My Content List #33 | Mon 9/27/21

Opening Rant: Feedback Cycles, Hedonic Treadmill, and The Great Humbling

[First time reading Content Lists? Feel free to check out where it all started…]

Back in Philadelphia, where it’s (finally) transitioning from the swampy Summer heat to that perfectly-temperate early Fall. Still, it’s no LA… 😜

Here at school, we’ve already had more in-person classes+events+etc. in the first few weeks this year than all of last year combined !! The energy on campus is palpable, coupled with cautious optimism that COVID doesn’t take another turn for the worse and derail it all…

All the more reason for us all — here in Philly and beyond— to be grateful, to find appreciation in momentary goodness amidst the wildly entropic world of ours.

A few quick-hit existential ponderings await you, just ahead…

I. Feedback Cycles (Short vs. Long)

There are a few reasons that render me envious of my friends/peers who work at hedge funds, but the biggest is the fact that they have perhaps the shortest decision →outcome feedback process of any industry. Why? They can accurately mark-to-market at any time.

Taking stakes in public companies stock (or bonds, commodities, options, etc.) requires synthesizing sector-specific, macro, and other quantitative realms. That plus the ineffable, Force-like qualitative component that enables the best traders to prophesy about future.

Sure it may take time for a thesis to manifest, but because exchanges (supply-demand aggregators based on bid/ask spreads, like the NYSE, NASDAQ, etc.) exist, a hedge fund knows exactly how it’s performing at any given moment, with little uncertainty. Instant gratification (or defeat).

The role as a venture capitalist (especially at the early stage) is at the opposite end of the spectrum, from a temporal decision-to-outcome perspective.

A VC’s decision to invest relies far more on those qualitative components; there’s definitely some “science” to this process, but the best investors seem like sage Force-wielding soothsayers when it comes to envisioning (and/or manifesting) tomorrow’s world.

And it takes 5–10+ years (i.e., FREAKIN’ FOREVER) for an investment decision to transmogrify into an exit. Indeed a VC has interim clues — tracking KPIs, subsequent capital raises, etc. — to monitor and track progress. And firms oft do comps-based valuation analyses to show LPs the latest return multiples on the portfolio (a process that IS NEVER EVER EVER (!!) influenced by selection bias…)

But at the end of the day, the exit is what matters most (as Machiavellian as that sounds). That’s when your returns are crystallized; when the J-curve swings back upwards. Anything that happens in the interim is “on paper” — theoretical at best, fictitious at worst.

So, working in VC industry is essentially signing yourself up to have (essentially) ZERO insight for AT LEAST a half-decade into whether you can *actually* do the job…

Sounds crazy right? Turns out working in VC is far from the only circumstance in which we have long feedback cycles in the game of life.

• Habit formation (e.g. exercise, meditating, journaling): you likely won’t perceive any differences on a day-to-day basis, but in the medium/long run continuous adherence can yield HUGE dividends to your physicality, mental state, cogitating abilities, etc..
• Choosing what/where to study or what industries to pursue + where to work **in the early innings** of your career: In each of those contexts, the “outcome” is often oriented towards the next achievement (aka the “exit opps”, same lingo as VC land). Stated differently, these choices are means to an “end” (whatever end you seek), not the end in themselves. You haven’t really “made it” by virtue of achieving any of this; they just enable you to get to where the “fun” really begins! There are rarely shortcuts when ascending up the ladder of achievement; but cynics might argue that this ladder’s more like a hamster wheel.

And many venture investors also work as value-add strategists; they’re not just twiddling their thumbs during the hold period, they help with growth, marketing, customer relationships, etc. Also note we could slip down rabbit holes about this phenomenon arising in interpersonal contexts and relationships as well, but I’ll refrain (for now).

This sentiment’s also not meant to take anything away from striving for long-term goals. Even endeavors that appear to be “quick” successes actually require years and years of groundwork — as this guy you might’ve heard of eloquently states:

Psychologically speaking, we’re wired to crave interim feedback (and by “wired,” I mean genetically conditioned over millennia to seek out reactions to / sense-check our behavior). We’ve covered our species’ innate pro-sociality before; it’s relevant here because social (or any) feedback allows us to course-correct!

But interestingly, seeking too much feedback can become a crutch — the kind that dampens one’s ability to build intuition. Note the theory of “learned helplessness” in developmental settings. Sometimes it’s better to try →fail →learn than ask a coworker/superior (or significant other) questions about each step of the process. “How am I doing / what should I do next?” — those are questions we should be asking as much of ourselves than of others.

After all, you’re the captain of this ship. Having a sense of self-sufficiency and autonomy is a necessary component of enduring fulfillment: if, over the long run, you over-weight what *others* think/what they tell you to do over *your own* beliefs/thoughts/etc., your life achievements will have been co-opted. That is not the way.

Journey over destination.

II. Life’s “Hedonic Treadmill”

We’ve talked before about the trickiness of expectations, and how some (simplistically) equate happiness to:

I wrote then (in CL #27):

If you set a low bar for yourself [i.e. low Expectations, in the equation], you’re surely more likely to clear it. But lasting Satisfaction comes not from clearing a low bar, but from the pursuit of increasingly elevated self-defined goals.

The “Hedonic Treadmill” refers to the fact that our Expectations become increasingly elevated as we achieve better Realities, thus negating any positive impact to overall Happiness levels.

To get even more mathematical for a purely qualitative concept (… my specialty), the Hedonic Treadmill implies that there is a correlation between Reality and Expectations.

• If your Reality is bleak (impoverished, unhealthy, etc.), you probably have pretty low Expectations.
• If your Reality’s pretty solid (say, a healthy millionaire) you’ve got a whole different set of “higher” Expectations.

The kicker is this: despite vastly different levels of Reality, these folks may have similar levels of Happiness because the net difference between Reality and Expectations (in the above equation) is the same!

For the healthy millionaire, the high watermarks he or she set while ~questing~ for that state continuously became their new “baseline”; their “new normal.” It works in both directions… Hell, we’ve been in this pandemic so long, I’m now ELATED when I don’t have to wear a mask in a social setting…

We’re evolutionarily conditioned to adjust to our new surroundings as quickly as possible. Obviously this is essential for survival, but it can impede our ability to ~thrive~ because we quickly forget how bad(or good) we had it before.

