My Content List #32 | Fri 8/13/21
Opening Rant: Optimize=Compromise, Intuition & Action, Exploring/Expanding Consciousness, Emotion Contagion
[First time reading Content Lists? Feel free to check out where it all started…]
Ah, that August calmness. Well… relative calm. As always, thank you for stopping by!
I hope this finds you in a healthy, mentally lucid state, and that you’re able to take some time to recharge during this stretch. I’d venture that you’re more fatigued than you may realize; time to equilibrate’ll do the mind+body well.
Of note on my end, this is my final “official” summer. This is in all likelihood the last time I’ll be a student, so this instituted 3-month respite is a luxury I won’t have again. I remember a feeling when graduating college, just staring into (what then felt like an) endless abyss of workstuffs, year after year, decade after decade…
BUT it turns out the real world’s a lot more fulfilling than I thought: charting a career, building meaningful relationships, questing for “purpose.” It’s all pretty awesome. And as much as I’ll embrace this year with my classmates (whew, what a ride this’ll be…), I’m chomping at the bit to get back into the “real world.”
Another friendly reminder that the journey is the destination. Let’s get into it…
I. Optimize = Compromise
We’ve talked before about achieving dynamic equilibrium, about maximizing vs. satisficing, and many other conversations around the concept of optimizing. I believe that life is but a series of tradeoffs, and thriving (however defined) requires a constant triangulation across several variables.
Multiple variables… fitting them all together… sounds kind of like a regression, no? [“Yikes…” thought you, the reader. “Here comes another tenuous analogy; let’s see where he’s going here”]
The regression process involves deriving a “line of best fit” superimposed onto a scatterplot. That line, in crudest terms, minimizes the distance between each point and the line itself — the below graphic should clarify.
This is essentially an (oft-imperfect) optimization based on the info fed to the the regression algorithm. It also happens to be the elemental process of machine learning: utilizing a series of regressions to generate predictive power.
We’re complex creatures; ever-evolving constellations of attributes, interests, and preferences. So, naturally, some points in our constellation will fall farther from that arc of best-fit. Data scientists might call this an outlier, and if you want a “tighter” fit they’d advise you to pluck that proverbial point from your life’s scatterplot and re-run the regression.
We’re inherently resource constrained (time). Simply put — no human can fulfill all priorities, address all ambitions, sate all desires at ALL times… Sacrifices must be made; compromises reached.
Spreading oneself too thinly has become the de-facto norm among ambitious folks around my age, and I’m no different. I somehow find myself both scatterbrained with my current commitments and afflicted by FOMO when opportunities arise that I can’t delve into.
There’s no silver bullet resolution here, but the best I can come up with is striving to prioritize as clearly as possible / to “weight the variables” in our regression analogy. We can optimize much more effectively across ~1–4 things than 5-10+, at least at any one time.
C’est la vie: to optimize, one must compromise.
This also hearkens back to one of my first posts on the great generalist vs. specialist debate. I’m still in the Generalist camp, mind you, but even the most wide-ranging generalists find a way to prioritize. “Ruthless prioritization” is the phrasing Ray Dalio would use.
Best espoused by Charles Munger, Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the Generalist philosophy — visually represented — is a matrix of Venn diagrams. The interweaving of experiences and mental models is what Mr. Munger calls a “latticework” — a compendium of actionable strategies and evaluative lenses that spans many subject areas. His take (which I espouse) is that isolated experience is useful, but a real differentiator is building mental models through varied exposure, pushing the limits of one’s abilities and domains of competence.
This latticework method amalgamates key learnings from different situations we encountered in life, professionally and personally, with each becoming part of our problem-solving cache for the remaining journey.
Like compound interest, I believe this approach — coupled with prioritization — results in exponential enhancement of perspicacity and productivity.
II. On Intuition and Action, Forgiveness vs. Permission
In my PE gig, I had a love-hate relationship with one of my bosses. The guy was tough as hell to work for, but MAN did he crush it. After 3+ decades in industry, he’d seen it all and wasn’t shy when it came to imparting his wisdom (/critiquing everything that wasn’t up to his lofty standards.)
I got a lot of feedback from him over the years, but the tidbit that’s stuck with with me most is:
If you do 100% of what you’re asked, you’re doing — at most— 80% of your overall “job”.
Obviously the 80% figure depends on the hierarchy/culture of your workplace and how much experience you have. In my case, that advice came as I was rising up the ranks from analyst to associate (aka bottom rung to slightly-above-bottom rung), and with a new role came new responsibilities that weren’t always explicit.
In some jobs, there’s literally zero guidance from superiors whatsoever (entrepreneurship); in opposing cases, there almost no work that can be done unless you’re explicitly asked(/commanded) to do it (e.g. junior-level consultant, banker, etc.).
The most interesting cases, as usual, are somewhere in between.
Bridging explicit responsibilities and holistic job success requires experience-based inference — making predictions about what actions will be necessary to position yourself/your team/etc. more effectively, then taking the initiative yourself.
It’s generally accepted that our intuitive capabilities improve over time. Think back to elementary school: doing what you’re asked almost unequivocally will earn an A+ grade (… and, in some cases, kids might earn trophies just from showing up). In the “real world”, it’s not so easy.
There lies an anticipatory gap in actually knowing what predictive actions are, and building competence necessitates a mix of guesswork and pattern-matching. Trying something → seeing how it works out → learning from that (/not making the same mistake twice) → repeat is the best way to strengthen this cognitive muscle. That’ll help transition something from an “unknown unknown” to a “known unknown”, and eventually to a “known known.” (We covered these in CL#25, but a refresher’s below).
This is where permission vs. forgiveness comes into play.
- Damn near every startup job probably has “bias towards action” as a desired characteristic (vagueness aside). The paradigm of “move fast and break things” is now infamous but is still a solid way to characterize some companies’ cultures, even select mature ones. Permission isn’t required for an action to be undertaken, and if you happen to step on someone else’s toes in your process, so be it + you’ll learn for next time.
- On the other end of the spectrum lies strict hierarchical cultures, where nothing gets done without express guidance/permission from the higher-ups on the corporate totem pole. If you do something outside your stated scope of duties, you’re more likely to be castigated than rewarded.
It’s puzzling to me why some cultures almost-knowingly stifle personal development in intuition. Once credibility’s been established in a role/industry, why wouldn’t it make sense to trust that person to make judgment calls, lead new initiatives, bring some creativity to a legacy process? My ideal workplace — like I had this summer at 9Yards Capital (thanks y’all, if you happen to read this!) — doesn’t just permit those dynamics; it encourages them.
