My Content List #31 | Wed 7/14/21

Opening Rant: Fractal Problems, Narrative Reflex, Reverence for Rockstars

First, a quick thanks for all the commentary on CL#30 Observations — Angels vs. Apples. I’ve never received more responses to a post… Perhaps the most incisive comment: “in LA your greatest currency is your looks, but in NYC it’s your pedigree.”

It’s all intriguing to noodle on, to gather your perspectives- that’s why I do this! It means the world to me that you’re here, reading, indulging me and my psycho-social + technophilic ranting…

And I’m not changing my M.O. anytime soon, so thanks in advance. And apologies for any typos.

Also of note, I received a question about whether this is a list of every article I skim in between posts / if I’m just pasting all seemingly-highbrowed content I encounter…

I hope this doesn’t come across in any way as conceited, but you’ll just have to trust me when I say: these articles and podcasts are no more than 50% of my content consumption… in most cases closer to 1/4th of the total. I suppose I have a sizable appetite, but this is a curated list. I’ve included each piece for a reason; I manage the distillation so you don’t have to. All this is aligned with the mission statement I’ve had since CL#1, way back in 2019:

Find content that will help me (i.e. us) understand, analyze, perform, and holistically benefit tomorrow and into the future — not just today.

… So here’s (yet) another assemblage of musings to get us rolling.

I. Fractal Problems / Fractal Thinking

Fractals are infinitely-repeating geometric arrangements (or numerical sequences) in which similar patterns recur at both progressively smaller and larger scales.

If you’re unfamiliar, below are a few animated fractals so you can get a sense…

Pretty trippy, right? When static, you think you’ve got a sense of everything in within the frames… but when zooming in (or out), the infinite patterned intricacies are revealed.

If you’re a regular reader, you know I’m a fanboy of mental models. But I’d never heard of the concept of “fractal problems” until listening to a recent podcast. In the words of Patrick O’Shaugnessey:

The best, most interesting problems are just fractal. The more you zoom in on them, you just keep finding problems to solve. You can zoom in, zoom out, doesn’t matter. There’s just constantly new levels of depth and detail with new kinds of problems as you scale.

I find this a brilliant metaphor. Most problems appear nuanced from whatever vantage you’re examining, but — for the right topics — the granularity becomes endless as one delves ever deeper. This is the ol’ “seeing the forest through the trees” paradigm, reworked: within each “tree” is a “forest” unto itself, and so on.

I hesitate to use Amazon as an example given its ubiquity, but what you may not know is that the company’s entire mission can be distilled into three (simple) Bezos-crafted goals:

1. More selection
2. More convenience
3. Lower prices

These are the epitome of fractal problems: each implicates near-limitless technological/logistical undertakings, zooming inwards. And the same can be said about the subcomponent problems interconnected therein.

“Scaling a startup”, which is what O’Shaughnessey was referencing in the quote above, is another prime example. Your value prop can be managing data service requests for enterprise customers seeking GDPR compliance (like my friends at Transcend), or handling predictive refilling for household staples like coffee (see Bottomless), or something else entirely… these are almost always fractal problems. And the best founders and business minds — Bezos, Gates, Buffet, Musk, Jobs — can focus on both the intricate and the big-picture (while, surely, some leaders specialize in one or the other).

But this isn’t just a business-centric paradigm…

Learning an instrument is a fractal problem.

Eating more healthily is a fractal problem.

Having a successful career is a fractal problem.

Building a relationship (romantic or otherwise), or family is a fractal problem.

Improving your habits is a fractal problem.

… Living a “good” life is — you guessed it — a fractal problem.

This hearkens back to what we’ve covered before with respect to the Dunning-Krueger Effect and “ascending Mount Stupid.” Sometimes it’s impossible to appreciate the layers behind a goal until you take action and get your hands dirty.

Fractal thinking — knowing when/how to zoom in and out — can help us address fractal problems. But that’s obviously easier said than done… Stated colloquially, there are levels to this shit!

II. “Narrative Reflex” & The Power of Self-Talk

Another morsel from Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (which, again, I *highly* recommend for anyone interested in psychology)…

Over the course of our lives, we talk to ourselves more than anyone else.

Yet most of us underestimate the impact (and frequency) of this self-talk. Our inner voices can serve as our biggest believers or our harshest critics; our solace or our hamartia.

Baby Achilles getting dipped in the River Styx, held by his heel… which wound up being where a poison-tipped arrow pierced his impervious skin, killing him. Hence, Achilles’ heel is his hamartia — his fatal flaw that caused his demise.

In my tour of duty as an investment banker — when I likely (/almost definitely) had DSM-diagnosable levels of situation-induced depression and anxiety — I recall how horrifying it was when my trusty inner voice turned on me.

Normally that voice is my advocate, my source of encouragement even in trying times, but I started experiencing spiraling negative thoughts. “This is all your fault… you suck at this… you’re wasting your life… you’re not worthy of anything… you deserve these feelings…this will never get better…”

It can get out of control quickly, because marginal thoughts (and actions) compound over time. That’s how compounding works; it happens gradually, then all at once! It took some deliberate cognitive rewiring — not to mention getting the HELL out of that gig — to get myself back to normal, plus a lot of help from my close-others.

The next time you catch yourself critically self-reflecting, I implore you to do your best to pause and reframe.

Perhaps the most captivating part of this inner voice (and of human nature, generally) is our ability to force-fit narratives to our life happenings. [Yes, I’ve mentioned this briefly in CL#28] For better or worse, we can rationalize damn near everything to ourselves — any course-charting, any decision, any utterance or action.

That’s both a feature and a bug of the human mind, because sometimes that “narrative reflex” can turn on us. This is yet ANOTHER cognitive bias, our tendency to ascribe meaning and discern patterns/narratives where there shouldn’t be any. Conspiracy theories are one of many societal byproducts of this mental tendency.

