Know the Risks? | NYTimes

• “Most adults who bet on sports do so without major negative consequences. But about 1 percent of American adults have a gambling disorder, in which the core symptom is continuing to gamble despite harmful consequences, said Dr. Fong, who is a director of the Gambling Studies Program at U.C.L.A.
• A vast majority of those with a serious gambling problem never seek or gain access to treatment, he said.
• Studies have shown that sports bettors are typically male, under 35, single, educated and employed or preparing for a career. According to a new survey commissioned by the National Council on Problem Gambling, sports bettors showed significantly higher levels of problematic gambling than other gamblers. The risk of addiction is higher for young adults — specifically sports bettors — than for those of any other age, the survey found.”

Be More Realistic About the Time You Have | Harvard Business Review

• “It’s no surprise that many of us overload our workday, assuming we can take on many tasks in a small amount of time. Yet, at the end of the day, we’re stunned to find that work remains unfinished. Despite past evidence, our predictive engines gum up, and we’re convinced we’ll be able to achieve the extraordinary in an ordinary day. This is called “magical thinking,” and it can cause you to disappoint others, miss deadlines, feel depleted, and lose your inspiration. But you can break free of this habit. First, realize that your workload is likely not temporary. Review past projects and what took up most of your time, so you can prioritize better in the future. Second, stop believing next time will be easier, and plan more time for your work, not less. Third, think about the end product and what you can reasonably do before agreeing to a project. Fourth, help others learn autonomy, rather than taking the time to fix their mistakes yourself. Finally, don’t assume you’re indispensable. Let go of your monopoly on work and build capacity in others instead”

Why bands are disappearing: ‘Young people aren’t excited by them’ | The Guardian

• “Whichever metric you use, the picture is clear. Right now, there are only nine groups in the UK Top 100 singles, and only one in the Top 40. Two are the Killers and Fleetwood Mac, with songs 17 and 44 years old respectively, while the others are the last UK pop group standing (Little Mix), two four-man bands (Glass Animals, Kings of Leon), two dance groups (Rudimental, Clean Bandit) and two rap units (D-Block Europe, Bad Boy Chiller Crew). There are duos and trios, but made up of solo artists guesting with each other. In Spotify’s Top 50 most-played songs globally right now, there are only three groups (BTS, the Neighbourhood, and the Internet Money rap collective), and only six of the 42 artists on the latest Radio 1 playlist are bands: Wolf Alice, Haim, Royal Blood, Architects, London Grammar and the Snuts.”

Scarcity Cred | Prof Scott Galloway

• “NFTs create and capture the value of scarcity cred in a massively dispersed fashion that bypasses gatekeepers and taps into capital anywhere. At the high end, digital art sold for millions doesn’t really need an NFT, just as Bowie didn’t need crypto to securitize his royalties in 1997. Christie’s could have just as easily sold an embossed paper certificate, and entered the buyer’s name in a leather bound book securely held at Christie’s headquarters. But that sort of infrastructure isn’t available to the vast majority of digital artists, whereas anyone can create an NFT. Nyan Cat, a pop culture meme, isn’t likely to appear at Christie’s any time soon, but as an NFT it sold for nearly $600,000.”

“Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading | a16z

• “Gen Z faces an uncertain path to financial progress. A combination of asset price inflation (QE and COVID stimulus packages) and generally loose monetary policy has driven the transfer of wealth from the asset-poor (young) to the asset-rich (old). A new generation of Gen Z investors are willing to take risks to counter a deck that may be stacked against them. Active investing is a natural extension of hustle culture, in which risk is embraced and failure is accepted (and even celebrated); YOLO behavior on WallStreetBets is just one example. Furthermore, Gen Z retail traders have never experienced a market contraction — the oldest of them were 10 in 2007 when the S&P began its 50 percent decline. For many, passive investing is viewed as a strategy for the already rich to *stay* rich, not for those wanting to *get* rich.”