It’s also wild to me that some hedge-fund friends can deploy $20… $30… $50+ million (!!) to work *in a single day.* Their ideas are vetted by higher-ups, sure, but at the end of the day it’s their ass on the line. High stakes, high reward. In many cases, the best way to learn is by actually doing (some call this the knowing-doing gap). And many would argue that there’s a lot more to learn from failing than from succeeding.
This is relevant at the human level too. Strong personal relationships (romantic or otherwise) rely on trust and intuition to large degrees, and the “culture” (communication dynamic) sets the tone for how much is expressly stated vs. implied. That’s where it gets tricky, though, because we’re not mind readers — there’s a bottomless well of uncertainty in each individual we encounter.
In these interpersonal contexts, it’s perfectly healthy to check in about what could be improved. This is an extreme example, but Kat Cole (executive at global multi-channel franchisor and operator of Cinnabon, Auntie Anne’s, Jamba Juice and others) shared in a recent Knolwedge Project podcast that she and her husband have monthly check-ins wherein they address questions like:
- What was your favorite / least favorite moment of the past month (as a couple and individually)?
- What behavior/quality should I express more/less of in this relationship?
In sum, building intuition is one of those fractal problems that can be infinitely improved, with boundless upside. But in some contexts, guidance is essential as one bolsters these sorts of capabilities.
III. Exploration and Inebriation
I just wrapped up a book called “The Harvard Psychedelic Club”, about how Timothy Leary and fellow pedigreed-yet-wookish scientists/academic/theologians dosed hundreds of folks (from graduate students to prisoners) with psilocybin and LSD in the ’60s, all in the name of research.
Excuse the cliche, but this book was quite a trip…
Leary and others argue that consciousness-expanding activities can be traced back to the earliest human civilizations. Nearly every society across the globe has some version of this, from the ayahuasca traditions of South America, to poppy and opium in the Far East, to the the stimulant/alcohol-fueled voyages of our country’s European forbearers.
Even on an individual level, Leary et al. argued that we have an “innate urge” to push the boundaries of experience, even as children. Just think — we spun ourselves around at the playground until we were damn near drunk on dizziness; we sought out rollercoasters, sugar highs, and immersed ourselves in worlds of make-believe when playing with friends.
I started thinking about all this while in college, when I saw folks start experimenting more with alcohol and other drugs. (I’m mostly talking about the latter since I struggle to see any real prospects of consciousness expansion when getting domelessly drunk.) Questions like these have been rattling around my head for years:
- What’s up with this seemingly-ingrained human desire to expand+alter our perceptions by experiencing psychedelics and/or getting inebriated?
- Is this some humanity-unifying urge to explore, deepen connections, quest for existential (philosophical, religious) answers… or is it just a form of escapism… or both?
There’s also palpable stigma, still, when it comes to these topics among the broader populace. Driven by Nixon’s “War on Drugs”, drugs like marijuana, acid, and mushrooms wound up on the same lists as more hardcore, debilitating, addicting narcotics. Yeah, like that makes sense…
From stigma, curiosity emerges. There’s a libertarian/psychologically-grounded argument to be made that if use-reduction is the goal, Nixon’s restrictions actually had the opposite effect. Thankfully the medical and political world is starting to “wake up”, as psychedelics are now being studied for a range of disorders such as anxiety, depression, PTSD, epilepsy, and beyond.
Mind you, there’s non-negligible health detriments when any of these things are consumed in excess (including and especially alcohol). But there’s also a range of positives that can come from “experimentation.”
- What about the indisputable correlation (perhaps even causation) between artistic / creative inspiration and psychedelics?
- … Or the fact that many have experienced incomparable moments of rapture / introspective epiphanies while on a trip?
Those who work in music or film are the obvious examples, but this is relevant to the business world as well! Steve Jobs is perhaps the most prolific psychedelic explorer; Jack Dorsey, Elon, Benioff, Adam Neumann (whose stated mission is to “elevate the world’s consciousness”… apparently by way of WeWork…?) have surely dabbled; and I’ll leave it up to your interpretation what Ray Dalio was up to at Burning Man…
All this is to say that this “innate urge” doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, nor do the substances themselves, so we might as well devote resources to understanding what all this means. We’re all, in a sense, vision questing in our own ways…
IV. Emotion Contagion
There are three separate (yet related) pieces of content below about how emotions are contagious. Mostly through non-verbal cues (body language, countenance/expression, tone of voice, etc.) we’re emitting an aura to whomever we encounter, and that aura has an effect on others’ auras. At this point, it’s undeniable that this is happening, by various mechanism(s) — “mirror neurons”, self-presentation / impression management, empathy and self-other merging, etc.
These auras especially infectious in sustained interactions — e.g. coworkers, friendships, courting business or romantic partners, roommates, enduring relationships, etc.
I don’t want to get too metaphysical given I just ranted about psychedelics… but one must be cognizant of this endless energetic exchange. It’s important to be mindful of the energy you’re sending out, and to effuse those *good vibes* as much as possible! A smile, a sincere compliment, a genuine question — it’s pretty easy to do.
And when challenges inevitably strike, compartmentalization is key. Don’t take work stress back home, and vice versa. It’s also worth paying attention to which people make you feel good (or bad), and trying to identify what about their persona elicits that reaction.
As usual, I’m saying this all to myself as much as to y’all…
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With that, hope you enjoy the eclectic Content List below! Crazy this is the 32nd edition… Press onwards for more on cultural liquidity, the revival of stoicism, cofounder couples’ therapy, modernizing insurance, outrage as a business model, the dangers of woke culture, and beyond…
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 #32 | Friday 8/13/21
Articles
Different Cultures Define Happiness Differently | The Atlantic
- “Inner harmony might sound universal, but it can mean very different things in different places. For example, while shooting a documentary film in Denmark on the pursuit of happiness two years ago, I found that the Danes often described inner harmony in terms of hygge, which is something like coziness and comfortable conviviality. Meanwhile, I have found that Americans tend to define it in terms of their skills meeting their passions, usually in the context of work.
- So psychological definitions don’t nail down happiness much. And from there, the differences among countries only widen. The same 2016 study cited above found, for example, that 49 percent of Americans referred explicitly to family relationships in their definition of happiness, while Southern Europeans and Latin Americans generally conceived of it in terms of oneself: Just 22 percent of Portuguese, 18 percent of Mexicans, and 10 percent of Argentines talked about their families in their happiness definitions.”