In college (and still today), I loved nerding out on abnormal psychology — I figured learning how/why the brain malfunctions can help us glean real insight about how it should operate properly. These were some of my favorite classes I’ve taken to date. To get a sense of how our narrative reflex can f**k us up, consider the Aberrant Salience Hypothesis of psychosis, namely schizophrenia. Let me explain…

• A normal brain secretes dopamine as we observe events deemed significant or otherwise “salient.” The mechanism for this is complex, and you probably know already that dopamine is involved in other things (like pleasure, drugs, etc.). Simplistically speaking, though, when you observe something new/noteworthy/interesting (a fact, a person, a topic, something scenic, etc.), dopamine is secreted. That tells the rest of your brain: HEY SOMETHING’S HAPPENING, PAY ATTENTION! (Not in a fight-or-flight way, mind you. That’s adrenaline.)
• You’ve probably witnessed (or heard of) the delusional beliefs that those who suffer from schizophrenia endure. They make narrative leaps that seem(/are) nonsensical. This flickering streetlight is Jesus trying to communicate with me in Morse code … Or, that sequence of numbers is the coordinate location of my long-lost brother who needs to be rescued… It can get scary.
• The Aberrant Salience Theory goes like this: schizophrenics suffer from those sorts of delusions because their dopamine system is out of whack. Due to something funky in that person’s brain chemistry (their genetics or their environment/behaviors), the neurotransmitter’s secreted irregularly, without pattern or warning… so their brain’s getting the PAY ATTENTION signal from a bunch of random occurrences, and the narrative reflex is stuck trying to make sense of it all. Too many signals of (aberrant) salience + an ingrained, inevitable narrative reflex = seriously jumbled thoughts/beliefs

Sadly, dopamine is not the only neurotransmitter implicated in schizophrenia, so this isn’t as simple to fix as you’d think. I share this not to elicit fear, but to illustrate the potency of our narrative reflex. (For more on schizophrenia, I’d recommend reading Hidden Valley Road which recounts the shockingly true story of a family of twelve children, of which six (!!) had schizophrenia. The book digs into the disease’s etiology as well.)

It’s perfectly healthy to question whether we’re reliable self-narrators. That’s why we’re wired to be social creatures — so we can sense-check our own beliefs+assumptions with peers, to triangulate a sense of “true” reality between our own and others’ perspectives.

In a recent conversation on this topic with a friend, we acknowledged the reality of the following paradox:

• There is “good crazy” and “bad crazy” in this world.
• Everyone is one of the two. Sometimes both, at different times.
• It’s virtually impossible judge for yourself which one you are.

That’s life. (- Sinatra)

III. Reverence for Rockstars

In my perpetual state of questioning everything, I recently asked myself why do I, and others, revere rockstars so ardently? I credit this exceedingly random inquiry to my recent completion of Daisy Jones and the Six, which was AMAZING.

Note I’m mostly not talking about today’s popstars. Hop on for a magic carpet ride, and let’s go back a few decades…

I’m talking Mick Jagger strutting sultrily around stage, practically as vibrant in his 70s as he was in his 20s. I mean, c’mon — he and the Stones have been on, what, 5 “Farewell Tour”s over the years… they literally can’t get the music out of their systems.

I’m talking Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul Jones rocking your socks off — or, in ‘70s-speak, “getting the Led out.” Just dripping with voltage, raw emotion emanating from every note.

I’m talking Bowie, Neil Young, John, Paul, George, and Ringo, Kurt Cobain, Elton, Hendrix, The Dead, The Eagles, Bill Withers, The Doors, Sting, Clapton, Pink Floyd… hell, even Metallica!

Y’all know I love John Mayer, and there are a few other contemporary folks who definitely register highly on my rockstar Richter scale; from Harry Styles to Jack Johnson, Kings of Leon to Foo Fighters… Ah, I could go on, but I’ll resist…

These folks are awesome, in the purest sense of the word.

They ooze talent, and they’re doing exactly what they were put on this earth to do. Just for a second, imagine Prince doing literally anything else besides rock and roll; the dude’s was probably never even close to sitting behind a desk. Neither Stevie Nicks nor Janis Joplin were ever going to record and fill your prescriptions (well, actually, they probably had a guy…but you know what I mean.)

On creativity — a rockstar’s genius lies not in their mastery of musical theory, but in their insight to know when to bend (and break) the rules. Why? Because it sounds cool, damnit!

That irreverence transcends the music and embodies the archetypal “rockstar persona” as well. They don’t care if you don’t “get” them. In their world, it’s come as you are… take it easy… yet at the same time, take it to the limit!

Yet, they weren’t just born and instantly anointed rock gods. They had to toil ENDLESSLY at their craft, refine their sound, try (and fail) a hell of a lot before they made it.

Then when you experience them perform, onstage, you know there’s nothing that makes them happier. It’s spellbinding. You’d think there’s no greater pleasure in life than having your lyrics or melody belted back at you onstage, by thousands of onlooking fans… and maybe there really isn’t any greater pleasure. This is a rockstar’s life’s work on display, and people are paying to see it performed, deriving meaning from it, connecting to it. They’re living the music. Literal and figurative resonance. Thriving betwixt structure and improvisation.

And through it all, rockstars appear to be authentically themselves. Or, at least questing for authenticity — exposing their vulnerabilities thru melodies and lyrics along the way. They inspire and influence, proverbially standing on other’s shoulders as each concocts a historically-rooted yet “true” and innovative sound.

Behind the curtain and IRL, they’re just as fallible as the rest of us. Rockstars are humans, too. We can pedestalize them and accept them for who they are, flaws and all. How’s that for dynamic range?

I admire the hell out of all that — authenticity, grit, ingenuity, (the right kind of) irreverence, empathy, striving to find a “calling” (even if that’s a farce). Rockstars embody those things, and I respect ’em for it.

Here’s the catch: rockstars don’t just make rock and roll music. Those qualities can be tapped any time, by any of us. You can rock out getting your PHD in macroeconomics, as an M&A lawyer, a chef, an army lieutenant, a data scientist… I’ll spare you the sustained cheesy-ness. You get the point.

CANNOT WAIT for this new John Mayer album to drop (on Fri 7/16!)

With that, please continue onwards to Content List #31. Lots of stimulating pieces — from the social media stock market to the dark side of fitness culture; Roblox to Lil Dicky; and much, much more.

Until next time!

Have 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; I’ll live.

