My Content List #34 | Wed 12/29/21

Opening Rant: Positioning vs. Doing, Flow States, Wasted Youth, Dog Daze

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

Hello friends. Hope you’re in good health + thriving despite this latest Omicron wave. I confess I may have jinxed us all back in June when I put the words “Post-COVID” in a Spotify playlist title. So… yeah, my bad there.

The past few months have been a bamboozling stretch, in the best of ways. You may not have noticed I’m a bit tardy on my normal monthly-ish cadence for these Content Lists. But I noticed [+ it totally hasn’t been eating away at my soul each day that this goes unpublished…] so I feel an urge to justify the delay:

1) At The MBA Fund (a now-$6MM+ institutional VC firm, where I’m a co-lead Investment Partner), we’ve been busier than ever keeping pace with the current market environment. We completed SIX (!!) pre-seed/seed deal this semester:

• Financial Choice (YC S’21): modern banking platform featuring a checking account alternative that lets you invest your balance for market returns, while retaining instant cash access
• Ditto (FKA BuyWithMe): gamified social commerce app targeting beauty products and off-price retail; think PinDuoDuo for the US
• Frame Fertility: B2B2C fertility coaching platform helps employees plan for and address potential fertility issues before they manifest into expensive, hard to treat conditions
• Nook (YC W ‘22): online platform to redesign and remodel homes in Southeast Asia
• PortAbl: creating an OS for unified financial identity to transform how banks, fintech’s, and other financial service providers accept and manage customer data
• Window: a mobile and web tool that algorithmically curates selections across apparel websites to show an optimal, hyper-personalized “Window” for each user

Incredibly strong founders and TONS of potential across all of these. Could nerd out here ad infinitum; hmu if you want more on the VC workstuffs.

2) Somehow I’ve found myself in a rock band with my Wharton classmates: Erika Flames. The humor within the “goes to business school → forms band” trajectory is not lost on me. We’ve only played 2 shows (including one with >1K !! in attendance), but if you were there you’ll — hopefully — know what a blast they were. I’m BEYOND grateful that I’m able to channel some time into this passion project and for the support we’ve received from our spirited fans (#FlameBots)! More gigs to come in next semester, and more on the music below.

Despite all this, I can’t turn my brain off when it comes to introspecting and pondering the existential. I suppose this is a gift and a curse. Here are some things I’ve been thinking about…

Positioning vs. Doing

You may have heard that, as an investment banker or consultant, you’ll receive inbounds from headhunters and recruiters within your first few weeks/months on the job (sometimes for gigs that start 1–2 years in the future). This is factual, based on my and others’ lived experiences. [N.B. I know the recruiting process is extremely broken overall, especially for undergrads, but that’s the subject of a different rant.]

It does strange things to one’s headspace to be forced into thinking about what comes next before one’s feet are really set in the current experience. Through that lens, you could argue that all of childhood + young adulthood is positioning. High school positions you for college; college positions you to land a good entry-level job; that first gig positions you for the next job(s) with more esteem, higher-pay, etc., and so on. [a].

These inferences arose from my recent(/incessant) thoughts about career charting, given I’m on the precipice of launching back into the Real World from (oft-fictional) business school life. When does the positioning stop and the doing begin? How can one cultivate a state of meaningful work, while still preparing for what may come next?

To make this concrete, one of** the big questions I’ve been asking myself is whether to target (A) larger, more established “blue chip” VC firms or (B) newer up-and-comers that haven’t “made it big” just yet. To distill the tradeoffs, this is a balancing act between:

• Access, pre-established reputation, and perhaps better “institutional learning”/training prospects (favoring A over B), and
• More autonomy, potential for upward mobility, ability to build my own reputation alongside the firm’s (favoring B over A)

Another benefit of established firms is that they ~preserve optionality~ (perhaps Millennials’ favorite activity). If I want a better exit opp — to another firm or, most enticingly, to raise my own fund 🤓—traditionalists might say it’s better to have as much pedigree from past roles as possible.

I’m far from the only one to voice this, but I believe we’re caught in a rat race of pedigree in the job market. And that’s become increasingly clear as I’ve established my own “pedigree” through my education (nearly 2 degrees deep) and jobs thus far. Having this degree or that past experience may grant *access* to certain opportunities, but that access is — I’ve come to realize — quite independent of the *outcomes* within any given opportunity.