So is there a solution here? I think, firstly, awareness of this upwardly-creeping-Expectations phenomenon goes a long way. If you can be (1) deliberate about goal-setting and (2) grateful for and proud of all the micro-achievements along the way, I’d argue you’ll find more Happiness.

I define the (overused) word “mindful” to refer to a state of elevated cognizance, lucidity, and intentionality. With respect to setting future-looking Expectations and managing those against your Reality, manifesting that mindful state is the best way to solve for these variables.

In that state, you’ll not only be able to cultivate purer motivations (esp. career-wise); you’ll be able to stop and smell the roses while doing so.

III. The Great Humbling & Your Inner Child

Over final weeks of Summer, I was able to spend a nice stretch with my family — especially my niece, nephew, and younger cousins. I don’t know about you, but I LOVE hearing kids’ perspectives on life.

Hot takes galore; some utterly ridiculous things come out of their mouths… But also some wildly incisive brilliance; tidbits of precocious (/sometimes accidental) wisdom that a Socrates or Confucius would’ve wished was attributed to them.

When it comes to their ambitions, they’ll enthusiastically tell you one moment that they’re going to the moon; the next that they’re going to win the Super Bowl. Then when you ask again, they want to be a scientist or doctor, an artist, a teacher… you get the point.

When they “grow up,” many kids will say they want to be ALL of those things ALL at the same time. Their aspirations are ~boundless~.

I mention all this because it’s intriguing to me how, over the years, these aspirations get beaten out of us. Call it a Great Humbling, but that’s perhaps a bit too gentle for the nature of this conditioning process. Obviously a college student is going to talk about their future differently than a pre-teen… But the college student/young adult still has a TON of time to re-chart their course; even more seasoned adults do! We needn’t be just another brick in the wall.

I’ve mentioned this before (see CL #18), but at *every age* from 18–65, we VASTLY underestimate how much we ACTUALLY change over the subsequent decade. Specifically:

in a study conducted by psychologist Dan Gilbert about “why we make decisions that our future selves often regret” and our “fundamental misconception about the passage of time.” He and his co-authors asked respondents (1) “How much do you anticipate your values/personality will change over the next 10 years?” and (2) “How much did your values/personality change over the last 10 years?” The results: At every age, from 18–68, people underestimate how much they will *actually* change over the next 10 years.

In the process of writing this, I came across a visual from the great Tim Urban that perfectly captures the essence of this thesis:

By the time the “real world” chews you up and sh*ts you out in one way or another (which I’d argue happens to every adult at some point), it can feel like you’re trapped in the grooves of that job, those relationships, this “path.”

The aperture of feasibility inherently narrows over time, but really it’s a lot wider than we give it credit for — at any age, in any (well, almost any) situation.

The truth is it’s not all that hard to push eject and change course; we covered this in depth in CL #28 on Linear Narratives and Forced Rationalization.

If nothing else, let this passage re-connect you to your inner child. They’re in there somewhere —

… brimming with unbridled imagination and creativity,

… capable of deriving joy from something as simple as blowing bubbles or doodling;

… fundamentally trusting of the world and those in it, saying and thinking things that you now realize are flat-out crazy…

I’ve said before that none of us should take ourselves too seriously, and if you’re acquainted with your inner child it’s less likely you’ll fall into that trap.

Joan Child’s sculpture “Inner Child”

Assessing any situation with a beginner’s naivety may present more unique or otherwise creative solutions than someone who’s been deeply entrenched by rules/norms. And when it comes to “crazy” ideas/goals and tweaking (or uprooting) your circumstances to pursue them, remember what Jobs said:

Just so ya don’t think I myself am slipping into the category of “taking oneself too seriously”, especially in an Opening Rant where I’ve been particularly prescriptive… I’ll close with one last tidbit that felt highly relatable and legit made me l-o-l:

To sum it up: all advice is context-dependent, and you definitely shouldn’t take my word as gospel. But I hope you enjoyed perusing my perspectives.

Another intriguing Content List awaits you below, covering how to cultivate a sense of wonder, reluctant pop stars, supply chain snarlings, ludicrous asymmetries in health care costs, “smart” toilets, wanting what you can’t have, why NFTs aren’t the next asset bubble, social monetization, mass clickbait-ificiation, and beyond…

Have something to contribute? Think my reasoning is flawed?

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

To get notified when the next Content List drops, follow me @James Shecter. Or don’t; I’ll live.

My Content List #33 | Mon 9/27/21

Articles

Why You Need to Protect Your Sense of Wonder — Especially Now | HBR

• “As the pandemic era goes on, more than ever we need ways to refresh our energies, calm our anxieties, and nurse our well-being. The cultivation of experiences of awe can bring these benefits and has been attracting increased attention due to more rigorous research. At its core, awe has an element of vastness that makes us feel small; this tends to decrease our mental chatter and worries and helps us think about ideas, issues, and people outside of ourselves, improving creativity and collaboration as well as energy. The authors, a physician and a psychologist, have facilitated hundreds of resilience and well-being workshops; they suggest a number of awe interventions for individual professionals as well as groups.”

Back to School | Prof Scott Galloway

• “McKinsey projects that this learning gap will reduce lifetime earnings for K-12 students by an average of $49,000 to $61,000. By the time the majority of these kids have joined the workforce in 2040, it’s estimated we’ll have lost as much as $188 billion a year in GDP due to unfinished learning during the pandemic.
• As with most things, these ill effects are falling disproportionately on the poor and children of color. Black kids are six months behind in math and learning, whereas white kids are “only” four and three months behind.
• Meanwhile, the U.S. educational system has been losing ground to those of our international peers for years. American students routinely score lower on tests of basic skills than students in other countries, a trend that isn’t likely to reverse.”

Lorde, Billie Eilish, And The Reluctant Pop Star | BuzzFeed News

• “It’s a steady album, devoid of Lorde’s signature big choruses. Scan its 12 tracks and you’ll find a record entirely unconcerned with hit-making. Lorde is no longer in the smash business. She’s fresh out of bangers. Alongside the shift in focus, Lorde has also telegraphed a shift in ambition: She told the Wall Street Journal she doesn’t want to play arenas anymore. “I would much rather have a room with 5,000 people in it who know every word to every song … than have 18,000 people who heard two songs on the radio and liked them,” she said. “I’m an amphitheater girl. I’m a 150-year-old theater girl.”
• So the old Lorde can’t come to the phone right now. The scaled-back sounds of Solar Power make for an album that is only interested in its own rubric for success, satisfied to lounge and breathe deeply. It’s also not on its own: Solar Power fits in with a pop moment where other stars like Billie Eilish are pulling back, no longer expanding their audience at all costs and no longer striving for ubiquity. Welcome to the age of the reluctant pop star.”