My Content List #31 | Wed 7/14/21

Articles

The Dark, Democratizing Power of the Social-Media Stock Market | The New Yorker

• “In the twenty-tens, social-media companies became some of the most valuable businesses in the world. But much of that value was built off unpaid labor, as users spent billions of hours crafting posts, shooting photos, and making videos. One might look at BitClout’s creator economy as a way of democratizing social-media platforms and sharing profits more equitably with artists, comedians, and provocateurs — the people who make social media an interesting place to be. After all, where would Twitter, Reddit, or TikTok be without the people who supply them with content? A site like BitClout is simultaneously empowering and dark. It collapses everything — art, humor, personhood — into money, laying bare just who, and what, we are willing to pay for.”
• Related: Everyone Is An Investor | Digital Native

Advice to Grads: Be Warriors, Not Wokesters | Prof Scott Galloway

• “My bromide: Be warriors, not wokesters. Be mentally and physically … warriors. Lift heavy weights and run long distances, in the gym and in your mind. Many tasks you’ll be asked to perform early in your career will be tedious. Don’t do what you are asked to do, but what you are capable of doing. Think of it as boot camp before being sent to battle, as there are millions of other warriors fighting to win the same regions of prosperity. Get strong, really strong. You should be able to walk into a room and believe you could overpower, outrun, or outlast every person in the room.”

From free meatballs to forced jabs: How countries are pushing COVID shots as the vaccination curve flattens | Fortune

• “The hard-nosed dictum of “Get vaccinated or lose your job” has been accompanied by a host of more benign incentives used by Russian officials and companies to push up low vaccination rates, including raffles for free cars, snowmobiles, and all-expenses-paid trips.
• In Romania, where distrust of government authorities has reportedly stalled vaccine uptake, local officials have offered free meatballs in return for jabs, and staged vaccinations at the castle believed to have inspired Dracula.
• In Greece, the incentive on offer is a 150 euro ($177) digital debit card called a “freedom pass,” which will be given to every person between the ages of 18 and 25 who gets vaccinated. The app-based cash card, which will be valid from this week through the end of the year, will be usable for travel and cultural activities.”

Lil Nas X Is Gen Z’s Defining Icon | Digital Native

• Not totally my taste but gotta say it … rockstar!
• “Lil Nas X is one of the first digitally-native superstars. He’s seven months younger than Google. When Facebook launched, he was four. When the iPhone came out, he was eight. He came of age online, fluent in digital culture. There’s a reason that Gen Z’s defining personalities are musicians: Lil Nas X, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo. Music is set up for the velocity of creation and the ethos of authenticity of the digitally-native generation. More volume of content, and more relatable content.
• Lil Nas X, as a musician, is built for Gen Z fame: he’s relatable; he’s vulnerable; he’s constantly, incessantly putting out content. He’s always had ambition — the “X” in Lil Nas X represents 10, the number of years he expected to elapse before he achieved global fame — and that ambition resonates with his generation. He used the internet and his own savvy to go from a public housing project in Atlanta to stardom.”

A day in the life of a flavour inventor | BBC

• “In her current job, the act of making a flavour usually begins with an idea provided by a client company — a black truffle flavour for a salad dressing, a peach for a vodka, a meaty taste for a meatless patty. The flavourist comes up with a first draft at their desk, then puts on a white coat and hits the lab bench, mixing oils, essences, extracts, and synthetic molecules. Wright, who is known for her pear flavours, can reel off the ingredients. There’s a bubblegum, almost banana-tasting molecule called isoamyl acetate, and another molecule called ethyl decadienoate, which has a strong pear taste but that can get a little acrylic.
• “Then there’s oils like davana oil, which have a really nice effect in pear. Davana’s sort of got an orchard taste, but if you put too much in it becomes plum like and too raisin-y, so you’ve got to kind of balance that. And then something like lavender’s really good in a pear. I love lavender anyway. I try to put lavender in most things,” she admits”

Why People Fall For Conspiracy Theories | FiveThirtyEight

• “In the context of modern conspiracy theories, social media plays a significant role in getting these theories in front of the people who might be susceptible to them. Conspiracy theories about the coronavirus vaccine are a clear example. Though social media sites have made attempts to crack down on anti-vaxx content in the last year or so, they flourished in the first place thanks to these sites’ algorithms. And as so many of us have spent more time at home — and online — during the pandemic, our environment has become awash with all kinds of conspiracy theories. Anyone with even the slightest tendency to this kind of thinking would have trouble dodging the rabbit holes.”

We All Have “Main-Character Energy” Now | The New Yorker

• “Over the past year, on the strength of that one TikTok video, which has more than three million views, the “main character” archetype has become part of Internet vocabulary, a sort of social-media update to the “Type A” personality. It describes any situation in which a person is making herself the center of attention, the crux of a particular narrative, as if cameras were trained on her and her alone. The term can be used appreciatively, acknowledging a form of self-care — putting yourself first — or as an accusation, a calling out of narcissism: a person dressing too extravagantly for a casual event, for example, is trying to be the main character. Main-character moments are those in which you feel ineffably in charge, as if the world were there for your personal satisfaction. As a TikToker put it recently, “Why does only buying the groceries I need for 2–3 days make me feel like the main character in an Italian summer memoir[?]” In the video, a woman carries a tote bag full of basil down a sunlit sidewalk, to a soundtrack from the lambent Italian-summer film “Call Me By Your Name.” “TikTok and social media has made it more attainable for you to write your own story,” Yasmine Sahid, a twenty-four-year-old actor and TikTok creator who began making her own main-character videos last August, told me. “You can kind of cast yourself in these mini-movies.”

For the music industry, cryptocurrency will be as disruptive as MTV | Fast Company

• “Where fans have always been on the floor of the arena looking up at the artist, with crypto, for the first time ever, fans and performers earn together. Fans are holders of a token demonstrating their super fandom and can use that token as an access pass to exclusive content, NFTs, experiences, and communities of their favorite artists. Artists can offer goods and services in exchange for their own currency, and both fans and creators can participate in the growth and success of this economy. Every day with Rally, I work with creators to experiment with seemingly endless fan benefits. Rally has collaborated with Portugal The Man, who are looking to re-invent the fan club with crypto, Beyoncé’s Grammy Award winning producer !llmind, who is collaborating on new music with fans, and DJ Wax Motif, who will let you hang with him at a music festival.”

Half of the pandemic’s unemployment money may have been stolen | Axios

• “The big picture: Before the pandemic, unemployment claims were relatively rare, and generally lasted for such short amounts of time that international criminal syndicates didn’t view them as a lucrative target.
• After unemployment insurance became the primary vehicle by which the U.S. government tried to keep the economy afloat, however, all that changed.
• Unemployment became where the big money was — and was also being run by bureaucrats who weren’t as quick to crack down on criminals as private companies normally are.
• Unemployment fraud is now offered on the dark web on a software-as-a-service basis, much like ransomware.”