Stated differently, IMO qualifications mediate a surprisingly small part of performance. Past success is not a sufficient condition for present (or future) successes. *** Chasing pedigree for pedigree’s sake to me sounds pointless; what one actually does with whatever skills/resources/access at their disposal is eons more important.

I think of this as Positioning vs. Doing; Sam Harris, I found out recently, calls it the “Being vs. Becoming Gap.” In his conception (which resonates), these ideals can coincide when proper forethought and presence is infused into the journey. We came to a similar conclusion when we talked about life’s hedonic treadmill, a suggestion on how to stay grounded through this:

(1) be deliberate about goal-setting and

(2) be grateful for and proud of all the micro-achievements along the way

None of this is a knock against having ambitions, long-term visions, multi-level schemings, playing chess. This is essential and should be encouraged. It’s just how it goes that some opportunities are inevitably stepping stones to bigger, better ones. If you chalk this all up as Machiavellian, you may have missed my point (and I assure you my moral compass has more empathy than Niccolo).

I’m frankly not sure where this lands me on the which-VC-to-pursue question. The reality is I’ve been fiercely pursuing jobs at both types, hah #PreserveOptionality

“Flow States” & Multitasking

I’ve written before about my reverence for rockstars; part of that admiration stems from that ineffable feeling that arises when witnessing someone doing “exactly what they were put on this earth to do.”

A similar feeling arises in what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls the “Flow State”: complete immersion and engagement within a certain task. Flow is marked by that optimal equilibrium of guidance/structure with autonomy, continuously confronting challenges yet progressing, deriving as much energy as you deploy.

Eminem would call this losing yourself in the music, the moment. I too have felt the Flow in the context of music; that’s when my best guitar jams happen, alone and with my bandmates.

Flow can be found in high concentrations among those in creative fields — writers, artists, producers, photographers, and beyond. Nature or sports tend to summon Flow States as well: we’ve reached it while surfing, running, hiking, biking. It’s especially fun in team contexts, when a resonant Flow is reached within a group.

I’d argue that Flow can be reached in working/productivity states as well, as has been the case for me in many a pitch meeting, diligence+research processes, and investment committee discussions (again, alone and with my “bandmates”).

To many, multitasking may stand in opposition to achieving a state of Flow. Jumping between tasks will keep you too surface-level and you won’t actually get anything done, they’ll tell ya. This is purely anecdotal, but I honestly don’t find this to be the case.

Some of the times when I feel most Flow-y are when I’m pinballing from class to a pitch to band practice to investment committee to a hockey game. It’s those days that I’m most dialed, most focused, most energetic, most insightful. Either by predisposition or cultivation (or both), this is how I am, and I seriously doubt I’m alone on this one. This attests to the theory that multitasking can create Flow.

Perhaps this is the state of “Antifragility” — or “gaining from disorder” — that Nassim Taleb and others have written about. Maybe multitasking to this degree renders me too cognitively occupied even to think about potentially-distracting thoughts. Maybe this is all just me running on fumes, and I’ll be burnt out in a half-decade, or sooner.

Or maybe this is a worthwhile realization that balancing across diverse interests can engender a Flow State.

My friend Nick embodies this better than almost anyone I know, and I admire the hell out of him for it. For context, he’s killing it as a full-time VC in a niche sector, is highly knowledgeable about all things crypto/web3, and is also running a holistic wellness retreat (yoga + breathwork + meditation + nature immersions) in Guatemala right now. Trust me when I say that man is Flowing damn near always.

“Youth is Wasted on the Young”

I’ve frequently referred to this b school experience as “fictional,” as in too-good-to-be-true. Classmates concur resoundingly.

Through chats with them and those outside of this strange social experiment we’re in, I’ve distilled a few key factors that get at why it feels this way.

Firstly, compared to college, folks seem more settled into and comfortable with themselves — as in who they are. Classmates present their authentic selves more unabashedly, knowing that most everyone has a “come-as-you-are” attitude. (N.B. there are occasional affronts here, of course.) On the whole, though, this self-acceptance seems to enable more acceptance of others, and so begins the positive feedback loop.

I lovingly refer to my friends at Wharton as “Case Studies” in and of themselves, realizing full well that I constitute one myself.

Second: We’ve all spent time in the “Real World”, and — again, compared to our college selves — we realize what a goddamn rat race it is. We have more flexibility and autonomy over our time compared to our full-time working selves. And time has — with age — only further emblazoned itself as our most finite resource.