How Anxiety Hides in Your Habits | GreaterGood by UC Berkeley

• “As Brewer explains, our brain stores a “reward value” for different people, places, and things we encounter. The more rewarding our brain thinks a behavior is, the stronger the habit around it will be. But reward values can become skewed or outdated. For example, we might have developed a passion for cake as an anxious teen — but in adulthood, we now find ourselves in a queasy sugar coma after three slices.
• “The only sustainable way to change a habit is to update its reward value,” writes Brewer. That means taking a fresh look at how a habit is affecting us now. And we need to do this over and over, each time we repeat the habit in our daily life, until our brain updates its reward value and stops being drawn to the habit. What does this mean in practice?
• Once you’ve identified your habits that support anxiety, you need to be mindful when they occur. If you’re anxious and you start worrying about the future, make a mental note; observe the tightness in your chest, the lump in your throat, how little you get done at work that afternoon.”

These Startups Want To Give Us The Best Night’s Sleep And Investors Are Tucking In | Crunchbase News

• “Meanwhile, about $430 billion is spent each year on sleep aids by people trying to achieve optimal sleep. The global sleep economy is expected to grow to $585 billion by 2024, according to market and consumer data company Statista. And even with all of that money spent, the majority of adults still get poor sleep, Tsern added.
• Bryte’s bed monitors temperature, pressure points and updates those algorithms every night so sleep quality is individualized as it changes from night to night and year to year. The beds are sold for $7,600 for a queen and $8,600 for a king, but the company is working to scale production to eventually bring the cost down, including partnering with luxury hotels, he said.
• “You sleep, and the bed figures out what makes you sleep better and then provides the optimal environment each night,” Tsern said. “We are seeing 40, 50 and 60 percent better sleep, but we are just scratching the surface of the technology, and as we scale, we feel we can reach people across the world.””

Is Coffee Good for Us? Maybe Machine Learning Can Help Figure It Out. | NYTimes

We (Might) Work | Prof Scott Galloway

• “The new WeWork is a stronger company than the 2017 model. It’s still not worth $50 billion, but it might be worth $9B (or more). The new WeWork will benefit from the massive investments in space and brand equity (i.e., global awareness); additionally, people underestimate the difficulty of scaling “vibe,” where WeWork has a proven talent.
• Most companies aren’t going 100 percent remote. But when we return to the office, we will want less space that is more flexible, and more appealing to the premier asset of any firm: its ability to attract skilled, young human capital… Imagine: a commercial real estate play, with properties around the world, configured as flexible office space, rentable by the hour, the day, or the month, with great community spaces, aspirational design, and strong tech. In sum, We might Work.”

Founder Survey: EQ Matters More Than IQ | Crunchbase

• “As investors, mentors, and coaches to hundreds of founders, the last year has only deepened our conviction that emotional intelligence (or EQ) is beyond just essential for any entrepreneur — it is perhaps even the single greatest factor in success. In fact, EQ can have a very real impact on a company’s bottom line; Gallup estimates that employee disengagement costs the economy $350 billion per year.
• In an effort to understand the subject more deeply, we conducted a survey of about 100 founders on emotional intelligence, how 2020 impacted them, and how they’re growing their own EQ.
• More than 95 percent stated that EQ in leadership matters more than IQ.
  Nearly 60 percent of our founder respondents reported that in a year shaped by the pandemic and a crisis of racial justice, incorporating EQ into culture is more important now than ever.”

How AI Can Help Companies Set Prices More Ethically | Harvard Business Review

• “Using AI and data-driven tools, companies can change the price of a good or service based on who is buying, when they’re shopping, and myriad other factors. This power raises a question: Should ethics and societal values factor into these prices — and how? Companies should consider what they’re selling, who they’re selling to, and how they’re selling their products, and consider the range of possible impacts. Then, they should 1) get creative about reducing negative externalities, 2) reach out to stakeholders, and 3) build proactive filters into their pricing deliberations.”