Faces are the Next Target for Fraudsters | WSJ

• “In the past year, thousands of people in the U.S. have tried to trick facial identification verification to fraudulently claim unemployment benefits from state workforce agencies, according to identity verification firm ID.me Inc. The company, which uses facial-recognition software to help verify individuals on behalf of 26 U.S. states, says that between June 2020 and January 2021 it found more than 80,000 attempts to fool the selfie step in government ID matchups among the agencies it worked with. That included people wearing special masks, using deepfakes — lifelike images generated by AI — or holding up images or videos of other people, says ID.me Chief Executive Blake Hall.”

Does Tech Need a New Narrative? | The New Yorker

• “Silicon Valley is a future-oriented place. In their early phases, startups often look implausible (home rentals), minor (online payments), frivolous (social media), or risky (ride-hailing). A well-crafted narrative about innovative underdogs and counterintuitive but inevitable success was legitimizing. The role played by venture capital itself rarely figured: widespread adoption was seen as a reflection of merit, rather than a function of a funding model that used cash reserves to create new monopolies. By the mid-twenty-tens, Andreessen Horowitz’s marketing strategy had evolved into something like mythology. As late as 2014, Wired was still referring to Andreessen, then forty-two years old, as a “wunderkind.”

The Big Ambition of Lil Dicky | GQ

• “Burd is an extremely affable person, which can obscure the fact that this rigor extends to all aspects of his life. When he makes music, he’s not enjoying himself at late-night studio sessions. “I wake up at 8:30 a.m.,” he says. “I treat it like school. I’ve never even written a lyric past sundown.” He has a girlfriend now, his first in seven years, but when he was single, he would make sure to schedule a date per week. “I’m at the age where if I can’t envision a real future then it’s a total waste of time,” he says. “When you go on every first date and you’re thinking, Is this my wife? That’s a tough way to be.”
• Much has been made of middle class millennials’ obsession with productivity and ambition, and Burd might as well be the poster child for this affliction. “Every moment I’m like, how can I optimize this?” he tells me. “How can I maximize my happiness? How can I maximize the potential of this cut? How can I maximize this afternoon? How can I maximize my talent?”

Roblox, explained | The Verge

• “There’s not a single Roblox experience that you can enter in the way you can hop into a world of vanilla Minecraft and immediately start building houses and crafting tools.
• Think of Roblox instead like an app store. The “storefront” recommends games for you to play, and you can also search through the games available or browse through different categories and genres. A lot of players also share games among themselves or find things recommended online by creators and YouTubers.
• Because there’s so much to choose from, it can be overwhelming at the start. But since it’s so easy to jump into a game, you’ll probably be able to find something fun just by exploring.”

Private Equity’s Mid-Life Crisis | HBR

• “The current PE approach is to treat the businesses in a firm’s portfolio as a bunch of isolated, individual investments, and to focus on how the stand-alone performance of each one can be improved over time. Of course, this approach is about diversifying risk, and it is how PE investors create value vertically. At the top are PE owners, which drive the improved performance of their portfolio businesses (in the middle) via strategic, operational, or management changes. At the bottom, bolt-on acquisitions are absorbed into those portfolio businesses to extract more value.
• Conversely, we believe the next frontier of value creation is to design and manage PE portfolios as a business ecosystem. In this approach, which is largely unexploited, a PE firm orchestrates a network of relationships between some of its portfolio companies, linking previously unrelated goods and services across industries, and helping the companies unlock new value in each other. As a basic example, two businesses could coordinate the procurement of common services (such as employee health insurance) to reduce costs. The incremental value derived from leveraging the portfolio this way complements vertical value very well — the horizontal links between companies give PE firms more, and novel, options for increasing their portfolio’s worth.”

Why The Two-Party System Is Effing Up U.S. Democracy | FiveThirtyEight

• “This pattern may have something to do with the shifting politics of coalition formation in proportional democracies, where few political enemies are ever permanent (e.g., the unlikely new governing coalition in Israel). This also echoes something social psychologists have found in running experiments on group behavior: Breaking people into three groups instead of two leads to less animosity. Something, in other words, appears to be unique about the binary condition, or in this case, the two-party system, that triggers the kind of good-vs-evil, dark-vs-light, us-against-them thinking that is particularly pronounced in the U.S.”

Reality Privilege and Living Your Life Online | Digital Native

• “It’s easy to read about futuristic tech concepts like the metaverse (often in this newsletter) and to wring your hands. Our online lives are still relatively new; even 10 years ago, only 1 in 3 Americans owned a smartphone. Virtual worlds, immersive online experiences, digital economies — these concepts are new and different and often uncomfortable. Though I’m a devoted tech optimistic, even I occasionally find it all a little dystopian.
• But the concept of Reality Privilege resonates. Not everyone has the chance to live in Manhattan. Not everyone is able to visit the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu. As our online lives become richer and more vibrant — and as technology improves — digital experiences will at least come close to capturing (and, in some cases, will likely surpass) those offline experiences.”

The Billionaire Playbook: How Sports Owners Use Their Teams to Avoid Millions in Taxes | ProPublica

• Yet another reason to own a team…

Founder Of The RealReal Julie Wainwright Proves Unicorns Aren’t Just For Young Tech Bros | Forbes

• “The seeds for The RealReal were planted early on in Wainwright’s life: Both of her parents were artists who believed in “upcycling” and rescuing clothes and household decor from the trash bin.
• “They really loved beautiful things. And that didn’t necessarily mean beautiful new things,” Wainwright says. “My mother would go to people’s homes and, if for example they had a nice rug, she’d say, ‘When you’re ready to sell it, I’ll buy it from you.’”
• This background, paired with time spent in boutiques around San Francisco and watching customers beeline for the “consignment” section in these posh stores, gave Wainwright the idea for the company. She started The RealReal in 2011, working from her home in Marin County. Two years later, she’d expanded operations into a warehouse in Sausalito; by 2015, Forbes estimated The RealReal was worth $300 million, more than Pets.com ever was. In 2019, Wainwright took the company public, and today, its market cap is well over $1 billion.”