Ah, the passage of time…

I sit here typing within a few feet of my niece and nephew, who are 13 and 15 (respectively; we’ve talked about them before). This is a great time of year to reminisce with the fam, and its evident that age dictates the extent to which we revere time. I’m not as wise to all this as my sister (40s, nearby opening the wine), who isn’t as wise as our parents (60s-70s+, nearby reading), but MAN sometimes I want to grab these kids and shake them into a deeper reverence for how good they have it now — as kids.

Literally me. I swear I’ve used this gif before but can’t find where, hah.

That’s the real “fictional” time in life: purely unencumbered. How can we conjure more appreciation for those moments before they’re lost?

That’s also why this time as an MBA is so special. Adulthood enables us to do to way more “cool shit” and make/spend our own $$ (among other benefits), so being able to do tap into those elements + explore new things more (professionally and extracurricular-ly) with more intent, all while getting full-time learnt within the cocoon of academia… it’s a prime setup, and we’re reveling in it together.

Dog Daze

Last week we had to put down our beloved family dog Misty, who lived to the ripe old age of 16.5.

I think the best way to honor anyone’s death is to celebrate their life, but obviously grieving is part of the process too. In the words of Scott Galloway (who wrote this awesome piece when he and his fam lost their dog), “we are grieving because our love perseveres.”

Misty was present for nearly 60% of my life. We got her when I was 10 and went to overnight camp for the first time: I was troublingly homesick, and my parents’ promise (bribe) of a dog willed me through it. Her permanence is heady to reflect on…

From 5th grade into the awkward middle school years, Misty was there. She loved me the same despite my my acne and braces, and she had her own section in my Bar Mitzvah photo montage.

When I filled out my apps for college, Misty was there. We jammed to music for hours, days on end! … which is probably why she was quite deaf by the end.

Through the rough patch of familial health crises in my college days, Misty was there. I hesitate to anthropomorphize, but she seemed to know that heavy shit was going down, so she’d nuzzle closer and give me a lick every chance she got. She even visited me on campus a few times; here we are outside the Phoenix in 2016.

Through my first stint in the Real World, Misty was there. She loved NYC, so many… interesting… scents.

The energetic, affectionate Schnoodle who I called a “pup” up until her dying day was also there when I returned back home to Philly for this Wharton experience. It was sad to see how age had sapped her vivacity. She started off younger than me yet grew up and old even faster. The squirrels and rabbits she once tormented in Rittenhouse Square now lived uninterrupted. We no longer run sprints together in my apartment building’s hallway. Her stoicism through what was surely painful arthritis was remarkable.

And as much as she’s our “family dog,” my Dad spent the most time with her over the years — we calculated he gave her something like 20,000 (!!!) cumulative walks. Her passing hit him hard; doing my best to help him process.

Although our time together has passed, we’re eternally grateful for the unwavering affection she gave us. I know she’s wagging her tail up there somewhere. RIP Misty — man’s best friend.

Some killer content awaits you below — covering lucid dreaming, the opioid crisis, the wonders of web3, existential optimism, moral bucket lists, the coddling of American children, the untapped potential of NFTs, defining cool with Justin Timberlake, psychedelics for depression, and beyond…

Footnotes:

[a] Maybe analogies can be drawn on the personal side as well, in the sense that one relationship may teach you more about yourself + what you seek in a counterpart, so you’ll be better positioned in successive relationship(s) (and eventually into marriage) with a better sense for what feels romantically resonant and enduring.

** This does not consider other paths I’m looking into; namely, entrepreneurial or other startup endeavors from an operating role.

*** I recognize I say all this from a position of privilege, and I’m certainly grateful for the doors my academic experiences have opened for me. And it should also be noted that there’s definitely a correlation between pedigree/experience and certain on-the-job success.

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 #34 | Wed 12/29/21

Articles

Sc3nius | Not Boring by Packy McCormick

• “‘Looking backwards, it’s striking how unevenly distributed progress has been in the past…the discoveries that came to elevate standards of living for everyone arose in comparatively tiny geographic pockets of innovative effort.
• They called for a new scholarly discipline, Progress Studies, which “would study the successful people, organizations, institutions, policies, and cultures that have arisen to date, and it would attempt to concoct policies and prescriptions that would help improve our ability to generate useful progress in the future.”
• Turns out, this scenius shows up throughout history in those astonishingly productive places. It’s the best explanation I’ve seen for excess genius. According to Kevin Kelly, whose framework for scenius we’ll dive into shortly, “Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes.”