The Cutthroat World of $10 Ice Cream | NYTimes

• “For shoppers worn down by the journey through a hangar-size Whole Foods, it’s also a reward: an ultradecadent bounty in an ever-multiplying variety of daring and imaginative flavors.
• It has never been a better time to eat ice cream or a more cutthroat time to try to sell it.
• Fueled by pandemic trends of “at-home comfort” and “anytime eating,” the $7 billion industry grew 17 percent in 2020, after roughly 2.4 percent annual growth over the previous decade, said Jennifer Mapes-Christ of the market research firm Packaged Facts. Artisan ice cream — a “squishy” term, she said, that usually refers to product with less air and more fat but “mostly just means ‘fancy’” — is growing even faster than mainstream ice cream and is considered the industry’s future.”

Bad News — Selling the Story of Disinformation | Harper’s

• “The Commission on Information Disorder is the latest (and most creepily named) addition to a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia, and policy research: Big Disinfo. A kind of EPA for content, it seeks to expose the spread of various sorts of “toxicity” on social-media platforms, the downstream effects of this spread, and the platforms’ clumsy, dishonest, and half-hearted attempts to halt it. As an environmental cleanup project, it presumes a harm model of content consumption. Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in belief or behavior that are bad, by some standard. Otherwise, why care what people read and watch?”

Inside Supermoon Capital’s Big Dreams For Its Sleep Tech Focused Fund | Crunchbase

• Congrats Grayson!!! Excited see what’s ahead here
• “San Francisco-based Supermoon Capital launched its first fund last month: $36 million dedicated to pre-seed through Series A startups trying to partner with medical teams to solve sleep disorders, make products that will help people get better rest, and explore some of the untouched corners of sleep science, including dreams.
• “Until recently, investing our time and money to improve and enhance our sleep was seen as imprudent and unproductive,” Supermoon co-founder Grayson Judge said in a recent interview. “But today, people understand that sleep is really important for long-term health and wellness and demand for solutions is continually growing. Supermoon may be the world’s first VC firm that exclusively focuses on sleep, but it isn’t alone in trying to tap into what the firm’s three co-founders describe as the “night market.””

Would Plato tweet? The Ancient Greek guide to social media | BBC

• “The influential pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes presented his ideas in the context of rhapsodic contests, where poets vied for prizes and renown — philosophical rap competitions, of a sort. Early philosophers also developed highly elaborate public personas. Empedocles, who’s credited with inventing the idea of the four Classical elements, made his public appearances with extravagant flair — a purple robe, a golden belt, sandals of bronze — and referred to himself as an incarnate god.
• If these modes of self-presentation had included the ability to take video, you would have had some potentially very viral philosophers. They were, in their manner, akin to content creators and influencers, in that their intellectual authority consisted not only in their ideas, but their performative eloquence, and the cult of personality with which they surrounded themselves.
• Perhaps the most famous ancient Greek philosopher managed to disseminate his ideas without ever writing anything at all. Socrates, as we’re told, conducted in-the-moment philosophical conversations, usually in public places, in which he challenged conventional wisdom on various topics — provoking his fellow citizens, and, fatally for himself, the government. His art was verbal, but his expressions were as transient as a tweet or a post, a virtuous troll in the comments sections of Athenian intellectual life.”

The Pain Was Unbearable. So Why Did Doctors Turn Her Away? | Wired

• “Appriss is adamant that a NarxCare score is not meant to supplant a doctor’s diagnosis. But physicians ignore these numbers at their peril. Nearly every state now uses Appriss software to manage its prescription drug monitoring programs, and most legally require physicians and pharmacists to consult them when prescribing controlled substances, on penalty of losing their license. In some states, police and federal law enforcement officers can also access this highly sensitive medical information — in many cases without a warrant — to prosecute both doctors and patients.
• In essence, Kathryn found, nearly all Americans have the equivalent of a secret credit score that rates the risk of prescribing controlled substances to them. And doctors have authorities looking over their shoulders as they weigh their own responses to those scores.”

Life, death and gabagool: how The Sopranos explains everything | Guardian

• “In lesser hands, Tony’s therapist would be a convenient rhetorical device designed to explain — and worse, excuse — the lead character’s bad behaviour. What’s smart is how talking therapy is used to complicate our understanding of the show’s patients, not consolidate it. Tony and Dr Melfi’s discussions reveal how we often dance round our problems instead of looking them in the eye. Her analysis of Tony’s Oedipal complex needles at his taste for self-destructive brunettes, a recurring issue throughout the show”

The Social-Media Stars Who Move Markets | WSJ

• “Along with the rise of commission-free online trading has come demand for advice at the lowest price in the most accessible place: free, and online. Now, a new generation of Jim Cramers has risen up on social media with massive followings as guides to these market newbies. Many of these influencers have no formal training as financial advisers and no background in professional investing, leading them to pick stocks based on the whims of popular opinion or to dispense money-losing advice.
• Today, he’s MeetKevin, a YouTube influencer with 1.7 million subscribers. Most days, he live-streams on the platform for several hours, talking about the stock market and doling out investing advice in a rapid-fire, self-deprecating manner. He banters with commenters, hams it up with silly British accents and sips coffee in front of a wall in his home studio hung with brightly colored cartoon posters and a turquoise electric guitar. In addition to the live streams, he’s made hundreds of videos on a range of investment-advice topics… [MeetKevin] says he earned $5 million in the first three months of this year, as page views and demand for his guidance have skyrocketed during the pandemic.”

Blood Brothers: the friendship and fallout of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali | Guardian

Experts Versus Elites | Overcoming Bias

• “When an academic wins a Nobel prize, they have achieved a pinnacle of expertise. At which point they often start to wax philosophic, and writing op-eds. They seem to be making a bid to become an elite. Because we all respect and want to associate with elites far more than with experts. Elites far less often lust after becoming experts, because we are often willing to treat elites as if they are experts. For example, when a journalist writes a popular book on science, they are often willing to field science questions when they give a talk on their book. And the rest of us are far more interested in hearing them talk on the subject than the scientists they write about.”