Actual impostors don’t get impostor syndrome | Zapier
- “One thing a con artist will never do, in my experience, is openly admit that they’re conning you. They will deny, lie, and generally talk in circles around the truth. So if you want to know, one hundred percent, that you’re not an impostor, do something no impostor would ever do: out yourself. Tell a coworker you trust how you feel. I bet they’ll react with understanding and that you’ll feel a lot better after.”
Even Your Allergist Is Now Investing in Start-Ups | NYTimes
- ““It is absolutely going mainstream,” said Kingsley Advani, founder of Allocations, a tech platform for angel investors. “It’s accelerating and it’s getting faster and faster.” He said even his mother, a retired schoolteacher in Australia, has invested in 41 start-ups over the last few years.
- More than 3,000 new angel investors are projected to make their first deal this year, up from 2,725 last year, according to the research firm PitchBook. And the amount of money that angels are pouring into start-ups has swelled, reaching $2.1 billion in the first six months of this year, compared with $2.6 billion for all of 2020, according to the National Venture Capital Association and PitchBook.”
Virtual Reality Is the Rich White Kid of Technology | Wired
- Clickbait headline but actually a sensible argument…
- “The technology is always about to turn a corner, about to be more than just a gaming device, about to revolutionize fields like architecture, defense, and medicine. The future of work, entertainment, travel, and society is always on the verge of a huge virtual upgrade. VR is a bit like a rich white kid with famous parents: It never stops failing upward, forever graded on a generous curve, always judged based on its “potential” rather than its results.”
Cultural Liquidity: The Rise of Cryptomedia | Digital Native
- “Cryptomedia and digital assets aren’t exclusive to music; they’ll rearchitect all cultural industries. Many of us were taught that because something is digital, it has no value. We were conditioned by the early internet to assume that everything online is free. But digital creations do have value; the system is just set up so that we don’t see it. As Bobby Hundreds puts it:
Your social media posts do make money. It’s just that you don’t see any of it. Your gorgeous photographs, compelling essays, and motion graphics draw attention to platforms like Facebook and Google, which churn advertising dollars off of all those eyeballs. You do all the hard work. They make the money from it. And now that you see it that way, isn’t it incredibly unfair?
- If you make something, and millions of people derive value from that thing, shouldn’t you be rewarded for it?”
The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine? | Michael Pollan x The Guardian
- “London’s coffeehouses were distinguished one from another by the professional or intellectual interests of their patrons, which eventually gave them specific institutional identities. So, for example, merchants and men with interests in shipping gathered at Lloyd’s Coffee House. Here you could learn what ships were arriving and departing, and buy an insurance policy on your cargo. Lloyd’s Coffee House eventually became the insurance brokerage Lloyd’s of London. Learned types and scientists — known then as “natural philosophers” — gathered at the Grecian, which became closely associated with the Royal Society; Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley debated physics and mathematics here, and supposedly once dissected a dolphin on the premises.”
The Revival of Stoicism | Vice
- “What is Modern Stoicism used for? Inner peace and mental serenity? Productivity and creating a Fortune 500 company? Fighting against climate change and for social justice? It’s currently all of the above, depending on who you ask. Stoicism’s memeable soundbites and its practical advice make it both incredibly useful as a strategy of resilience, and highly commercializable and pliant to varying interpretations. It can serve as an accessible entry to philosophy, offer genuinely helpful coping mechanisms, and a way to approach difficult circumstances, or, it can be adapted to justify one’s pre-existing lot in life, forgo larger social change, and regulate away messy emotions, even in moments when vulnerability or attachment might be more beneficial. It will be up to the Modern Stoics to define the boundaries and applications of the philosophy so that it aligns with, to borrow a Stoic phrase, a virtuous life.”
Investigation shows scale of big food corporations’ market dominance and political power | The Guardian
Jeff Bezos Is Not My Astronaut | Prof Scott Galloway
The One Who Defines the Category Wins the Category | David Sacks
- “The purpose of brand marketing for all SaaS companies, therefore, is the same: to establish category leadership. While marketing is no substitute for a great product with happy customers or a successful sales motion, nothing can amplify the success of those efforts like good marketing. In the case of a new category, this requires proving that the category actually exists. In the case of an existing category, it requires redefining the category around your disruption. In either case, it takes an active marketing strategy to bring the market around to your point of view.”
This Song Is About You | NPR
- “This dig into the self, and the collateral damage it may cause, defined what singer-songwriters did as long ago as the late 1960s. Writing about the chart-topping bards of the Laurel Canyon scene in 1976’s Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, Janet Maslin questioned the emerging style’s “reactionary expressions of frustration, confusion, irony, quiet little confidences, and personal declarations of independence.” Finding worth in their dedication to rooting out the particulars of self-discovery, she nonetheless called out “the solipsism to which all singer-songwriters are notoriously prey.” Abhrajyoti Chakraborty identified very similar issues in the talk about about autofiction, writing in The New Yorker in 2019: “We have ascribed to the genre certain flattening traits — a degree of self-absorption, a preoccupation with authenticity, the presence of a writer as a protagonist — that can seem like so much ‘idle pondering.’””
Curators All the Way Down | Gaby Goldberg
- “The shift to putting creators in the driver’s seat was a long-awaited one. But no good thing comes without unintended consequences. Users were uploading 300 hours of video to YouTube every single minute; over 100 million photos were posted to Instagram each day. Even when we look today, it’s impossible to keep up with the number of new Tweets, emails, blog posts, or Google searches every second.
- In short, with democratized access, the web became more saturated than ever before, and as consumers, we began to spend more and more time trying to sort through it all. In a state of analysis paralysis, how do we disaggregate signal from noise?”
- Related: What’s next for the big business of influencer-founded brands? | ThingTesting
- Related: Deep Dive: Entering a New Phase of the Creator Economy | K50 Ventures
Jason Sudeikis Is Having One Hell of a Year | GQ
- Like I said, confidence is a funny thing. You have to somehow believe that the worst outcome simply won’t happen. Sometimes you have to do that while knowing for a fact that the worst outcome is happening, all the time. “It’s a very interesting space to live in, where you’re living in the questions and the universe is slipping you answers,” Sudeikis said. “And are you — are any of us — open enough, able enough, curious enough to hear them when they arrive?” This sounds oblique, I guess, but I can attest, after spending some time talking to Sudeikis, that everything is a little oblique for him right now. He had the same pandemic year we all had, and in the middle of that, he had Ted Lasso turn into a massive, unexpected hit, and in the middle of that, his split from his partner and the mother of his two children, Olivia Wilde, became public in a way that from a great distance seemed not entirely dissimilar to something that happens to the character he plays on the show that everyone was suddenly watching. “Personal stuff, professional stuff, I mean, it’s all…that Venn diagram for me is very” — here he held up two hands to form one circle — “you know?”