This Is the Summer the Youth Own New York | NYTimes

Cityblock Health | Not Boring

• “Find and Engage. Once Cityblock finds its members and gets them to opt-in, it needs to keep them engaged, just like any tech company (or newsletter). Health plans typically have single-digit engagement after a year. Cityblock has 70% engagement at a year
• Intervene. The name of the game in this model is to avoid expensive hospitalizations. Data from its first cohort suggests that Cityblock members have 20% fewer hospitalizations. That’s huge from both a medical and financial perspective.
• Brand and Experience. To keep people engaged and interacting with Cityblock over time, and to get them to vouch for Cityblock with other hard-to-reach and mistrustful target members, it needs to create a positive experience for its members. The results there are eye-popping. Cityblock’s NPS is consistently in the high-80s and low-90s. That’s absurd for any company — Apple’s NPS is in the 70s — particularly absurd for a healthcare company, and particularlyparticularly absurd when you consider most members’ starting feelings towards healthcare.”

Well-Behaved Bubbles Often Make History | Future by a16z

• “The dynamics of a bubble show up in other places, too. In politics, many successful movements go through a long period of obscurity or even persecution, and surviving these tends to make organizations almost superhumanly tough. The party that rules China today is descended from the organization that survived the Long March. Someone who is motivated enough to spend over a year retreating more than five thousand miles through difficult terrain is probably quite committed to the cause, and under different circumstances will likely be loyal. In Eastern Europe, the successors to communist governments were often people who had survived persecution and imprisonment from those same governments. In a U.S. context, political tendencies like neoconservatism and modern monetary theory have (under much more pleasant circumstances!) spent long periods out of power, biding their time and refining their ideas.”

Value Propositions for Mental Health Tech: All Roads Lead Back to the Payor | Gabe Strauss

When does sharing become oversharing? | The Verge

• “The intimacy of social media can lead us to share a lot, and being vulnerable in those spaces can give us a rare sense of power. The #MeToo movement brought on a flood of women disclosing their experiences with sexual violence and other issues, leading to increased accountability for perpetrators, a deeper sense of community for survivors, and greater education around consent. Yet at other times, sharing can have unexpected negative consequences, like shaming, security issues, or professional and personal conflict. But if the whole point is to share something, how should we think about the choice of what to share and what not to share?”

Amazon Primed Andy Jassy to Be CEO. Can He Keep What Jeff Bezos Built? | WSJ

• “Though some former employees say Mr. Jassy is more even-keeled with employees than Mr. Bezos — who has been known to explode in meetings if an executive seems ill prepared — they also say he is at least as intense and competitive. And while Mr. Bezos for the past several years has largely governed with a hands-off approach, as The Wall Street Journal reported in February, Mr. Jassy is known for digging into the minutiae of his division, Amazon Web Services, sometimes to a degree that baffled his underlings, according to former employees. He did everything from pitching potential customers and guiding technical changes to choosing the music at company events and editing press releases. It was more difficult to reserve a spot on Mr. Jassy’s calendar than it was with any other top executive reporting to Mr. Bezos, according to former senior Amazon executives.”

The Dark Side of Fitness Culture | The Atlantic

• “The only certain aspect of the past 15 or so months is that everyone’s experience has been different. The pandemic sharpened inequities in capital, but also safety. It clarified how fragile social-support networks can be, how disproportionately mothers bear the brunt of schools and child care shutting down, how the ability to take optimal care of our bodies is a privilege not everyone has. And yet somehow one of the dominant messages of the current moment, as many Americans are reentering the world, isn’t that society needs to change, but that our bodies do. The pandemic, one New York Times article from March scolded, is “a wake-up call for personal health.” Quarantine weight gain, according to WebMD, is “not a joking matter.” Gwyneth Paltrow popped up in March confessing that she’d gained 14 pounds in quarantine by indulging in bread and alcohol — not to be relatable, but to help hawk a diet book dedicated to “intuitive fasting.””

The Amazon that Customers Don’t See | NYTimes

• “With the high churn, multiple current and former Amazon executives fear there simply will not be enough workers. In the more remote towns where Amazon based its early U.S. operations, it burned through local labor pools and needed to bus people in.
• “Six to seven people who apply equals one person showing up and actually doing work,” Mr. Stroup explained. If Amazon is churning through its entire work force once or twice a year, he said, “You need to have eight, nine, 10 million people apply each year.” That’s about 5 percent of the entire American work force.”

What the Crypto Crowd Doesn’t Understand About Economics | Bloomberg

• “A second point, oft neglected in the crypto community, is that crypto prices won’t continue to go up forever at high rates. It doesn’t matter whether money supply deflation is built into a crypto system, or that new and valuable uses will be discovered each year. At some point the market will figure out the value of crypto and incorporate that information into a high level of price for those assets. From then on, expected rates of return will be — dare I say — normal”

More Startups Founders Are Tackling Addiction: Here’s Where The Money Is Going | Crunchbase

How to think about pleasure | Psyche

• “Perhaps the problem, as so often, lies with language. Pleasure occupies a prime position in a very crowded constellation. Nearby, you’ll find joy, delight, happiness, satisfaction and, perhaps a bit further on, ecstasy, euphoria, exaltation, bliss. Pleasure might just be stretched too thin, operating as a kind of catch-all for all the fine gradations of positive experience. (Plato thought so.) But, if asked what it is that makes an experience positive, I would be hard pressed not to fall back and say, well, it’s the experiences that give me pleasure.”

The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox | a16z

• “Now, there is a growing awareness of the long-term cost implications of cloud. As the cost of cloud starts to contribute significantly to the total cost of revenue (COR) or cost of goods sold (COGS), some companies have taken the dramatic step of “repatriating” the majority of workloads (as in the example of Dropbox) or in other cases adopting a hybrid approach (as with CrowdStrike and Zscaler). Those who have done this have reported significant cost savings: In 2017, Dropbox detailed in its S-1 a whopping $75M in cumulative savings over the two years prior to IPO due to their infrastructure optimization overhaul, the majority of which entailed repatriating workloads from public cloud.
• Yet most companies find it hard to justify moving workloads off the cloud given the sheer magnitude of such efforts, and quite frankly the dominant, somewhat singular, industry narrative that “cloud is great”. (It is, but we need to consider the broader impact, too.) Because when evaluated relative to the scale of potentially lost market capitalization — which we present in this post — the calculus changes. As growth (often) slows with scale, near term efficiency becomes an increasingly key determinant of value in public markets. The excess cost of cloud weighs heavily on market cap by driving lower profit margins.”