• Related: The Pareto Funtier

The therapists using AI to make therapy better | MIT Technology Review

• The type of machine learning that carries out automatic translation can quickly analyze vast amounts of language. That gives researchers access to an endless, untapped source of data: the language therapists use. Researchers believe they can use insights from that data to give therapy a long-overdue boost. The result could be that more people get better, and stay better.
• [These companies] train their AIs on transcripts of therapy sessions. To train the NLP models, a few hundred transcripts are annotated by hand to highlight the role therapists’ and clients’ words are playing at that point in the session. For example, a session might start with a therapist greeting a client and then move to discussing the clients’ mood. In a later exchange, the therapist might empathize with problems the client brings up and ask if the client practiced the skills introduced in the previous session. And so on.
• The technology works in a similar way to a sentiment-analysis algorithm that can tell whether movie reviews are positive or negative, or a translation tool that learns to map between English and Chinese. But in this case, the AI translates from natural language into a kind of bar code or fingerprint of a therapy session that reveals the role played by different utterances.”

Reasons for optimism after a difficult year | Bill Gates

• “I’ve had a lot of people ask me recently if I’m still optimistic about the future. While the answer is yes, being an optimist doesn’t mean ignoring problems. I am deeply troubled by one challenge in particular.
• The pandemic has been a massive test of governance. When the pandemic finally comes to an end, it will be a tribute to the power of global cooperation and innovation. At the same time, this era has shown us how declining trust in public institutions is creating tangible problems and complicating our efforts to respond to challenges. Based on what I’ve seen over the last couple of years, I’m more worried than I’ve ever been about the ability of governments to get big things done.
• We need governments to take action if we’re going to make progress on challenges like avoiding a climate disaster or preventing the next pandemic. But declining trust makes it harder for them to be effective. If your people don’t trust you, they’re not going to support major new initiatives. And when a major crisis emerges, they’re less likely to follow guidance necessary to weather the storm.”

Getting Comfortable Being Uncomfortable | Jordan Woodard

• Big shoutout to my man Jordan publishing his first thought piece!
• “I’m very much so an extrovert. In most conversations I look for that spark- that spark being a shared interest or passion that gets the other person engaged and excited. I draw energy from good conversations and cultivating relationships, but whenever the archetypal networking reception question arises:
  “what do you want to do”
• for a split second I find myself thinking, “what answer should I craft based on what I know about this person?” If I ultimately tell them about my interest in cannabis and they choose to disengage, that’s OK. I’ll continue to become more comfortable with the dismissiveness by watching my portfolio grow and working with brilliant innovators.”

Tiger Global: How to Win | The Generalist

• “We may be earlier than we thought. Tiger’s current private market thesis is simple: we are still in the opening stages of the digital revolution. For those who began evangelizing the “software opportunity” decades ago, that we have yet to reach maturation may come as a surprise. If Tiger’s right, we should expect many more unicorns to be minted and for returns to be larger than anticipated.
• There are different ways to win in venture capital. Just as a16z did a decade ago, Tiger has disrupted the venture market, showing a new way to win. Its approach is predicated on rapid capital deployment, reducing founder friction, and accepting a lower return profile.
• Outsourcing due diligence has benefits. How does Tiger invest across geographies at a rate of roughly a deal a day? By delegating elements of deal sourcing and evaluation to consultancies like Bain. By doing so, Tiger is able to move much faster with broader coverage. This maneuver also turns a fixed cost into a variable one.
• Founders may be sick of “hands-on” investors. Part of Tiger’s pitch is that it will be an unobtrusive capital partner. That approach runs counter to industry norms as most firms compete to demonstrate a willingness to roll up their sleeves and help. The fact that so many founders find Tiger’s laissez-faire attitude attractive exemplifies the lack of trust many have in VC’s value propositions.
• Hedge fund managers can bring novel perspectives to startups. Though perhaps less visionary than their venture capital counterparts, some founders find the detail and rigor of hedge fund managers’ thinking refreshing. That might make crossover funds like Tiger increasingly attractive partners.”