The American Identity Crisis | NYTimes
- “Over the past decades America and its allies have betrayed our values and compromised with tyrants innumerable times. But at their core the liberal powers radiate a set of vital ideals — not just democracy and capitalism, but also feminism, multiculturalism, human rights, egalitarianism, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the dream of racial justice. These things are all intertwined in a progressive package that puts individual dignity at the center.
- If the 21st century has taught us anything, it is that a lot of people, foreign and domestic, don’t like that package and feel existentially threatened by it. China’s leaders are not just autocrats, they think they are leading a civilization state and are willing to slaughter ethnic minorities. Vladimir Putin is not just a thug, he’s a cultural reactionary. The Taliban champion a fantasy version of the Middle Ages.
- These people are not leading 20th-century liberation movements against colonialism and “American hegemony.” They are leading a 21st-century Kulturkampf against women’s rights, gay rights, minority rights, individual dignity — the whole progressive package.”
The Pandemic Drives Cofounders to Couples Therapy | Wired
- “Reid Hoffman has likened running a startup to “throwing yourself off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.” Elon Musk has compared it to “eating glass.” But many founders still underestimate the challenges that come from working alongside another person, day in and day out, with a kind of intimacy often reserved for marriages. Noam Wasserman, who spoke to thousands of founders when writing his 2012 book The Founder’s Dilemma, estimated at the time that 65 percent of startups fail because of cofounder conflict.
- Those conflicts only intensified under the stresses of last year’s lockdowns. “If there was anger and resentment that wasn’t being addressed, that really started to show up more intensely,” says Matthew Jones, a psychologist and creator of the Cofounder Clarity Coaching Method. “I saw several partnerships that, in different circumstances, may have been able to last a bit longer.” Much like the rash of pandemic breakups, Jones says, the pandemic didn’t cause conflicts between cofounders so much as bring existing ones to the surface. Since colleagues are generally less likely to talk about their feelings than couples, those tensions drove a number of exasperated clients into his virtual office.”
Rookie Bankers Sour on Wall Street’s Pitch of Big Pay and Long Hours | NYTimes
- Lol…
- “For decades, investment banking — the job of advising big companies on their most pressing needs — was one of Wall Street’s most prestigious careers, glorified in 1980s best sellers by writers like Tom Wolfe and Michael Lewis. Thousands of young hopefuls applied every year for a chance to start careers at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Salomon Brothers and other banks as analysts — entry-level positions that taught aspiring financiers how to build financial models and evaluate businesses. They embraced the long hours and grunt work in exchange for the prestige of jobs that eventually paid millions. In turn, each analyst class provided banks with a reliable pipeline of talent.
- But new college graduates are increasingly unwilling to put themselves through the strenuous two-year analyst program, despite starting pay that can reach $160,000. That’s especially so as careers in technology and other parts of the finance world promise better hours and more flexibility. The pandemic, which forced many to reassess their work-life balance, has only underscored that thinking.”
- Related: How Honest Should You Be During Your Exit Interview? | WSJ → Yes, I was *quite* honest in my review of my Citi daze…
You Anon | NYTimes
- “Many of the internet’s most powerful firms owe their success to our identities, from which they’ve extracted billions of dollars of value. Some of them, however, are showing their age. The era they defined is, if not coming to an end, colliding with changing habits. Facebook is increasingly associated with older people, many of whom joined during its experiment in “real names.”
- Younger people, for the most part, have gravitated elsewhere, their pseudonyms spread across a variety of games, apps and services, some persistent, some disposable, many carefully tailored to the context in which they’re used. Discord isn’t AIM, but it’s closer in spirit to 2001 than 2021. Snapchat’s assumptions about what its users want to show people, and to whom, are miles from Instagram’s. TikTok is absolutely interested in collecting and monetizing data from its users. But even Bytedance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, knows better than to ask users for their legal names when they sign up.”
$HOOD | Prof Scott Galloway
- “Robinhood went public on [July 29], the old-fashioned way — via an IPO with underwriters after a roadshow. The IPO priced at $38 per share, yielding a valuation of $32 billion, and closed its first day of trading down 8.4%. The trading company’s debut is the worst on record among the 51 U.S. firms that have raised as much cash as Robinhood.
- So what will $30 billion buy? At first glance, Robinhood is a roaring success. In 2020 it registered revenue of $959 million, a 245% increase from 2019. RH boasted 18 million monthly active users in March 2021, up from 7 million a year prior. And in keeping with the company’s thesis, “to democratize finance for all,” female users tripled over the past year and more than 25% of users are now people of color, significantly more than at the incumbent brokerage houses.
- However … I’ve written before about the problematic aspects of Robinhood’s gamification of investing. The company preys on human weakness, in particular young men’s susceptibility to gambling addiction. That’s still true, and RH’s IPO warrants a deeper dive into the firm’s business model.”
Millennials, What Will It Take for You to Buy Life Insurance? | The Atlantic
- “Life-insurance companies in the U.S. and U.K. are waking up to the fact that they have a young-people problem. The share of Americans covered by life insurance slid from 63 percent in 2011 to 52 percent in 2021, according to the Life Office Management Association, an industry research group. That has occurred across all age categories, but it is most pronounced among people under 40. The stakes are high, given that, like health insurance, young people tend to subsidize everyone else in the system.
- To stay relevant, a new crop of start-ups, boasting names like YuLife, DeadHappy, Lemonade, Bestow, and Dayforward, are borrowing tactics from plant start-ups, game-development studios, and ride-sharing companies. Life insurance 2.0 is a slicker, Millennial-friendly product bursting with brightly colored websites and conversational ad copy that wants you to know that this company isn’t like those other life insurers. But rebranding an industry that the average person tends not to think much about has its challenges. What these insurgents don’t seem to want to consider is that maybe the problem isn’t branding, but life insurance itself.”
The Age of Access Capitalism | Digital Native
- “The world has already shifted from a 20th-Century production-based capitalistic economy to a 21st-Century network economy. Marketplaces for physical goods have become marketplaces for ideas and information. The next iteration is an access economy — a marketplace for access to people and their time. As long as we safeguard what access is paid versus what remains free, this new economy should unlock more wealth creation and economic mobility.