Gary Gensler on Crypto, SPACs, and Robinhood Wall Street’s top cop wants to police new finance with old rules. | NYMag

• “Can I just say something? [Robinhood] is not “free.” It’s a misnomer. It is not free, and it costs everybody who goes on those platforms. Because the platform is doing multiple things: One, they’re selling your order flow. Two, they’re collecting data, and the person paying for the order flow is getting that data. There’s an inherent conflict because your order — your buy or sell order — is not necessarily competing in the market. So it is anything but free.”

Hospitals and Insurers Didn’t Want You to See These Prices. Here’s Why. | NYTimes

Why Is the Supply Chain Still So Snarled? We Explain, With a Hot Tub | WSJ

• “The global supply chain is an intricate ballet of container ships, airplanes, trucks and trains. The coronavirus pandemic threw it out of whack. This is why you often can’t buy the goods you want.
• Hot-tub maker Bullfrog Spas saw demand soar as homebound consumers upgraded their backyards. Yet its supply chain spans thousands of miles across continents and oceans. On a typical day, its Herriman, Utah, factory takes delivery of 40,000 gallons of chemicals, 400 sheets of plastic and up to 60,000 additional components.
• “We have the best-case scenario on the demand side and the worst-case on the supply-chain side,” said Bullfrog CEO Jerry Pasley.”

Back to the Future: Myspace and Gen Z Digital Identity | Digital Native

• “The digital native generation is being trained to customize rich, complex virtual worlds. These worlds are returning to the chaos and agency of expression on Myspace. Scapin’, for instance, lets anyone create customized virtual spaces to hang out with friends or strangers. In some ways, it’s Roblox for adults. Other startups, like Dreamworld and Manticore Games, are blurring the lines of sandbox games, social networks, and customized virtual spaces.”

The Morally Troubling ‘Dirty Work’ We Pay Others to Do in Our Place | NYTimes

• “Of course, there are questions about the moral culpability of the workers Press describes, about how they can continue to do the jobs they do. He is fascinated by Hannah Arendt’s thesis from “Eichmann in Jerusalem” (1963) about the banality of evil, the horrors committed thoughtlessly by those “just following orders.” Her view was supported by the results of Stanley Milgram’s “shock experiments,” published during the same period, in which subjects were instructed to deliver dangerous electrical shocks to a person (in fact an actor screaming on a tape recorder) in an adjacent room. At least in the version of the results Milgram publicized widely, most subjects complied. The New York Times framed a 1963 report on the experiments by asking, “What sort of people, slavishly doing what they are told, would send millions of fellow humans into gas chambers or commit other such atrocities?” The answer was that conditions could quite easily be created in which people acted with blind obedience. Milgram himself frequently compared his subjects to Eichmann.”

The Interface Phase | NotBoring

• “The last major paradigm shift before web3 was mobile. Internet on the phone dates back to the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), which was introduced in 1999. The Nokia 7110, released October of that year, gave its owners a rudimentary ability to do things like check sports scores, headlines, or weather (apps), but it burned tons of expensive data in the process. As wireless coverage and speeds improved, data rates came down, and 3G rolled out in 2003 (infrastructure improvements) mobile phone makers began offering slightly-less-basic mobile browsers. But without Apple’s 2007 iPhone release and 2008 iPhone App Store launch (and Android’s subsequent Play Store), mobile internet would likely not have become ubiquitous.”

Are NFTs The New Napster? This Time The Music Industry Isn’t Taking Chances | Forbes

• ““The model that I’m working on is meant to be a reverse record deal,” says Blau, who is 30 and has worked with acts like Rihanna, Katy Perry and Ariana Grande. Instead of what he called the “predatory” 80% that most labels take, he plans to fund production costs by selling directly to fans. His team is now in conversations with Billie Eilish, Madonna and Metallica and preparing for what he hopes will be the first blockchain music auction to be hosted at Christie’s, the London auction house.”

These People Who Work From Home Have a Secret: They Have Two Jobs | WSJ

• “They were bored. Or worried about layoffs. Or tired of working hard for a meager raise every year. They got another job offer. Now they have a secret.
• A small, dedicated group of white-collar workers, in industries from tech to banking to insurance, say they have found a way to double their pay: Work two full-time remote jobs, don’t tell anyone and, for the most part, don’t do too much work, either. Alone in their home offices, they toggle between two laptops. They play “Tetris” with their calendars, trying to dodge endless meetings. Sometimes they log on to two meetings at once. They use paid time off — in some cases, unlimited — to juggle the occasional big project or ramp up at a new gig. Many say they don’t work more than 40 hours a week for both jobs combined. They don’t apologize for taking advantage of a system they feel has taken advantage of them.”
• Related: How Freelancing Is Changing Work | NYTimes
• Related: Why are so many knowledge workers quitting? New Yorker

Space-reduced Cemeteries. | Billion Dollar Startup Ideas

• “This business would develop a myriad of technologies to change how we die. Rather than cremating or burying, both of which take space, this business would focus on creating digital representations of people for the memory of family members. Of course, the traditional view of ideas like this is to upload ones consciousness to the Internet. “Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, has predicted that by 2030 we will be able to connect our brain to the cloud. Investor Sam Altman, who co-founded the prestigious Y Combinator program that funds and supports start-ups, is another believer. ‘I assume my brain will be uploaded on the cloud,’ he recently told the MIT Technology Review, explaining why he has joined Nectome’s list of subscribers.”

Direct-to-consumer retailers try to bring pizzazz to dull goods | The Economist

• “The playbook used to be simple. At its inception Warby Parker faced few dtc rivals and enjoyed low costs and readily available capital. The rise of Shopify and Amazon enabled aspiring entrepreneurs to open shops with a few clicks and a few dollars. Operating digitally opened a treasure chest of data on customer behaviour and allowed precise targeting on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Sans serif fonts, neat designs, millennial lingo and socially conscious mission statements still seemed novel. “It couldn’t have been easier to start a dtc brand,” says Len Schlesinger of Harvard Business School. “You didn’t even need a good idea.””

Meta… verse | Professor Scott Galloway

• “The Zuck is obsessed with another Augustus, world-conquering emperor Augustus Caesar. But the boy-who-would-be-emperor has a problem, something standing between him and greater wealth and power. Not the Facebook board; he’s neutered that via dual-class shares. Not the government; his 900-person comms department, coupled with a massive increase in lobbying expenditures, has dispensed with that nuisance. The last remaining obstacle is the world itself … it’s distracting.
• So Zuck envisions a series of virtual worlds to absorb our remaining attention. The arbiter of activity algorithms in that world would be a god — and able to serve a shit-ton of targeted Nissan ads.”