Dr. Aaron T. Beck, Developer of Cognitive Therapy, Dies at 100 | NYTimes

• RIP to the “Father” of CBT!
• “Dr. Aaron T. Beck, whose brand of pragmatic, thought-monitoring psychotherapy became the centerpiece of a scientific transformation in the treatment of depression, anxiety and many related mental disorders, died on Monday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 100.
• Dr. Beck was a young psychiatrist trained in Freudian analysis when, in the late 1950s, he began prompting patients to focus on distortions in their day-to-day thinking, rather than on conflicts buried in childhood, as therapists typically did. He discovered that many people generated what he called “automatic thoughts,” unexamined assumptions like “I’m just unlucky in love” or “I’ve always been socially inept,” which can give rise to self-criticism, despair and self-defeating attempts to compensate, like promiscuity or heavy drinking.
• Dr. Beck found that he could undermine those assumptions by prompting people to test them out in the world — say, by socializing without alcohol to observe what happens — and to gather countervailing evidence from their own experience, like memories of healthy relationships. Practicing these techniques, in therapy sessions and in homework exercises, fostered an internal dialogue that gradually improved people’s mood, he showed.”

Existential Optimism | Not Boring by Packy McCormick

• “What became existentialism was born out of the transition from Agricultural Societies to Industrial Societies, from church to nation-state. When many could no longer put the responsibility on God, existentialism offered a way to think about taking responsibility for themselves.
• The version most are familiar with today, Sartre’s existentialism, sharpened during World War II. Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir became celebrities in Europe as existentialism spread. “After WWII ended,” Existential Comics’ Corey Mohler explained, “there was this atmosphere of ‘We can recreate society. We can recreate ourselves. We can do anything we want.’”
• You might hear those very same optimistic calls today. We’re in the transition from Industrial Society to Informational Society, from nation-state to individual. We’re emerging from a global catastrophe, a pandemic this time instead of a war. There’s a strong “we can recreate society and ourselves and do anything we want” breeze blowing.”

From the Apple Watch and Ray-Ban Stories to Oura: How Wearable Tech Got Stylish | WSJ

• “The landscape changed in 2015 when Apple released its first Apple Watch. To have Apple — the high-design tech temple that Steve Jobs built — move into wearables validated the market. The watch looked exquisite, with curved edges, a glossy square display and interchangeable bands, including a much-crowed-about leather option from French luxury stalwart Hermés. The Apple Watch presented wearable technology as fashionable, not merely functional.
• As the Apple Watch has caught on, spotting a wearable on someone’s wrist no longer seems remarkable. At a recent meeting, New York fashion designer Jeff Staple noticed all 10 other attendees had on some sort of wrist wearable. “These are people that probably have Rolexes and Pateks in their closets,” he said. “But they’re sitting there collecting dust because the information [wearables yield] is just too important.””

The Cambrian Explosion in Software and Content | Digital Native

• “With low-code tools, a developer might contribute some hand coding to get things over the finish line. But these tools vastly decrease the amount of time and engineering resources needed to build something. Those 26.9 million developers can get a lot more done.
• No code tools, on the other hand, are slightly less robust in what they can do, but they allow more people to be developers. Someone with no technical background can build something that would otherwise require specialized skills. Bubble, for instance, is more no code than low code. Bubble lets anyone create web apps (mostly consumer-facing) with zero programming knowledge.
• No code, in particular, removes the bottleneck of limited engineering resources. The framework of low code / no code for software development can be extended to content creation.”

As More Workers Go Solo, the Software Stack Is the New Firm | Future by a16z

Blockchain Gaming and On-Ramps to Mass Adoption | Digital Native

• “NoPixel is a popular Grand Theft Auto server in which people assume a digital identity. You might be a bartender, a mayor, a drug kingpin. To enter NoPixel, you have to apply and interview in character — and once in, you’re never allowed to break character. Every player starts with $5,000 and to earn more, you have to get a job or live a life of crime.
• NoPixel is a fascinating example of a digital world and digital economy. In many ways, it foreshadows our metaverse future. But think how much more vibrant and immersive NoPixel would be if it was built on blockchain — if digital goods were valuable and authentic and interoperable.
• Blockchain enables scarcity, and scarcity enables value. That combines with the internet’s zero marginal costs to create a potent digital economy. Gaming is already eating the world; blockchain simply accelerates its trajectory and makes digital economies more interesting, creative, and valuable.”