- McLuhan’s writing often focused on how technology is an extension of our bodies. The wheel extends our feet, the phone extends our voice, television extends our eyes and ears, the computer extends our brain, and electronic media, in general, extends our central nervous system. We’re in a moment in time where technological innovations are happening at an unprecedented rate. We just need to retain some agency over how the tools that we create shape us.”
Schools Look for Help from AI Teachers’ Assistants | The Future of Everything
- “Typically, AI education products serve one function, such as assessing a student’s literacy, tailoring tools to individual learners or performing administrative functions such as grading. Next-generation tools may do all of this in a single platform, serving at times as a peer learning partner, a group facilitator and a monitor for educators — a sort of superpowered teacher’s assistant personalized for each student.
- Educators have long feared that such a tool could replace them, says Lalitha Vasudevan, managing director at the Digital Futures Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University. Instead, she says, thoughtfully designed AI tools could help pick up on patterns in behavior and performance that a busy human might otherwise miss, making good teachers better and requiring more — and more data-savvy — educators.”
The great American cool | Vox
- “Our tastes, though, both in the consumer-branded heyday of the ’90s and 2000s and now, lend themselves to the delusion of uniqueness. Today, our particular likes are even more than a shorthand for an identity, they are the identity itself. In the now defunct blog-turned-book Stuff White People Like, Christian Lander bills his observations as “a guide to the unique taste of millions,” winking at the inherent conformity baked into the arbitrary commodities and interests enjoyed among the white yuppie set. Of course, normies enjoy dinner parties, the comedy of Dave Chappelle, and music piracy, too, but only non-normies use these as dog whistles and mating calls to signal their own interestingness to others.”
Scorched, Parched and Now Uninsurable: Climate Change Hits Wine Country | NYTimes
- “In Napa Valley, the lush heartland of America’s high-end wine industry, climate change is spelling calamity. Not outwardly: On the main road running through the small town of St. Helena, tourists still stream into wineries with exquisitely appointed tasting rooms. At the Goose & Gander, where the lamb chops are $63, the line for a table still tumbles out onto the sidewalk.
- But drive off the main road, and the vineyards that made this valley famous — where the mix of soil, temperature patterns and rainfall used to be just right — are now surrounded by burned-out landscapes, dwindling water supplies and increasingly nervous winemakers, bracing for things to get worse.
- Desperation has pushed some growers to spray sunscreen on grapes, to try to prevent roasting, while others are irrigating with treated wastewater from toilets and sinks because reservoirs are dry.”
The Computer Scientist Training AI to Think With Analogies | Quanta
- “Analogy isn’t just something we humans do. Some animals are kind of robotic, but other species are able to take prior experiences and map them onto new experiences. Maybe it’s one way to put a of intelligence onto different kinds of living systems: To what extent can you make more abstract analogies?
- One of the theories of why humans have this particular kind of intelligence is that it’s because we’re so social. One of the most important things for you to do is to model what other people are thinking, understand their goals and predict what they’re going to do. And that’s something you do by analogy to yourself. You can put yourself in the other person’s position and kind of map your own mind onto theirs. This “theory of mind” is something that people in AI talk about all the time. It’s essentially a way of making an analogy.”
Telehealth: A quarter-trillion-dollar post-COVID-19 reality? | McKinsey
What Ever Happened to IBM’s Watson? | NYTimes
- “IBM poured many millions of dollars in the next few years into promoting Watson as a benevolent digital assistant that would help hospitals and farms as well as offices and factories. The potential uses, IBM suggested, were boundless, from spotting new market opportunities to tackling cancer and climate change. An IBM report called it “the future of knowing.”
- IBM’s television ads included playful chats Watson had with Serena Williams and Bob Dylan. Watson was featured on “60 Minutes.” For many people, Watson became synonymous with A.I.
- And Watson wasn’t just going to change industries. It was going to breathe new life into IBM — a giant company, but one dependent on its legacy products. Inside IBM, Watson was thought of as a technology that could do for the company what the mainframe computer once did — provide an engine of growth and profits for years, even decades.
- Watson has not remade any industries. And it hasn’t lifted IBM’s fortunes. The company trails rivals that emerged as the leaders in cloud computing and A.I. — Amazon, Microsoft and Google. While the shares of those three have multiplied in value many times, IBM’s stock price is down more than 10 percent since Watson’s “Jeopardy!” triumph in 2011.”
Those Who Share a Roof Share Emotions | The Atlantic
- “Emotional contagion isn’t all negative. In 2008, researchers used decades of data from a Massachusetts community to find that happiness is highly contagious. Specifically, living within a mile of a friend who becomes happy makes you 25 percent likelier to become happy too.
- Emotions of all kinds have long been found to jump between people through a number of mechanisms. The most obvious is conversation, in which we transmit and take on the emotions of others through facial expressions, vocal tone, and posture. You probably have found that when you interact with certain people, you laugh more than normal; with others, you complain a lot.
- We can also “catch” others’ emotions physiologically, at least in part. In one experiment, people who inhaled a disgusting smell and those who merely observed a video clip of a person with a disgusted expression had activation in the same parts of the brain. Similar results have been found in the experience of pain — your brain can sense it simply by seeing someone else who is hurting.”
- Related: Brains Might Sync As People Interact — and That Could Upend Consciousness Research | Discover Mag
- Related: The Link Between Happiness and a Sense of Humor | The Atlantic
Why People Feel Like Victims | Nautilus
- “In 2020, researchers in Israel, led by Rahav Gabray, a doctor of psychology at Tel Aviv University, conducted a series of empirical studies to come up with an answer.2 They identify a negative personality trait they call TIV or Tendency toward Interpersonal Victimhood. People who score high on a TIV test have an “enduring feeling that the self is a victim in different kinds of interpersonal relationships,” they write.
- The study of TIV is built around four pillars. The first pillar is a relentless need for one’s victimhood to be clearly and unequivocally acknowledged by both the offender and the society at large. The second is “moral elitism,” the conviction that the victim has the moral high ground, an “immaculate morality,” while “the other” is inherently immoral. The third pillar is a lack of empathy, especially an inability to see life from another perspective, with the result that the victim feels entitled to act selfishly in response. The fourth pillar is Rumination — a tendency to dwell on the details of an assault on self-esteem.
- You only need to spend only a few minutes watching or reading the news, in any country, to hear and see victimhood raging.”