I Want to Look Damn Good When the World Sees Me Again | The Atlantic

• “I had to know: Are other people acting as self-absorbed as I am? Every year there’s a frenzy to get that svelte summer beach bod, but ahead of this summer, something special might be happening. “People are legit getting ready for the end,” says Taryn Stewart, a personal trainer in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Since the start of February, attendance at her virtual classes has doubled, and many of her in-person clients who used to come see her monthly are now showing up once a week or more. “I can tell this is not just a summer bump,” Stewart told me. “I’ve been training for a long time, and I’ve never seen this amount of pickup.”

Robinhood Trader’s Battle Cry: ‘It’s All Just a Game to Me’ | WSJ

• “This isn’t a bull market or a bear market. It’s a know-nothing market.
• Bragging rights used to go to those investors who worked the hardest at learning the most. Now the glory often goes to those who know the least and don’t even care. That has turned the traditional investing hierarchy upside down, although it probably won’t last.”

As Insurtech Exits Spike, More VC Money Piles Into The Space | Crunchbase

• ““We’ve never seen insurance move this fast,” said Mike Greene, CEO of Hi Marley, an SMS-focused insurtech startup that closed a $25 million Series B this week. He sees a few factors contributing to the heightened speed of digital-age adaptations. One is stepped-up competition from industry newcomers. Another is a good earnings year in 2020 leaving large insurers more flush to spend on upgrading backend tech and customer service.
• Public markets have certainly taken note. Since summer, at least four venture-backed insurtech companies have carried out U.S. public offerings, with the largest and most recent entrant, Oscar Health, valued at $6.5 billion. Another two upstarts — Hippo Insurance and Doma (formerly States Title) — announced plans this month to go public by merging with blank-check acquirers.”

How Trader Jeff Yass Parlayed Poker And Horse Race Handicapping Into A $12 Billion Fortune | Forbes

• LONG LIVE JEFF! What a story…
• “At age 63, Yass has built Susquehanna into a global giant without taking a penny of outside capital. Today, Susquehanna commands nearly 10% of the market making volume in exchange traded funds, moving over 130 million shares daily in 50 countries around the world. It’s also regularly among the top-five market makers in U.S. stocks traded by retail brokers. Yass has used Susquehanna’s trading profits to invest in early-stage growth companies around the world, like TikTok parent company ByteDance, the world’s most valuable private company. His firm is now among the 20 largest investors in venture capital-backed companies in the world, according to some estimates, owning tens of billions worth of investments spread across China, Israel and the United States and large stakes in tech companies like Agora Inc. in China, and Credit Karma and Payoneer in the United States.”

The Sonic (Entrepreneurship) Boom | Prof Scott Galloway

• “Post-crisis periods are among history’s most productive eras. London rebuilt after the Great Fire with grand new architecture, and Europe after the worst of its plagues underwent a commercial revolution. The Marshall Plan turned enemies into allies, fomenting peace and prosperity for over half a century. Leaders also emerge from crises. Ulysses S. Grant was a washed-up soldier without prospects until war broke out, but that war created the opportunity for Grant to save the Union and advance the cause of freedom. This is all to say: In the next 36 months, I believe our economy will birth a new generation of web 3.0 firms and leaders.”

Big Music Needs to Be Broken Up to Save the Industry | Wired Magazine

• “The broad middle class of independent artists, record labels, venues, and other small businesses must now rely on — and increasingly pay — monopolists for access to bands and fans. For some, the pandemic made a difficult situation impossible.
• Decades of bad policy got us here. Dangerous corporate mergers went unchecked, bad conduct unpunished. But now, sweeping changes to the way we police corporate power appear to be on the way. New legislation proposed in the Senate, along with a House committee’s recommended legal changes after a comprehensive look at monopoly power among Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, are aimed at reining in unchecked corporate power. If enacted and successful, the proposed changes would rebalance the music industry away from corporate bigness and toward music’s vibrant, crucial middle class.”