The Facebook Files | WSJ

• “Facebook Inc. knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands. That is the central finding of a Wall Street Journal series, based on a review of internal Facebook documents, including research reports, online employee discussions and drafts of presentations to senior management.”

Nifty Corporates | Not Boring

• “The internet started with university researchers (the first transaction facilitated by the internet was a 1972 weed deal between Stanford and MIT researchers via Arpanet) and spread to message boards and chat rooms before going mainstream. By 1999, internet startups were raising at eye-popping valuations and every incumbent company needed a website. Adding “.com” to a corporate name sent stock prices soaring.
• Similarly, web3 spent its first decade or so as a playground for researchers, coders, and degens. People bought drugs with crypto, too. Last year, corporates started dipping their toes by buying Bitcoin with their balance sheets. Over the past month or so, though, it really feels as if web2 companies are waking up to the fact that they need to figure out their web3 strategy or they’re not gonna make it. In addition to the VISA and Budweiser purchases, in the past month alone:
• Coca-Cola sold four NFTs.
• Arizona Iced Tea bought a Bored Ape.
• Discord surveyed its users on web3 features.
• Twitter named a new head of BlueSky, its decentralized social network project.
• Cannabis delivery company Eaze is hiring a Principal Blockchain Engineer to facilitate payments with crypto and reduce the dependency on payment processors that has plagued OnlyFans.
• Shopify launched NFT sale capabilities, and the Chicago Bulls availed themselves of the capabilities to sell NFTs to their fans.”
• Related: Why NFTs Aren’t the Next Asset Bubble | Digital Native

Unbundling College: Technology Is (Finally) Reinventing Education | Digital Native

• “Quietly, higher education was always an excuse to justify the college lifestyle. But the pandemic has revealed that university life is far more embedded in the American idea than anyone thought. America is deeply committed to the dream of attending college. It’s far less interested in the education for which students supposedly attend.
• [Education] is just a small part of college’s purpose. In the United States, higher education offers a fantasy for how kids should grow up: by competing for admission to a rarefied place, which erects a safe cocoon that facilitates debauchery and self-discovery, out of which an adult emerges. The process — not just the result, a degree — offers access to opportunity, camaraderie, and even matrimony. Partying, drinking, sex, clubs, fraternities: These rites of passage became an American birthright.”

China Set to Pass One of the World’s Strictest Data-Privacy Laws | WSJ

• “The world’s leading practitioner of state surveillance is set to usher in a far-reaching new privacy regime. China’s top legislative body is expected this week to pass a privacy law that resembles the world’s most robust framework for online privacy protections, Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. But unlike European governments, which themselves face more public pressure over data collection, Beijing is expected to maintain broad access to data under the new Personal Information Protection Law.”’

Cannabis Retailers Seek to Unlock The Healing Power of Pot | WSJ

• “Though questions remain about the efficacy of compounds isolated from the rest of the cannabis plant, the rise of biosynthesis will allow for a purified, consistent study drug, hastening scientific understanding of each compound’s potential toxicities and benefits, cannabis researchers say. Analysts at the investment bank Raymond James predict the nascent biosynthetic cannabinoid industry will be worth $10 billion globally by 2025. This is despite potential legal complications arising from selling cannabis-related products, even if the compounds were grown in a lab.
• “The marijuana plant has tremendous potential, so the more access we have to the constituents of marijuana, the more we can continue to move the science forward,” says Dr. David Shurtleff, the deputy director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health at the National Institutes of Health.”

How TikTok Serves Up Sex and Drug Videos to Minors | WSJ

How to Work with Someone Who Creates Unnecessary Conflict | HBR

• “Disagreements on a team aren’t necessarily a bad thing. But you want to watch out for unhealthy conflicts that hijack precious time, trust, and energy. Often this type of animosity develops when there’s a “conflict entrepreneur” on your team — someone who inflames conflict for their own ends. The author suggests several actions you can take to identify these people and mitigate their negative impact, including resisting the urge to demonize them, spending more time with them, redirecting their energy when possible, and encouraging open disagreement and decency from everyone in the organization by establishing good-conflict practices.”

Ready for the roaring 20s? It’s time to re-learn how to have fun, says happiness professor | Guardian

• “After a year-and-a-half of loss, sickness and stress caused by the pandemic, burnout is high and morale is low. But in some positive news, according to Laurie Santos, Yale’s “happiness professor”, the way to feel better need not depend on restrictive diets, gruelling fitness regimes or testing mental challenges, but in something far more attractive: fun.”

Fresh Today, Faded Tomorrow? Brand Resilience in a Changing World | Tasha Kim

Meet Altos Labs, Silicon Valley’s latest wild bet on living forever | MIT Technology Review

The Secret to Happiness at Work | The Atlantic

• “Decades of studies have shown that the people most satisfied with their work are those who find a fundamental match between their employer’s values and their own. This is especially true when the values have special moral, philosophical, or spiritual significance. For example, a 2012 study on Iranian nurses found that the happiest ones believed their work was “a divine profession and a tool by which they could gain spiritual pleasure and satisfaction.” Many of my colleagues feel the same way about the vocation of higher education, and as the late philosopher Michael Novak wrote, that sense of a calling can be found in business as well.”

Smartwatches Track Our Health. Smart Toilets Aren’t Too Far Behind. | WSJ

• “The next frontier of at-home health tracking is flush with data: the toilet.
• Researchers and companies are developing high-tech toilets that go beyond adding smart speakers or a heated seat. These smart facilities are designed to look out for signs of gastrointestinal disease, monitor blood pressure or tell you that you need to eat more fish, all from the comfort of your personal throne.
• “All of the things that have come with smartwatches and phones, you can imagine that on another scale,” says Joshua Coon, a bioanalytical chemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Morgridge Institute for Research, who published a 2019 study exploring the potential of continuously monitoring a person’s health by looking at molecules in their urine samples. “You could really start to understand disease risk.””