Status Monkeys | Not Boring
- First Utility, Then Social Capital. “Come for the tool, stay for the network.” Instagram first attracted users with an easy photo editing tool and became a photo-based network on top of which people have built huge followings and businesses.
- First Social Capital, Then Utility. Wei highlights Foursquare, Wikipedia, Quora, and Reddit as products that used the promise of social capital to get people to do free work that then becomes a utility for the masses.
- Utility, But Not Social Capital. Messaging apps are incredibly useful for communicating with people you know, but don’t really help users build up social capital.
- Social Capital, But Little Utility. Wei puts Facebook in this category, mentioning that many of his friends just stopped using Facebook with no impact on their life (This describes me too, as I suspect it describes many of you).
- … [But] Less than 1,000 words into his [2019] piece and two full years before NFT mania, Wei unknowingly laid the groundwork for analyzing what’s happening. NFTs blur the lines between social and financial capital, and as the media has been quick to point out, buying jpegs for thousands or millions of dollars seems irrational.
Your brain is on overload. This is how to augment your intellectual capacity | Fast Company
- “The time you get back is linear, but the things you can do with that time can compound. For example, with every email I write moving forward, I save myself 25 minutes of gathering information. Or at least 10 minutes of searching for an email to copy and paste.
- Similar to how a dollar not invested is not the same as a dollar saved, an hour saved isn’t just an hour earned — it’s actually an hour you can do something else with tomorrow — and the day after that, and after that, until the end of your work life. In those 25 minutes, I can relax, but I can also read a book, or make progress on a blog post, or something like that.
- It’s not just a productivity thing, either, at least to me. Every minute I currently spend confused, context-switching, and unclear comes with an emotional cost too. So a personal infrastructure can contribute to a certain sense of wellness. For me, I find I don’t stress so much about worrying about what gets done when; it frees my brain up to be more creative.”
“This Is Going to Change the World” | Slate
- Spoiler: the Segway did not live up to the hype, but man what an interesting case study!
- “The proposal quoted Steve Jobs saying the invention would be “as significant as the personal computer.” Jeff Bezos said it was “revolutionary.” But what was surprising about the book deal wasn’t merely the praise the invention and its inventor, Dean Kamen, garnered from tech world luminaries. It wasn’t merely the substantial investment the inventor had received from famed venture capitalist John Doerr, the largest in the firm Kleiner Perkins’ history. What stood out most of all was the detail that Harvard was paying a quarter-million dollars for the book — and it didn’t even know what the invention was. The inventor was paranoid about leaks, and the book’s author withheld that information from the proposal. No one — not even the literary agent who had submitted the proposal to editors, swearing them to secrecy — knew what the invention was. All they knew was the single word of the book’s title: IT.”
Investor’s Guide to The Care Economy | The Holding Co x Pivotal
- Related: For Older Adults, Home Care Has Become Harder to Find | NYTimes
Can Silicon Valley Find God? | NYTimes
- “Tech is a stereotypically secular industry in which traditional belief systems are regarded as things to keep hidden away at all costs. A scene from the HBO series “Silicon Valley” satirized this cultural aversion: “You can be openly polyamorous, and people here will call you brave. You can put microdoses of LSD in your cereal, and people will call you a pioneer,” one character says after the chief executive of his company outs another tech worker as a believer. “But the one thing you cannot be is a Christian.”
- Related: How Tech Won the Pandemic and Now May Never Lose | NYTimes
Next-gen commerce, marketplaces, and consumer tech businesses with Greylock’s Mike Duboe | FireAnt
- “Analytics is perhaps the most foundational problem to solve as an e-commerce merchant. For most e-commerce merchants, analytics debt is the silent killer. I think the thesis underlying many investments in the Shopify ecosystem is that you can scale pretty far without any engineers, and certainly you’re not going to have data analysts in the mix — especially not in the early days. If you ask ten merchants who, let’s say, are generating less than $20 million in revenue, to produce some simple analysis or even describe their P&L, I think you’re going to get very different answers there. And so there’s kind of like this need for a baseline of just basic business hygiene or analytics. Underneath that there’s also the ability to benchmark your performance across other merchants and understand and shine a flashlight on your business in a way that you probably wouldn’t be able to, unless you have a deeper analytics team. So there’s definitely a thesis around investing in solutions that create this analytics baseline and consistency among merchants.”
The lie of “expired” food and the disastrous truth of America’s food waste problem | Vox
- “The problem is bigger than individual consumers. Some states bar grocery stores from donating or selling out-of-date foods to food banks and other services designed to help those living with food insecurity. The thinking is reasonable, even altruistic: Why would we give sub-par food to the “poor”? If I wouldn’t eat “expired” food, why would I give it to others? Distributors fear legal threats if someone eats past-dated food and becomes ill (something that has rarely happened, but it’s still a looming threat).
- That’s exacerbated by the way Americans shop. Think about it: How often do you see a shelf or bin or freezer in a grocery store that isn’t fully stocked to the brim? Supermarkets stock more food than they can sell, and that’s on purpose. Broad Leib told me that it’s common practice for supermarkets to plan for “shrink” — food they expect to be wasted. Shoppers in the US look askance at a shelf that isn’t fully stocked, or at a few potatoes left in the bin. “On the consumer side, you can understand,” she said. “You want to go to a store and have them have everything you want. And if you went in and they didn’t have what you want, then you’d go somewhere else.” We may not even realize it, but we’ve trained ourselves to see full crates of beets and shelves of salad dressing as a sign that the store is good, and therefore the food in it is good. Abundance indicates quality.”
The rise of never-ending job interviews | BBC
- “In fact, the internet is awash with similar stories jobseekers who’ve become frustrated with companies — particularly in the tech, finance and energy sectors — turning the interview process into a marathon. That poses the question: how many rounds of interviews should it take for an employer to reasonably assess a candidate before the process veers into excess? And how long should candidates stick it out if there’s no clear information on exactly how many hoops they’ll have to jump through to stay in the running for a role?”
- Related: The Pain of the Never-Ending Work Check-In | WSJ
No, You Beg | The Cut
- “This deluge of rescue-puppy content has arrived, not coincidentally, during a time of growing awareness of puppy mills as so morally indefensible that even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could draw fire for seemingly buying a purebred French bulldog in early 2020. Then came the pandemic puppy boom, a lonely, claustrophobic year in which thousands of white-collar workers, sitting at home scrolling through their phones, seemed simultaneously to decide they were finally ready to adopt a dog. The corresponding demand spike in certain markets has simply overwhelmed the agencies: New York shelters that were used to receiving 20 applications a week were now receiving hundreds, with as many as 50 people vying for a single pup.”