Tracking space debris is a growing business | Economist

• “As orbiting objects multiply, the danger grows. Roughly a dozen sizeable pieces of space debris break up every year as a result of collisions, exploding rocket fuel, or the rupturing of pressurised tanks or old batteries. Solar radiation chips off bits of paint and metal. And the number of launches is increasing. According to BryceTech, a consultancy in Virginia, at the end of 2001 there were 771 active satellites orbiting Earth. Ten years later that population had grown to 965. Since then, it has nearly quintupled, to roughly 4,500 — and this does not include defunct satellites. And small, cheap satellites are a booming business. Maciej Konacki, an astronomer at the Polish Academy of Sciences, in Warsaw, who has studied the matter on behalf of the European Union, reckons there could be 100,000 active satellites in orbit by the end of the decade.”

Will the magic of psychedelics transform psychiatry? | The Guardian

• “In an advanced phase trial published in Nature in May, patients in the US, Israel and Canada who received doses of the psychedelic stimulant MDMA, alongside care from a therapist, were more than twice as likely than the placebo group to no longer have PTSD, for which there is currently no effective medicinal treatment, months later. The researchers concluded that the findings, which reflected those of six earlier-stage trials, cemented the treatment as a startlingly successful potential breakthrough therapy. There are now hopes that MDMA therapy could receive approval for certain treatments from US regulators by 2023, or perhaps even earlier — with psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, not far behind in the process. (A small study at Johns Hopkins University, published last year, suggested it could be four times more effective than traditional antidepressants.)

It’s Gen Z’s World, And We’re Just Living In It | Digital Native

• “Bella McFadden, the Depop reselling sensation, circumvented the fashion gatekeepers to become her own business — all from her bedroom in Canada. She says: “The fashion industry seemed all about knowing the right people. I didn’t think it was possible for me to do that in Ottawa.”
• McFadden embodies Gen Z entrepreneurship: 80% of Gen Zs want to be their own boss and 50% want to start their own business. Gen Zs are endlessly reimagining the types of careers they can create. Take my favorite recent example, Miss Excel.
• Miss Excel — real name: Kat Norton — has over a million followers on TikTok and Instagram, where she posts content about (you guessed it) Excel. But Norton’s social channels really act as a funnel for her Excel training courses. She earns six figures a day through her courses, all as a one-woman business. “Excel TikTok creator” wasn’t a form of entrepreneurship available 10 years ago. As young people enter the workforce, they’ll embrace and invent new forms of work — work that is self-directed, flexible, and creative, with meaningful financial upside.

Red Friday | Prof Scott Galloway

• “BNPL is one of the hottest trends in finance: 1 in 5 Americans used one of these services in the past year, with U.S. spending on BNPL increasing 230% since 2020. By 2025 global BNPL spending is projected to double to $680 billion. In August, Square acquired BNPL pioneer Afterpay for $29 billion in the largest-ever acquisition of an Australian firm. (We had the Founder/CEO of Afterpay on the Prof G Pod, and he’s an impressive young man.) Swedish BNPL giant Klarna is getting ready for a $50-billion-plus IPO, with a current valuation on par with ING or Lloyds Banking Group.
• The target market is young people. Klarna’s frontman is rapper A$AP Rocky (who was paid in equity, not debt) — many BNPL brands rely on social media influencer campaigns. In the U.S., three-quarters of users are Gen Zers or millennials; it’s projected that nearly half of Gen Z will be using BNPL services by 2022. Their attraction to BNPL coincides with an aversion to banks and the credit they offer. This is a generation that came of age just before or in the wake of the Great Recession, a global economic crisis precipitated by … way too much credit. Young people love BNPL because, according to the former director of Afterpay, the vast majority of them “don’t want to be on credit.”
• There’s one problem: Buy Now Pay Later is (wait for it) credit.”

Science Closes In on Covid’s Origins | WSJ

• “A coronavirus adapts for its host animal. It takes time to perfect itself for infecting humans. But a pathogen engineered via accelerated evolution in a laboratory using humanized mice would need no additional time after escape to optimize for human infection. In their Nature Medicine paper, Mr. Andersen and colleagues pointed to what they considered the poor design of SARS-CoV-2 as evidence of zoonotic origin. But a team of American scientists mutated the stem of the coronavirus genome in nearly 4,000 different ways and tested each variation. In the process they actually stumbled on the Delta variant. In the end, they determined that the original SARS-CoV-2 pathogen was 99.5% optimized for human infection — strong confirmation of the lab-leak hypothesis.”