The Silent Partner Cleaning Up Facebook for $500 Million a Year | WSJ

• “Facebook and Accenture have rarely talked about their arrangement or even acknowledged that they work with each other. But their secretive relationship lies at the heart of an effort by the world’s largest social media company to distance itself from the most toxic part of its business.
• For years, Facebook has been under scrutiny for the violent and hateful content that flows through its site. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, has repeatedly pledged to clean up the platform. He has promoted the use of artificial intelligence to weed out toxic posts and touted efforts to hire thousands of workers to remove the messages that the A.I. doesn’t.
• But behind the scenes, Facebook has quietly paid others to take on much of the responsibility. Since 2012, the company has hired at least 10 consulting and staffing firms globally to sift through its posts, along with a wider web of subcontractors, according to interviews and public records.”

Deepfakes Are Now Making Business Pitches | Wired

• “New workplace technologies often start life as both status symbols and productivity aids. The first car phones and PowerPoint presentations closed deals and also signaled their users’ clout.
• Some partners at EY, the accounting giant formerly known as Ernst & Young, are now testing a new workplace gimmick for the era of artificial intelligence. They spice up client presentations or routine emails with synthetic talking-head-style video clips starring virtual body doubles of themselves made with AI software — a corporate spin on a technology commonly known as deepfakes.”

The $150 Million Machine Keeping Moore’s Law Alive | Wired

• “The machine is being built by ASML, a Dutch company that has cornered the market for etching the tiniest nanoscopic features into microchips with light.
• ASML introduced the first extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines for mass production in 2017, after decades spent mastering the technique. The machines perform a crucial role in the chipmaking ecosystem, and they have been used in the manufacture of the latest, most advanced chips, including those in new iPhones as well as computers used for artificial intelligence. The company’s next EUV system, a part of which is being built in Wilton, Connecticut, will use a new trick to minimize the wavelength of light it uses — shrinking the size of features on the resulting chips and boosting their performance — more than ever before.”

What personality are you? How the Myers-Briggs test took over the world | Guardian

• “The business of “typing” people generates the Myers-Briggs Company a reported $20m annually from public and private institutions, militaries and universities, charities and sports teams who make use of it — not to mention 88 of the Fortune 100 companies. Away from the corporate world, the Myers-Briggs theory of personality has been embraced by enthusiasts as a hobby — even a way of life.”

China is tempting customers with its flawless AI idols — virtual influencers who don’t gain weight, never age, and keep their computer-generated noses out of controversy | Insider

• “”Five or ten years ago, people might have brought in a picture of a magazine cover supermodel. Now they’re bringing in a picture of themselves but just in a slightly optimized way, where Facetune or a Snapchat filter will give them a millimeter more of a cheekbone projection, or a fuller lip, or a straighter nose,” plastic surgeon Dr. Laura Devgan told Vice in 2018.
• All this unreality primed audiences for the rise of the virtual influencer. It’s tough to estimate just how much of the influencer market virtual influencers take up, but Bloomberg reported last October that Lil Miquela, a virtual influencer with 3 million followers on Instagram, makes around $8,500 for a sponsored post. And unlike social media influencers who were constrained by the pandemic and forced to stay in lockdown mode, Lil Miquela was free to work, even debuting a song at the online-only Lollapalooza last year.”

You’ve Never Heard of the Biggest Digital Media Company in America | NYTimes

• “Red Ventures, which started as a digital marketing company, has attracted serious investments from private equity firms. Its location has helped obscure what is perhaps the biggest digital publisher in America, a 4,500-employee juggernaut that says it has roughly $2 billion in annual revenues, a conservative valuation earlier this year of more than $11 billion, and more readers, as measured by Comscore, than any media brand you’ve ever heard of — an average of 751 million visits a month… “

The B2B Marketplace Funding Napkin 2021 | Julia Morrongiello

Today’s Taliban uses sophisticated social media practices that rarely violate the rules | Washington Post

• “Analysts caution that claims of a more evolved and tolerant Taliban should not be taken at face value at a time when a movement that once hosted Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda reintroduces itself to a skeptical world. The Taliban espouses a profoundly traditional notion of Islam, one that has many Afghans with more modern views fleeing in terror by any means possible.
• At the same time, the ability of the Taliban and its supporters to operate substantially within the rules of companies such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has left Silicon Valley vulnerable to intensifying political crosscurrents: U.S. conservatives have been demanding to know why former president Donald Trump has been banned from Twitter while various Taliban figures have not.”

Early-career setback and future career impact | Nature

• “Setbacks are an integral part of a scientific career, yet little is known about their long-term effects. Here we examine junior scientists applying for National Institutes of Health R01 grants. By focusing on proposals fell just below and just above the funding threshold, we compare near-miss with narrow-win applicants, and find that an early-career setback has powerful, opposing effects. On the one hand, it significantly increases attrition, predicting more than a 10% chance of disappearing permanently from the NIH system. Yet, despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run. Moreover, this performance advantage seems to go beyond a screening mechanism, suggesting early-career setback appears to cause a performance improvement among those who persevere. Overall, these findings are consistent with the concept that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” which may have broad implications for identifying, training and nurturing junior scientists.”

How narcissists climb the career ladder quickly | BBC

• “There are many good reasons for suspecting that narcissists might get ahead more quickly than their colleagues. Without the humility that would prevent others from tooting their own horn, narcissists may be especially good at self-promotion and ensuring that their contributions are recognised — even if they do not deserve to be held in such high esteem. (A 2017 study found that narcissists’ high appraisal of their own performance does not match objective measures of their actual achievements — which are no more remarkable than those of the people around them.)”

Social Monetization | Billion Dollar Startup Ideas

These Sensor-Studded Smart Clothes Just Might Save Your Life | WSJ

• “Neurodevelopmental disorders such as cerebral palsy or autism spectrum disorders originate early in life, research shows. Now, a toddler’s early steps can be followed in real time to identify manifestations of such disorders.
• Researchers at the University of Helsinki have developed Maiju, a jumpsuit for children that measures limb activity. A sensor positioned in each sleeve records acceleration and gyration movements. This data is then transmitted to a smartphone app and analyzed by an algorithm trained to recognize a child’s body posture and movement types every second. The algorithm categorizes the movements into five postures — supine, prone, sitting, crawling and standing — and assigns each a grade, from “still” to “fluent.”