Summer of Soul Is an Electrifying Rebuttal to the Worship of Woodstock | Slate

• “The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, held on six consecutive Sundays throughout that summer, has not generally been spoken of in the same hushed tones as its more storied contemporary counterparts. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s new film Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) goes a long way toward redressing that. The doc shines an overdue spotlight on an enormously successful festival, which provided a powerful musical gathering place for the city’s Black and brown populations and offered a showcase for luminaries like Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, B.B. King, the Staple Singers, and Mahalia Jackson.”

Writing Can Help Us Heal from Trauma | HBR

• “These effects of writing as a tool for healing are well documented. James Pennebaker, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, studied the impact of a certain kind of writing on mental health in 1986. Since then, over 200 research studies have reported that “emotional writing” can improve people’s physical and emotional health. In classic studies, subjects who wrote about personal upheavals for 15 minutes a day over three or four days visited doctors for health concerns less frequently and reported greater psychological well-being. According to a 2019 study, a six-week writing intervention increases resilience, and decreases depressive symptoms, perceived stress, and rumination among those reporting trauma in the past year. Thirty-five percent of the participants who began the program with indicators of likely clinical depression ended the program no longer meeting this criterion.”

‘The Silicon Valley of turf’: how the UK’s pursuit of the perfect pitch changed football | The Guardian

• “It was a big moment for English football talent when Real Madrid poached Paul Burgess from Arsenal in 2009. After starting his career at Blackpool FC, Burgess had arrived at the north London club in 1999, rising to prominence at the age of just 21. He excelled on the European stage during Arsenal’s Champions League campaigns in the early 2000s, and shone at Euro 2004 in Portugal. Four years later, he put in another commanding performance at the European Championships. Not long after that, Real Madrid, the most prestigious club in world football, made their sensational transfer swoop.
• If you don’t remember any of this, it’s not because Burgess was a flop at Madrid. It’s because he was Arsenal’s head groundsman.”

The Health Benefits of Coffee | NYTimes

• “In fact, in numerous studies conducted throughout the world, consuming four or five eight-ounce cups of coffee (or about 400 milligrams of caffeine) a day has been associated with reduced death rates. In a study of more than 200,000 participants followed for up to 30 years, those who drank three to five cups of coffee a day, with or without caffeine, were 15 percent less likely to die early from all causes than were people who shunned coffee. Perhaps most dramatic was a 50 percent reduction in the risk of suicide among both men and women who were moderate coffee drinkers, perhaps by boosting production of brain chemicals that have antidepressant effects.”

Michael, Dwight and Andy: the Three Aesthetics of the Creative Class | Alex Danco

• “To recap, we have three groups of people with distinct aesthetics here. Their aesthetic reflects what performance they’re putting on: how they present themselves to their peers, and how to they show off and jockey for status:
• Dwights convey, through their performance: I am winning.
• Michaels convey, through their performance: I am serious.
• Andys convey, through their performance: I am at ease.
• These performative aesthetics aren’t really a choice. They are rooted in our personalities, and we learn them in childhood and adolescence. We watch our parents interact with each other and their friends, and then practice over and over again with our own peers as we grow up. It becomes a skill set we know cold, from practicing it 1,000 times over, and as we reach adulthood, we’re ready to put it to work in competitive conversation.

We’re Learning the Wrong Lessons From the World’s Happiest Countries | The Atlantic

• “The happiness rankings are a useful countervailing force in a world that tends to take GDP as a proxy for a country’s success, and in the past five years, some governments have launched initiatives dedicated to their citizens’ life satisfaction: The United Kingdom appointed a minister for loneliness, the United Arab Emirates appointed a minister of happiness, and New Zealand reviewed its national budget based on how government spending would affect people’s well-being.
• For the people who come up with policies and run countries, the lessons of the report are not shocking: People are more satisfied with their lives when they have a comfortable standard of living, a supportive social network, good health, the latitude to choose their course in life, and a government they trust. The highest echelon of happy countries also tends to have universal health care, ample paid vacation time, and affordable child care.”

The Police Called It an Accident. She Turned to 1–800-Autopsy. | NYTimes

• “Vidal Herrera, owner of 1–800-Autopsy, is a towering man who hands out red baseball caps that read, “Make ‘Autopsies’ Great Again.” He operates his business out of an unmarked building not far from the California State University Los Angeles campus. It has a nondescript gated exterior, accessed through a long back alley. In a parking lot sits a van emblazoned with painted images of yellow crime-scene tape, a dead body under examination and the words “Private Autopsies,” “Medical Mal Practice” and “Wrongful Death Specialist.” On one end of the building, inside a bright and heavily ventilated examination room, two forensic doctors conduct autopsies day and night.
• “Suspicion lies at the heart of many of the calls that come in — a feeling that loved ones don’t have all the answers and don’t trust the ones they’ve been given. Along with a steady stream of police-related inquiries and general concerns over medical malpractice, this past year has brought scores of Covid-related cases to 1–800-Autopsy. It is among dozens of private-autopsy services that operate across the country in commercial buildings, laboratories and in the backs of funeral homes. Some cater to hospitals, medical examiner’s offices or legal firms, while others market to the general public. Some mobile autopsy services even come directly to their customers, carting along instruments and cleaning materials.”

What Will Become of the Pandemic Pets? | The New Yorker

• “Rowan calculates that there are approximately eighty million dogs in the U.S., a number that goes up by about a million every year. The number of strays is only about one per cent of the total. In 2019, before the pandemic, shelters took in four million dogs. More than half a million were euthanized. We used to have fewer dogs and kill a lot more of them. In 1973, when the dog population was less than half what it is today, seven million dogs were euthanized. 1973, as it happens, was a year of pet crisis. With New York City a turd minefield, the media took up the theme of overpopulation. “Thousands of unwanted pets roam the countryside, feeding on small farm animals and wildlife,” the Times reported. “They inhabit the empty lots of cities, coming out of abandoned buildings to pick through heaps of garbage. . . . Frightened residents, particularly in slum areas, report packs of wild dogs terrorizing their children.” The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Humane Society, and other groups responded by pushing harder for sterilization — a “planned parenthood for pets.” In 1970 in Los Angeles, for example, just ten per cent of licensed dogs were sterilized. By 1975, it was fifty per cent. Now that share is more than ninety-five per cent. Micky Niego, a behavior counsellor in Rockland County, helped transform the animal-adoption apparatus in New York City in the early eighties, as a kind of matchmaker. “The A.S.P.C.A. was a kill shelter,” she said. “They had the contract. It was the garbage can of New York City.” She facilitated adoptions by getting a clearer profile of dogs and of humans. She says that shelters have got much better at finding homes for dogs and at treating them humanely, but then again, she told me, “maybe there’s no hope for dogs, because look at what people do to their children and their wives.””