Effort | Ava

• “I think a lot of people want to be but they don’t want to do. They want to have written a book, but they don’t want to write the book. They want to be fit, but they don’t want the tedium of working out. They’re ashamed of rejection and they’re ashamed of imperfection. I might want lots of people to subscribe to this Substack, but do I want to workshop a post every day? Donna Tartt once said in an interview that if the writer’s not having fun the reader isn’t either. I think people make the best things when they love the process, when they willingly shoulder the inherent uncertainty and pain that comes with it. It’s almost like a form of prayer: you offer up what you can even though the reward is uncertain. You do it out of love.”
• Related: Commenting vs. making

Inside the ‘Black Market’ Where Artists Can Pay for Millions of Streams | Rolling Stone

• “Mack tells Blueprint he can jack up artists’ streams — for a price. A salesman operating in an industry that treats hype as standard operating procedure, Mack claims to Blueprint that his “network” can generate “200 million streams a month” spread across its various music clients, a group that he alleges has included nearly a dozen well-known acts and prominent labels. The recording offers a rare glimpse into the shadowy world of third-party companies in the music industry attempting to seduce artists, managers, or labels by promising to manufacture millions of streams.
• Mack freely admits to Blueprint that Spotify has punished him for his stream-boosting activities in the past, but he claims that artists continue to use his services anyway. Why? “We basically cracked the code,” Mack says, “and understand how to manipulate the system and hit astronomical numbers.””

The Start-Up Enemies of Wall Street Are Booming | NYTimes

• “Sila is one of thousands of financial technology start-ups riding an investor frenzy driven by a growing realization that Big Finance is ripe for a tech makeover. When the pandemic forced businesses to speed up their usage of digital tools, including e-commerce and online banking, the demand for what is known as fintech exploded.
• Now start-ups with names like Blend, Brex and Dave that provide decidedly unglamorous banking, lending and payment processing offerings are hot tickets. That was punctuated this month when Stripe, a payments company, raised $600 million in a financing that valued it at $95 billion, the highest ever for a private start-up in the United States.”

Even Garbage Is Using Blockchain Now | Bloomberg

• “Where does our trash go after it leaves the curb?
• There’s no easy answer. Most plastics and other waste aren’t recycled; instead, they end up in landfills — or worse. But their journey is often difficult to track. There are billions of moving parts along the chain, including collectors, processing centers and even many types of refuse.
• Pilot projects in the U.S. and abroad are trying to add accountability to this process with the adoption of blockchain technology that will allow both waste managers and citizens to peer into garbage collection with a more all-seeing eye.”

Anxiety Is in Your Body, Not Your Mind | Elemental x Emma Pattee

• “We are a cerebral culture, which makes us very equipped to deal with problems that require reason and logic — think moral dilemmas — and less equipped to deal with problems where cognitive reasoning can just make them worse. Having a “fight or flight” response to running late to brunch may seem like an overreaction, but sitting in traffic, you are physiologically experiencing it all the same. We use our thinking brain to try and decide if the issue is “worth” being anxious about, and then we try to force our nervous system to comply. “Our consciousness gets disconnected from our body in those moments,” says Stanley. Your thinking brain decides that you have nothing to feel anxious about, so you spend your days walking around telling yourself that everything is fine while still feeling the physical symptoms of anxiety throughout your body. Even worse, your thinking brain may start to criticize and shame you for still being anxious even after it’s told you that everything is fine.”

how to avoid half-heartedness | Ava

• “… if you tolerate too much half-heartedness, it’s probably because you’re half-hearted. As in: anxious and ambivalent, looking for reassurance. As in: bored, along for the ride, not really sure about your own feelings and opinions. As in: external locus of control vs internal locus of control. You probably don’t have anything in your life that really tethers you to yourself — you don’t have conviction about what you love, so you’re hoping that someone else will provide you that certainty.
• I think that people come alive when they’re serious about what they love — when they choose to pay careful attention to what feeds and sustains them. I love this one Heather Havrilesky line about how crushes are often just misplaced ambition….
• If you want to be loved, find something you love. People can sense it when you have something you’re dedicated to. No one wants the burden of being the answer to your dissatisfication. When you’re unsure of yourself, it’s easy to be obsessed with the idea of love — the idea that happiness will arrive when someone else loves you. This can lead to you ignoring your own life.”