The Clickbaitification of Netflix | Slate

• “ And Netflix recognizes that artwork — the thumbnails they present — is crucial to that decision-making. Since 2017, Netflix has customized its tiles based on a user’s viewing history, a change from its original quest to find the One Thumbnail to Lure Them All. This means (to take Netflix’s example) that if you watch a lot of romance, the company might serve you a thumbnail for Good Will Hunting that features Matt Damon and Minnie Driver smooching. If you love comedy, your Good Will Hunting thumbnail might feature Robin Williams. (More questionably, as outlets such as Wired have reported, if you’re Black, you’re going to end up seeing Black performers in your thumbnails, even if they’re relatively minor characters in the movie or show. I see Liam Neeson in my Love, Actually thumbnail; others might see Chiwetel Ejiofor.)”

No Porn Investments Please, Vice Clauses And How They’ve Evolved | Crunchbase

• “In the case of venture capital, vice clauses are restrictions by limited partners on where their money can be invested. According to Bryant Smick, a corporate attorney focused on startups at the law firm Carney Badley Spellman, VC funds typically don’t have their own vice clauses, but limited partners who invest their money in the fund do.
• “The LPs that require this stuff are almost always larger institutional investors, and the reason why they can pull this stuff is because they’re usually investing a lot of money in larger funds,” Smick said. “You don’t see vice clauses in smaller, seed-stage funds.”

Minimalist Phones Try to Give Users What They Need — Not Always What They Want | WSJ

• “A new device is slated to arrive in November: the Mudita Pure, a cellphone that can barely do anything — at least, compared with contemporary smartphones. It can make calls and send texts, but it cannot access social media, take photos or send email.
• The phone will cost around $369, and its monochrome screen won’t even load up a grid of Sudoku. But that, the company says, is the point.
• Mudita is one of a number of companies set up by entrepreneurs trying to establish the product category of minimalist phones, devices designed as an antithesis to the colorful, multifunctional and addictive smartphones that they believe can have too much control over modern lives.”

Brazilian Butt Lifts Surge, Despite Risks | NYTimes

• This one just made me laugh…
• “In 2020 alone, there were 40,320 buttock augmentations, which include both implants and fat grafting, reports the Aesthetic Society. According to Google keyword data, “BBL” was searched roughly 200,000 times per month between January and May 2021.
• It’s also one of the deadliest. A July 2017 report by the Aesthetic Surgery Education and Research Foundation in Aesthetic Surgery Journal noted that one to two out of 6,000 BBLs resulted in death, the highest mortality rate for any cosmetic surgery. In 2018, The British Association of Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery advised surgeons in the United Kingdom to stop performing it altogether, although they couldn’t ban it outright.”

They Still Live in the Shadow of Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes | NYTimes

• “A generation of female entrepreneurs — particularly those in life sciences, biotechnology and health care — is still operating in the shadow of Ms. Holmes. Though Theranos shut down in 2018, Ms. Holmes continues to loom large across the start-up world because of the audacity of her story, which has permeated popular culture and left behind a seemingly indelible image of how female founders can push boundaries.”

Digital Platforms Need Poison Cabinets | Slate

• More great stuff from my cousin Will Marks!
• “Foundational documents of liberal democracy, from the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, establish strong protections for free speech. Even so, the rise of digital platforms — and social media in particular — has added new wrinkles to our thinking on what types of expression should be able to circulate widely with ease.
• Urged on by well-substantiated claims of real-world harms arising from disinformation, harassment, and other forms of problematic content, policymakers and members of the public have placed pressure on online platforms to limit the availability of certain speech. It would be legally impossible for U.S. regulators to take such action themselves for much of that speech. Platforms, however, have much more power to shape the communities they cultivate and the information they promote. For instance, the United States government generally can’t silence those who spread general COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, even as the Biden administration claims it is killing people. Twitter, Facebook, and Google, however, can — and do — unilaterally move to contain or eliminate such speech and impose consequences on those responsible for it.”

Start-Up Boom in the Pandemic Is Growing Stronger | NYTimes

• “So far, however, the entrepreneurial boom has proved broader and more durable than early skeptics expected. Many of the biggest gains have been in industries heavily affected by the pandemic, such as retailing, food service and logistics, but there have also been significant increases in manufacturing, finance, construction and other sectors. And so far, at least, the economy’s reopening doesn’t seem to be pulling people away from entrepreneurship — the share of workers reporting they were self-employed hit an eight-year high in July.
• “There is evidence that this is something that is not just transitory,” said John Haltiwanger, a University of Maryland economist who was among the first to document the decline in entrepreneurship.”

It’s time to rethink air conditioning | Vox

• “What if the most American symbol of unsustainable consumption isn’t the automobile, but the air conditioner? In cool indoor spaces, it’s easy to forget that billions of people around the world don’t have cooling — and that air conditioning is worsening the warming that it’s supposed to protect us from.
• There are alternatives: We can build public cooling spaces and smarter cities, with fixes like white paint and more greenery. Some experts have hailed heat pump technology as a more efficient option. But as the planet warms and more of its inhabitants have spare income, AC sales are increasing. Ten air conditioners will be sold every second for the next 30 years, according to a United Nations estimate. Access to air conditioning can literally mean life or death for the young, elderly, and those with medical conditions such as compromised immune systems.”

The Changing Venture Landscape | Mark Suster

• “Nearly every corner of our market is over-valued. By definition — I’m over-paying for every check I write into the VC ecosystem and valuations are being pushed up to absurd levels and many of these valuations and companies won’t hold in the long term.
• However, to be a great VC you have to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. On the one hand, you’re over paying for every investment and valuations aren’t rational. On the other hand, the biggest winners will turn out to be much larger than the prices people paid for them and this will happen faster than at any time in human history.”

Crypto Bezos | Not Boring

If Networking Makes You Feel Dirty, You’re Doing It Wrong | NYTimes

• “So if you’re in the “networking feels disgusting” camp, changing your perspective might seem impossible. But a closer reading of Prof. Gino’s research reveals two crucial elements.
• The first is that the type of networking participants engaged in made a huge difference. What people felt bad about was transactional networking — i.e., networking to get something fast, like a job or an investment — rather than networking to make friends.
• The second is that junior-level professionals felt worse about networking, as compared with their more senior colleagues. One possible interpretation is that the junior professionals, having fewer connections or resources at their disposal to offer others, felt like “takers” because they worried they could never reciprocate.”