The Fallacy Of Fintech Ethics: Could Fintechs Be Less Ethical Than Banks? | Forbes
What to Expect When the Unexpected Becomes Expected: Harmonic Surprise and Preference Over Time in Popular Music | Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
- “Previous work demonstrates that music with more surprising chords tends to be perceived as more enjoyable than music with more conventional harmonic structures. In that work, harmonic surprise was computed based upon a static distribution of chords. This would assume that harmonic surprise is constant over time, and the effect of harmonic surprise on music preference is similarly static. In this study we assess that assumption and establish that the relationship between harmonic surprise (as measured according to a specific time period) and music preference is not constant as time goes on. Analyses of harmonic surprise and preference from 1958 to 1991 showed increased harmonic surprise over time, and that this increase was significantly more pronounced in preferred songs. Separate analyses showed similar increases over the years from 2000 to 2019. As such, these findings provide evidence that the human perception of tonality is influenced by exposure. Baseline harmonic expectations that were developed through listening to the music of “yesterday” are violated in the music of “today,” leading to preference. Then, once the music of “today” provides the baseline expectations for the music of “tomorrow,” more pronounced violations — and with them, higher harmonic surprise values — become associated with preference formation. We call this phenomenon the “Inflationary-Surprise Hypothesis.” Support for this hypothesis could impact the understanding of how the perception of tonality, and other statistical regularities, are developed in the human brain.”
‘We Don’t Need Another Michelangelo’: In Italy, It’s Robots’ Turn to Sculpt | NYTimes
Outrage As A Business Model: How Ben Shapiro Is Using Facebook To Build An Empire | NPR
A Long, Strange Trip | HBR
- “By the early 1960s, LSD was transitioning from miracle drug/weapon of mass delusion to countercultural touchstone. While a couple of former Harvard psychology faculty — Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, who later assumed the name Baba Ram Dass — are often given credit for popularizing the drug with the youth culture of the era, Turner says that Oscar Janiger, a California psychiatrist who “administered almost 3,000 doses of LSD to 1,000 volunteers,” played a more direct role in its spread.
- The members of the creative class — and others of means and influence who experienced LSD both in and out of treatment — raised awareness of the drug and its possibilities for expanding consciousness. Publicized by figures like Alpert and Leary — who famously encouraged Americans to “Turn on, tune in, drop out” — LSD migrated to the center of a utopian vision that was increasingly unsettling to middle-class society.”
SaaS Product Benchmarks | Sam Richard & Kyle Poyar
- some awesome granular data herein…
- Related: GTM funnel stages, metrics, and goals | Unusual VC
Don’t Worry About Inflation | FuturePerfect
Why the next big consumer platforms are social games | Bessemer Venture Partners
- “In summary, we’re excited to invest behind two concurrent trends in consumer social: (1) games that are designed to become (or organically become) social platforms, and (2) consumer platforms that are leveraging deeper gaming experiences like avatars and virtual worlds to engage users and promote socialization. We think many experiences are converging on these two trends, as consumers spend more time online and increasingly look for “stuff” to engage one another as they seek connection in virtual worlds.”
Climate Change Is Killing Beautiful Music, Too | Slate
Esther Perel Is Fighting the “Tyranny of Positivity” | GQ
- “In the same way we need reality and imagination, and we need groundedness and we need adventure, we need structure and spontaneity. Our rules structure us, and those rules are structured in time and in space. You came to work this morning, you dressed up a certain way that made sense for you, that is different than if you go to the gym, that is different than if you go to a club. The clothes go with the place where you go, with the building that you enter, with the way that you behave. A rule is a complex set of things that organizes you. That gives you a sense of how to behave, what to do, how to think, how to relate to people. When you don’t have any of that — you are a partner, a parent, a lover, a friend, a son, an employee, a manager — and it’s all happening at the same table in the same sweatpants, it becomes like a fog. You start to experience a type of lethargy. You start to lose the pleasure of what you do.”
Amazon labels millions of unsold products for destruction, new investigation finds | The Verge
- “Many third-party sellers pay to keep their stock in Amazon warehouses. But if their stuff doesn’t sell, they might find it more cost-effective to just throw out the products instead of keeping them on the shelf. Other investigations have also dug into Amazon’s heaping waste piles. The equivalent of a truckload of goods a week was sorted out for destruction at another warehouse in Germany, an investigation by environmental group Greenpeace found this year. And in 2018, Amazon destroyed more than 3 million pounds of products in France, a French TV station found.”
How Neopets Paved the Road to the Metaverse | Digital Native
- “For a virtual world most popular with middle-schoolers, Neopets had a surprisingly complicated (and realistic) economy. Users got bank accounts, where they could collect interest. They could invest their neopoints into Neopia’s stock market, called the NEODAQ.
- Occasionally, developers would flood the site with neopoints and cause massive inflation. There was also rampant income inequality: a surprisingly academic article in The Neopian Times — yes, that’s Neopia’s newspaper — found that just 10% of Neopets users held over 50% of the wealth. (Ironically, this makes Neopia a far more equitable society than America.)
- Participating in the economy was crucial. You had to make money — otherwise, you couldn’t feed your pet. A cheeseburger cost around 200 neopoints; rarer items might cost hundreds of thousands of points.
- Naturally, a black market sprang up. Every Neopet had to have a unique name, but soon there were over 280 million pets. Pets named “Rex” were a lot more valuable than pets named “Rex472892pbn93w”, and they started getting traded off-platform for thousands of real-world dollars. Ebay eventually had to ban all digital Neopets assets.”
Surfing’s Olympic Moment Is Here. Will the Waves Cooperate? | NYTimes
- “Surfing has been trying to get onto the Olympic program for years, and its supporters pushed for it to be included in the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, a surfing hot spot with world-class waves and a picturesque backdrop.
- Instead, its Olympic debut will come in Japan, a country with ample coastline but few world-class breaks. It is more Jersey Shore than North Shore.
- There was talk of using the fast-growing technology of artificial waves, but the Olympics decided several years ago that it was more important to stage the competition in a natural setting.
- No one is sure what to expect. The format, for 20 men and 20 women (and no more than two of each from any country), calls for four days of competition over an eight-day window.”