String theorist Michio Kaku: ‘Reaching out to aliens is a terrible idea’ | The Guardian

Big Lies vs. Big Lawsuits: Why Dominion Voting is suing Fox News and a host of Trump allies | Fortune

Behind the Scenes of Product-Led Growth | Chris Gaertner

• “A successful product-led strategy centers around creating as much value for customers in the shortest amount of time. As opposed to a traditional GTM motion where sales leads and product building follows, PLG starts with a product that solves a real pain point in a way that customers feel inclined to “sell it” to colleagues, friends, and even the internet. However, this doesn’t happen overnight — there are critical steps to building a PLG engine that I’ve summarized into 4 high-level steps:
  1) Commit to being product-led
  2) Know and understand the customer
  3) Maximize independent adoption
  4) Expand and monetize”

Modern GTM Will Break The CRM | John Tan

Podcasts

Eros, Self-Awareness, and Being a Good Partner — with Esther Pere‪l‬ | The Prof G Show with Scott Galloway

• “Esther Perel is a psychotherapist and one of the leading voices on modern relationships. She discusses the challenges the pandemic has posed on our relationships, the importance of serendipitous moments, and why self-awareness is so important. Esther also shares how co-founders can overcome the various pain points they’ve experienced throughout the past year and parenting tips to ensure your children grow up to be great partners.”

How Software Ate Finance — with Martin Chave‪z‬ | Prof G Show with Scott Galloway

• “Marty Chavez, a senior advisor to Sixth Street Partners and the former CIO and CFO of Goldman Sachs, shares his ideas around regulating big tech like big banks, and discusses the trends playing out in our financial ecosystem. Marty breaks down the crypto space, fintech, and what’s at stake when the meme stocks surge.”

Stoicism and Celebrating Success ft. Ryan Holida‪y‬ | Prof G Show with Scott Galloway

• “Ryan Holiday is a media strategist and the author of ten books including, The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy, The Daily Stoic, Conspiracy, and Stillness is the Key. He joins Scott to discuss how the four virtues of stoicism (courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom) are integrated into everyday life. Ryan also shares what stoicism has taught him about fatherhood.”

Is Laziness Real? | Freakonomics’ No Stupid Questions

Is Empathy in Fact Immoral? | Freakonomics’ No Stupid Questions

How to Fix the Hot Mess of U.S. Healthcare | Freakonomics

• “Medicine has evolved from a calling into an industry, adept at dispensing procedures and pills (and gigantic bills), but less good at actual health. Most reformers call for big, bold action.”
• See also: The 1% Steps for Healthcare Reform project

Can I Ask You a Ridiculously Personal Question? | Freakonomics

• “Most of us are are afraid to ask sensitive questions about money, sex, politics, etc. New research shows this fear is largely unfounded. Time for some interesting conversations!”
• No better way to break the ice IMO…

Revitalize | TED Radio Hour

• “After an exhausting year for everyone, how can we bring what’s been dormant back to life? This hour, TED speakers explore ways to revitalize our minds, bodies, buildings — and even populations. Guests include psychologist Guy Winch, visual artist Amanda Williams, biophysicist Andrew Pelling, and writer Wajahat Ali.”

Through the Looking Glass | TED Radio Hour

• “Our senses can only take us so far in understanding the world. But with the right tools, we can dig deeper. This hour, TED speakers take us through the looking glass, where we explore new frontiers. Guests include astrophysicist Emily Levesque, wildlife filmmaker Ariel Waldman, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapist Rick Doblin, and science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders.”

Useful Delusion‪s‬ | Hidden Brain

• “The discussion revolves around Shankar’s latest book, Useful Delusions, and how self-deceptions can bind together marriages, communities, and even entire nations.”

Musique

If you’ve made it this far, DM me on your channel of choice for a special perk…

Rome | Dojo Cuts

• light+simple funk vibe with some sultry vocals

Sexy Weekend | Scoundrels

• Smile-inducing soft rock jam

Beacon | Matt Duncan

• Golden hour driving on Sunset Boulevard

Whistleman | Bedouin

• Jungle + tiki + dance

Take Control | Jean Tonique

• smooth and percussive; for bedroom fun.