How to Be a Smart Contrarian | HBR

• “It is one thing to recognize what is wrong with the dominant logic. You also have to create a strategy founded on your new assumptions and theories. This requires people who can bring other mental models to bear, which is one of the main reasons why firms benefit from working to create a diverse workforce.
• The trap here is that organizations believe that they can solve complex problems by recruiting the “best individuals,” according to objective criteria. This belief holds when addressing relatively bounded tasks, but otherwise an individual’s cognitive resource is more useful when it produces additional ideas or perspectives different from those of existing team members. In hiring for Capital One, for example, Fairbank harnessed, as he put it, “the power of an objective ignorant view of the world from someone who really didn’t know anything about credit card[s].”

My Time with Kurt Cobain | The New Yorker

• ““Hi,” he said, and two things struck me instantly. The first was: oh, wow, I know this guy. He wasn’t some sort of rock-and-roll space alien — he was actually like a lot of the stoners I went to high school with. (I was kind of a stoner in high school myself.) All the nervousness went away. The other thing I realized is uncomfortable to say: I sensed that he was one of those rock musicians who dies young. I’d never met someone like that before or even known many people who had died at all. I just sensed it. It turns out that a lot of other people around him did, too: his bandmate Dave Grohl sensed it, and so did Kurt’s wife, Courtney Love. Even Kurt’s own mother acknowledged it. It just wasn’t something that anyone would say out loud at the time.”

Podcasts

Lessons from 5 Years of Podcasting | Invest Like the Best

David Fialkow — Paint Outside the Lines | Invest like the Best

• “David Fialkow, co-founder of General Catalyst. If you are looking for a dose of fun, charismatic energy from a very unique investor then this is the conversation for you. David has a diverse background not only as an investor but also as a philanthropist and filmmaker. He won an Academy Award for his role as the producer of the 2018 documentary Icarus. During our conversation, David and I dive into what makes a great founder, the importance of storytelling, and the value of effectively convening people within your network. After listening to all of his great stories, I think you’ll see why David has so much fun and success helping founders.”

Daniel Ek — Enabling Creators Everywhere | Invest Like The Best

• “Daniel Ek is the CEO and founder of Spotify, and I find him to be one of the most thoughtful business leaders in the world. Daniel is the perfect guest for this special occasion because he exemplifies the curiosity, humility, leadership, and dogged determination that I think characterizes the best investors and operators.
• In our conversation, we discuss the differences between the world of bits and atoms, how Daniel gets up to speed in challenging new fields, and why Europe might be a sleeping giant about to wake. We then bring the discussion back to Spotify, the evolving creator ecosystem, and Daniel’s frameworks for leading the business into its next chapter of growth.”

Paul Conti, MD — How Trauma Works and How to Heal from It | Tim Ferriss Show

• “Paul Conti, MD is a graduate of Stanford University School of Medicine. He completed his psychiatry training at Stanford and at Harvard, where he was appointed chief resident and then served on the medical faculty before moving to Portland and founding a clinic.
• Dr. Conti specializes in complex assessment and problem-solving, as well as both health and performance optimization, serving patients and clients throughout the United States and internationally, including the executive leadership of large corporations. His new book is Trauma, the Invisible Epidemic: How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It.”

Iconic Therapist Dr. Sue Johnson — How to Improve Sex and Crack the Code of Love | Tim Ferriss Show

• “Iconic Therapist Dr. Sue Johnson — How to Improve Sex and Crack the Code of Love”

Why Do We Want What We Can’t Have? | Freakonomics’ No Stupid Questions

How Can You Escape Binary Thinking? | Freakonomics’ No Stupid Questions

What Are the Police for, Anyway? | Freakonomics

• “ The U.S. is an outlier when it comes to policing, as evidenced by more than 1,000 fatal shootings by police each year. But we’re an outlier in other ways too: a heavily-armed populace, a fragile mental-health system, and the fact that we spend so much time in our cars. Add in a history of racism and it’s no surprise that barely half of all Americans have a lot of confidence in the police. So what if we start to think about policing as … philanthropy?”

Why Does the Richest Country in the World Have So Many Poor Kids? | Freakonomics

• “Among O.E.C.D. nations, the U.S. has one of the highest rates of child poverty. How can that be? To find out, Stephen Dubner speaks with a Republican senator, a Democratic mayor, and a large cast of econo-nerds. Along the way, we hear some surprisingly good news: Washington is finally ready to attack the problem head-on.”

All You Need Is Nudge | Freakonomics

• “When Richard Thaler published Nudge in 2008 (with co-author Cass Sunstein), the world was just starting to believe in his brand of behavioral economics. How did nudge theory hold up in the face of a global financial meltdown, a pandemic, and other existential crises? With the publication of a new, radically updated edition, Thaler tries to persuade Stephen Dubner that nudging is more relevant today than ever.”

Perseverance, Family Wealth, and Building a Career On Air — with Anderson Cooper | The Prof G Show

• Anderson Cooper joins Scott to discuss his experience covering the news throughout the past two decades, specifically as the anchor of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and a correspondent for 60 Minutes on CBS News. Anderson also shares his thoughts on fatherhood, overcoming personal tragedies, and what he learned while researching his latest book, “Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty.””

Group Think | NPR’s Hidden Brain

• “How do the groups you identify with shape your sense of self? Do they influence the beer you buy? The way you vote? Psychologist Jay Van Bavel says our group loyalties affect us more than we realize, and can even shape our basic senses of sight, taste and smell.”

Just Sex | NPR’s Hidden Brain

• “Casual sex typically isn’t about love. But what if it’s not even about lust? Sociologist Lisa Wade studies “hookup culture,” and believes the rules and expectations around sex and relationships are different for college students today than they were for previous generations”

Musique

Live at Red Rocks | Greta Van Fleet

• Zeppelin reincarnate? These guys’ll rock your socks off in the best of ways. If there are 20-somethings playing rock music and 50s/60s-somethings in the front row, you know it’s gonna be something special. So stoked to see them at ACL.

Put Up or Shut Up | Jarred Gallo

• Groove-infused house music, perfect for a party setting. Can’t NOT dance to this…
• For something similar, check out pretty much anything by Claptone or Purple Disco Machine, and Every Cow Has a Bird | Guit & Dubshape

Lee’s Last Dance | Mindchatter

• It’s been insane to see what my former bunkmate Bryce has accomplished under the Mindchatter moniker. Sounds like Flume, The XX, Disclosure, and LCD Soundsystem had a baby…

‘S Wonderful | Joao Gilberto

• Bossa Nova sounds have a special place in my heart; this is the epitome of that vibe by the pioneer of the Brazilian sound himself