Pinduoduo: Together, More Bull, More Bear, More Fun | NotBoring
5 Lessons from China’s Internet Companies | Digital Native
- China — whose young people are even more mobile-native than America’s — has innovated on technology solutions to loneliness. Soul mentions the word “community” 43 times in its F-1 filing. There are many interesting learnings from China’s internet companies; this week, I’ll go through five learnings built around the common theme of community.
- Bullet Commentary & the Hive Mentalit
- Social Serendipity
- Participatory Experiences
- Collaborative Learning
- Social Commerce & Livestreaming
The Fire That Forged Giannis Antetokounmpo | The Ringer
- “Giannis would stand in front of the mirror and practice his scowl. He’d squint his eyes, suck in his teeth. His nose would wrinkle; his forehead would tighten. His lips would curl, and then he’d let out a grunt.
- He was trying to look more aggressive, less adorable; more intimidating, less innocent. He needed a new identity heading into his second NBA season — one vastly different from the goofy, endearing rookie discovering smoothies for the first time.
- He needed to get mean.
- “He had to practice it because he’s not that guy,” says Skip Robinson, then Bucks vice president of community relations and player development. “He’s a lovable guy. A nice gentleman.”
- Giannis didn’t want to be seen as a nice gentleman on the court; he wanted to be seen as someone who would tear your heart out. He tried to pattern his scowl after Russell Westbrook’s scowl. Giannis loved Westbrook: his demeanor, his speed, but especially his scowl. Giannis came into practice once, scowling and grunting. “This is my new thing,” Giannis told his teammates.”
Typos, tricks and misprints | Aeon
- “English spelling is ridiculous. Sew and new don’t rhyme. Kernel and colonel do. When you see an ough, you might need to read it out as ‘aw’ (thought), ‘ow’ (drought), ‘uff’ (tough), ‘off’ (cough), ‘oo’ (through), or ‘oh’ (though). The ea vowel is usually pronounced ‘ee’ (weak, please, seal, beam) but can also be ‘eh’ (bread, head, wealth, feather). Those two options cover most of it — except for a handful of cases, where it’s ‘ay’ (break, steak, great). Oh wait, one more… there’s earth. No wait, there’s also heart.”
Market Sizing Guide | PearVC
Cathie Wood, Meme-Stock Champion Who Bet Big on Tesla and Bitcoin, Stands Her Ground | WSJ
- “Fans of fund manager Cathie Wood have built websites that track her every investment move. They sell T-shirts with her picture in the style of the Barack Obama “Hope” poster and with the ticker symbol of her flagship exchange-traded fund, ARK Innovation. On social media, they call her “Mamma Cathie,” “Aunt Cathie” and, in South Korea, “Money Tree.”
- Behind the adoration is her unchecked enthusiasm for a certain kind of speculative investment: companies that generate little or no profit but have what she says is the potential to change the world through “disruptive innovation.” Her asset-management firm, ARK Investment Management LLC, has bet heavily on buzzy sectors including alternative-energy businesses, space exploration and digital currencies.”
- Related: Elon Musk’s abrupt reversal on bitcoin conflicts with research from Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest that argues mining is actually environmentally beneficial | Markets Insider
Podcasts
The Pros and Cons of America’s (Extreme) Individualism | Freakonomics
- “According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; we’re also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity (but low on “uncertainty avoidance,” if that makes you feel better). We look at how these traits affect our daily lives and why we couldn’t change them even if we wanted to.”
The Dangers of Woke Culture — with Sam Harris | Prof G Show
- “Today, Sam shares his thoughts on why call out culture is an unproductive vehicle for creating change, addressing systemic problems, and facilitating debates. He also explains how we should establish a principle of charity — even with those who we may not agree with.”
Capitalism, Morality, and the Dark Psychology of Social Networks — with Jonathan Haidt | Prof G Show
- “Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business, joins the pod again for a conversation on how social media disrupts our democracy and the mental health of young people.”
This Is Your Brain on Pollution | Freakonomics
- “Air pollution is estimated to cause 7 million deaths a year and cost the global economy nearly $3 trillion. But is the true cost even higher? Stephen Dubner explores the links between pollution and cognitive function, and enlists two fellow Freakonomics Radio Network hosts in a homegrown experiment.”
Emerging Technologies and China’s Crackdown on Tech — with Josh Wolfe | Prof G Show
- “Josh Wolfe, the co-founder of Lux Capital, joins Scott to discuss his thoughts on the tech regulations coming out of China, and how investors should be thinking about them. He also discusses the sectors he’s keeping tabs on, including space and the metaverse, and the ones that he thinks are over and underhyped.”
Carl Kawaja — Wisdom from Decades of Investing | Invest Like the Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy
- “Carl Kawaja, who has served as a portfolio manager at Capital Group for decades. Capital Group is among the most respected shareholders in the world, with over $2T of assets, and listening to Carl, you’ll hear why.
- In our conversation, we cover Carl’s criteria for building conviction around long-term holdings, why he views uncertainty and ambiguity as healthy, and why tolerating failure is key to great investing career. Throughout our discussion, Carl connects his lessons through a variety of direct experiences, personal analogies, and broader frameworks. I love his ability to talk in the weeds about his investments in Vale and TSMC and then quickly shift to his broader thematic views like “The Empire Strikes Back.”
Nifty Gateway and the Significance of NFTs with Griffin Cock Foster | For Your Innovation by ARK Invest
Should We Just Ignore Our Weaknesses? | Freakonomics’ No Stupid Questions
How Contagious Is Behavior? With Laurie Santos of “The Happiness Lab.” | Freakonomics’ No Stupid Questions
The ₿ Word — featuring Cathie Wood, Jack Dorsey, and Elon Musk | For Your Innovation by ARK Invest
Inside TikTok’s Secretive Algorithm | WSJ (Video)
The 30 Best Bits of Advice We’ve Heard on Our Podcast (So Far) | First Round Review
GPT-3 Beyond the Hype | Future by a16z
Product-Market Sales Fit (What Comes First?) | Future by a16z
The Meaning of Emoji | Future by a16z
Musique
Guitar Inspiration | A Playlist by James Shecter
- My favorite guitar tracks from decades past… Grateful Dead, Hendrix, Clapton, Led Zeppelin, John Mayer…
Face | Brockhampton
- Summer earworm with jazzy routes and smooth rhymes
Night Moves | Bob Seger
- Making “night moves” just as relevant today as it was when this was released in 1976… Light rock and upbeat vibe
Feel Good | Polo & Pan
- The French duo’s back at it with a modern bossa nova / disco track that’ll do ya right for lounging or the dancefloor