InsurTech: benchmarks and breakouts | Ferdi Sigona

• “The last year has seen — among so many other things — the very first InsurTech leaders go public: Lemonade and Root had their IPO last year. This year, Metromile and Clover Health followed with SPACs, Oscar Health with an IPO just last week, and Hippo is next in line. On this side of the pond, our portfolio company Zego became the UK’s very first InsurTech unicorn. Many of the assumptions behind these businesses are yet to be truly tested. Yet, successful outcomes already provide validation, and can serve as the first public benchmarks investors and founders will keep in mind.
• Whilst insurtech “tech stack” players can benchmark themselves against a myriad of already IPO’d software products, the only public insurance carriers up until Lemonade’s IPO had been around for a long time (the 12 that are in the Fortune 100 are on average 125 years old)! They have low revenue growth, are profitable, and hence typically trade on multiples of earnings forecasted for the next 12 months (i.e. price / NTM EPS) or book value (i.e. price / book value per share).”

Crypto’s Top V.C. Is Playing the Long Game | NYTimes Dealbook

• “There’s this myth that crypto founders want the Wild West. They’re really kind of desperate for regulators to say what the rules are. It takes so much time, money and resources — specialty resources — to figure out how to navigate the morass of agencies ranging from the C.F.T.C. to Treasury, let alone the regulators in 50 different states.
• S.E.C. Commissioner Hester Peirce has called for a regulatory sandbox, but I’m not sure that goes far enough because it only solves issues for projects that are clearly securities. What I would like to see is at a federal level in the U.S., a regulatory sandbox that has federal pre-emption. And in order to do that, you need legislation.”

The Downtown Office District Was Vulnerable. Even Before Covid. | NYTimes

The Bloody Bubble | The Ringer

• “Expanding the scope beyond Netflix reveals similar trends throughout the industry. Parrot Analytics — a media-tracking company that measures audience demand with a formula that accounts for streams, search-engine traffic, illegal downloads, and social media — said in April that the documentary genre as a whole had become the fastest-growing segment of the streaming industry, with the number of series growing 63 percent between January 2018 and March 2021. In data prepared for The Ringer in May, Parrot revealed that true crime was not only the biggest documentary subgenre, but that it was also growing faster than nearly any of the others. (Interest in sports documentaries, which make up the smallest portion of the documentary market per Parrot’s data, grew slightly faster, though mostly all of that increase could be attributed to the popularity of the Michael Jordan docuseries The Last Dance.)”

Buy, Borrow, Die: How Rich Americans Live Off Their Paper Wealth | WSJ

• “For borrowers, the calculation is clear: If an asset appreciates faster than the interest rate on the loan, they come out ahead. And under current law, investors and their heirs don’t pay income taxes unless their shares are sold. The assets may be subject to estate taxes, but heirs pay capital-gains taxes only when they sell and only on gains since the prior owner’s death. The more they can borrow, the longer they can hold appreciating assets. And the longer they hold, the bigger the tax savings.
• “Ordinary people don’t think about debt the way billionaires think about debt,” said Edward McCaffery, a University of Southern California law professor who says he coined the buy-borrow-die phrase. “Once you’re already rich, it’s simple, it’s easy. It’s just buy, borrow, die. These are planks of the law that have been in place for 100 years.”

People Are Making Out. Everywhere. | NYTimes

Curiosity Depends on What You Already Know | Nautilus

• “But boredom alone can’t fully explain curiosity. “The very old view is that curiosity and boredom are opposite ends of the same continuum,” Loewenstein says. The new view: bored is not to curious as hungry is to full or thirsty is slaked. Rather, boredom is “a signal from your brain that you’re not making good use of a part of the brain,” like the tingling of a foot you’ve sat on too long. Boredom reminds us that we need to exercise our minds, but there are antidotes to boredom besides curiosity — food or sex, for example. What’s more, curiosity strikes even when we’re not bored. In fact, we will readily give up things we want or enjoy in order to learn something new.”

Everything feels more expensive because it is | Vox

Older Americans Stockpiled a Record $35 Trillion. The Time Has Come to Give It Away. | WSJ

• “Baby boomers and older Americans have spent decades accumulating an enormous stockpile of money. At the end of this year’s first quarter, Americans age 70 and above had a net worth of nearly $35 trillion, according to Federal Reserve data. That amounts to 27% of all U.S. wealth, up from 20% three decades ago. Their wealth is equal to 157% of U.S. gross domestic product, more than double the proportion 30 years ago, federal data show.
• Now they have started parceling it out to their heirs and others, unleashing a torrent of economic activity including buying homes, starting businesses and giving to charity. And many recipients are guided by different priorities and politics than their givers.
• Older generations will hand down some $70 trillion between 2018 and 2042, according to research and consulting firm Cerulli Associates. Roughly $61 trillion will go to heirs — increasingly millennials and Generation Xers — with the balance going to philanthropy. The transfer will provide another display of the outsize economic power of baby boomers, who came of age during a wave of post-World War II prosperity and drove the economy through many stages of their lives.”

Instagram’s Evolution | Stratechery

• “But today I actually want to talk a bit more about video. And I want to start by saying we’re no longer a photo-sharing app or a square photo-sharing app. The number one reason that people say that they use Instagram in research is to be entertained. So people are looking to us for that. So actually, this past week in our internal all hands, we shared, or I shared, a lot about what we’re trying to do to lean into that trend — into entertainment and into video. Because let’s be honest: there’s some really serious competition right now. TikTok is huge, YouTube is even bigger, and there’s lots of other upstarts as well. And so people are looking to Instagram to be entertained, there’s stiff competition and there’s more to do, and we have to embrace that. And that means change.”

Pokémon Card Frenzy Is Making Collectors and Startups Rich | Bloomberg

• ““I kept them because I thought one day these might be worth something,” he said. “I was right.” A lot of twenty- and thirty-somethings are coming to a similar realization. Fueled by nostalgia, new ways to sell online and a surplus of free time during the pandemic, the value of certain Pokémon cards has skyrocketed in recent months. In 2020 overall trading card sales climbed a record 142% on EBay, and Pokémon led the pack, averaging five card sales a minute — more than even baseball cards. That momentum has continued into this year. EBay listings of Pokémon cards were up 1,046% in the first quarter. The new Pokémon gold rush has fueled a mini-explosion of entrepreneurial activity. Individual collectors like Shininger have been able to make a small killing selling cards online — even as Target Corp. suspended sales of packs after a rash of parking lot thefts. There’s been an influx of business to new platforms that help collectors unload their wares. And authentication services have received too many requests to keep up. One of them, the Certified Collectibles Group, sold a majority stake to Blackstone Group Inc. last week at a $500 million valuation.”

What’s happening around the future of eComm supply chain tech: Drivers, trends, and opportunities | Lerer Hippeau

Podcasts

David Sacks — How to Operate a SaaS Startup | Invest Like the Best

• “David Sacks, General Partner at Craft Ventures and founding COO of PayPal. During our conversation, we explore what differentiates Enterprise SaaS from DTC subscriptions, what makes for a magical product launch event, and what key growth metrics David uses to measure success. David has written extensively on his idea of operating cadence, and we explore how that applies to the various functions within an organization. As time goes on, I am more and more impressed at the talent that existed within the original PayPal mafia, and I couldn’t help but ask David to highlight the superpowers for a few of his early partners.”

Marc Andreessen — Making the Future | Invest Like the Best

• “Before co-founding the legendary venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, Marc was an early pioneer of the internet. At age 22, he built Mosaic, the first widely adopted web browser and the technology that underpinned Netscape Communications. Marc was an early proponent of cloud computing, social networks, and the software business model. In each case, Marc seemed to be well ahead of the crowd. During our conversation, we explore how software is making the world better, how slow sectors like education, healthcare, and housing are eating the economy, and Marc’s vision of the future for A16Z.”

Will Ahmed — Optimizing Human Performance | Invest Like the Best

• “Will Ahmed, founder of fitness wearable company WHOOP. What started as a business plan in 2011 has evolved into the 24/7 health-tracking device you’ll often see on athletes across professional sports. During our conversation, Will and I discuss how his own backstory ties into the founding of WHOOP, the key design decisions they made in the ultra-competitive wearables market, and how the company grew slowly before inflecting in recent years. Will shares awesome details on health tracking and what it might look like in the future as a preventative tool rather than simply a tracking tool.”

Howard Marks — Embracing the Psychology of Investing | Invest Like the Best

• “Howard Marks, co-founder of Oaktree Capital, a leading investment manager, and one of the world’s largest distressed debt investors. In our conversation, we discuss takeaways from the market selloff and rapid recovery in 2020, the importance of assessing both quantitative and qualitative factors in markets, and the benefits Howard has realized from a career of writing.”

Expedia & Zillow: Rich Barton | How I Built This

• “In the early 90s, Rich Barton arrived to work at Microsoft just as the world wide web was taking off. He wound up pitching Bill Gates on an idea that was transformative at the time: to let everyday travelers book their own flights and hotels by giving them online access to previously hidden reservation systems. Expedia launched from inside Microsoft but was so successful at transforming the travel industry that it was spun out into a public company with Rich as CEO. Then in 2005, Rich moved on to a new idea with some Expedia colleagues, co-founding Zillow as a way to “turn on all the lights” in another sprawling industry: real estate. When the site launched in 2006, so many people tried to look up their home-value “Zestimates” that the site crashed within hours. By 2020, pandemic-era interest in housing saw Zillow accessed almost 10 billion times.”

The Influence You Have | Hidden Brain

• “Think about the last time you asked someone for something. Maybe you were nervous or worried about what the person would think of you. Chances are that you didn’t stop to think about the pressure you were exerting on that person. This week, we revisit a favorite episode about a phenomenon known as “egocentric bias,” and look at how this bias can lead us astray.”

Nap Time for Everyone | Freakonomics

• “The benefits of sleep are by now well established, and yet many people don’t get enough. A new study suggests we should channel our inner toddler and get 30 minutes of shut-eye in the afternoon. But are we ready for a napping revolution?”

Do Dreams Actually Mean Anything? | Freakonomics’ No Stupid Questions

What’s So Gratifying About Gossip? | Freakonomics’ No Stupid Questions

Psychedelics with Sam Harris | The Prof G Show

• “Sam Harris joins the pod again to discuss psychedelics — including his experience with LSD and psilocybin — and shares his thoughts on who should and shouldn’t take them. He also explains how these drugs can provide you with a profound perspective on life, give you clarity, and help you hit the reset button.”

Powering The Alts Revolution with Leore Avidar, CEO of Alt ! | Wharton FinTech Podcast

• “Ryan Zauk sits down with Leore Avidar, CEO & Founder of Alt. Alt has created a marketplace for sports cards that authenticates its transactions & provides buyers with the peace of mind that the card they’re dropping thousands on is no fake!
• Leore himself is a card collector and trader fanatic, having been deep in this asset class for years. Leore is also the CEO of Lob, a direct mail marketing & address verification API company on the path to going public. (Pretty good track record)”

Amy Nauiokas, Anthemis CEO/Founder-Cultivating Change & Building Resiliency in the Financial System | Wharton FinTech Podcast

• “Miguel Armaza sits down with the fascinating Amy Nauiokas, Founder and CEO of Anthemis, a Venture Capital firm founded in 2008 that aims to cultivate change in the financial system by investing in, growing, and sustaining businesses committed to resiliency, transparency, access and equity. Some of their most notable investments include Carta, Betterment, Pipe, Rally Rd, Simple, and Backstage Capital.”

Billionaire Investor, Activist, & Educator Tim Draper — China, Bitcoin, and Free Societies | Wharton FinTech Podcast

Musique

Rise | Herb Alpert

• Smooth jazz+funk from 1979. Lovely in its own right but hits especially hard when you hear the part that Biggie sampled in Hypnotize

Simply Are | Papooz

• French groovin at its finest! Also you gotta check out their rendition of Ann Wants to Dance, live from a moving boat

Queen of California — Live at Crossroads Guitar Festival 2013 | John Mayer

• There are a litany of live Mayer performances that encapsulate the Reverence for Rockstars sentiment from above, but lately I’ve been feeling this one in particular
• [Also shameless plug for whatever’s on Mayer’s SOB ROCK album, which launches Friday 7/16!]