$76 Billion a Day: How Binance Became the World’s Biggest Crypto Exchange | WSJ

• “Started just four years ago, Binance is the exchange giant that towers over the digital currency world, a crypto equivalent of the London, New York and Hong Kong stock exchanges combined. After a burst of growth, Binance processes more trades for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether each day, $76 billion worth, than its four largest competitors put together, according to data provider CryptoCompare.
• The years of largely unfettered, unregulated growth for Binance in particular and the crypto industry broadly, however, are coming to an end.
• Binance is drawing the most regulatory attention. The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into how Binance conducts business in the U.S., where it has many state licenses, according to former executives. The SEC has asked for a list of information from Binance’s U.S. affiliate, including how it relates to the global organization, according to one of the executives. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is examining whether Binance has abetted money laundering, one former executive said”

The Moral Bucket List | David Brooks

• “It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?
• We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.
• But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.”

How Justin Timberlake Came Undone | Slate

• “Between Britney and Janet, Justin once skated through controversies that had grievous PR effects on the women around him. Fortified by his undeniable musical talent — and make no mistake, he is one of the greatest performers of recent history — Timberlake’s boy-next-door identity endured for decades, even in the face of evidence that contradicted it. The new reckoning around him feels like a cultural exorcism, a chance to use the boy band vessel to purge ourselves of the evils he now represents to many. But behind the scenes, he was at once a canny self-marketer and a blank, withholding presence at the hub of conflict, surrounded by publicists and media and managers who were crafting his image, too. Timberlake has become the perfect emblem of a bygone era that rewarded guys exactly like him — until it didn’t.”

Rush to stop ‘Havana syndrome’ | HBR

• “In 2016, dozens of diplomatic staff at the U.S. and Canadian embassies in Havana began experiencing a sudden onset of health troubles with no apparent cause. They reported a variety of symptoms, including vertigo, nausea, vision and hearing difficulties, memory loss, and headaches. Many said they felt something pressing or vibrating around them or heard noises just before the symptoms appeared, leading some to suspect they had been exposed to a high-intensity burst of energy or sound waves.
• Known as Havana syndrome, today there are at least 200 CIA, State Department, and Pentagon personnel stationed overseas who have been affected. (President Biden signed a bill on Friday providing financial help to victims.) Intelligence agencies have been unable to determine what’s behind the incidents, although some officials believe they are the result of attacks by a U.S. adversary. Now, a recent flurry of high-ranking U.S. diplomats, spies, and security aides have been treated for Havana syndrome, possibly signaling an escalation of some sort, intelligence analysts say.

Investors Snap Up Metaverse Real Estate in a Virtual Land Boom | WSJ

• “The Metaverse Group has a real estate investment trust, and it plans to build a portfolio of properties in Decentraland as well as other realms including Somnium Space, Sandbox and Upland. The internet may be infinite, but virtual real estate is not — Decentraland, for example, is 90,000 parcels of land, each roughly 50 feet by 50 feet. Among investors, there’s a sense that there’s gold in those pixelated hills, Mr. Gord said.
• “Imagine if you came to New York when it was farmland, and you had the option to get a block of SoHo,” he said. “If someone wants to buy a block of real estate in SoHo today, it’s priceless, it’s not on the market. That same experience is going to happen in the metaverse.”
• Last week, Tokens.com closed an even larger land deal in Decentraland’s fashion district for roughly $2.5 million. The company, which says the real estate transaction was the largest in metaverse history, plans to develop the area into a virtual commerce hub for luxury fashion brands, à la Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue.”

Will Real Estate Ever Be Normal Again? | NYTimes

• “The last time U.S. housing saw such rampant price growth was in 2005, and the market corrected itself, infamously, in 2008. But the underlying reality today is different. Back then, a geyser of subprime adjustable-rate mortgages sputtered out as borrowers defaulted. (According to Bloomberg News, 60 percent of mortgages during the bubble years were adjustable rate; fewer than 0.1 percent of mortgages are now.) The current boom is better compared to a river, one fed by streams that have long been visible on the horizon: high demand, low supply and a dysfunctional economy in which wages are stagnant while restrictive zoning and poor public policy have turned housing into an artificially scarce commodity. Historically low 30-year fixed mortgage interest rates, hovering between 2.68 and 3.08 for the last year, are narrowing the riverbed, quickening the current.
• After a decade of too little development, the pandemic made the low inventory lower. Construction stopped. Sellers, afraid of inviting the virus into their homes or reluctant to move in uncertain times, didn’t list, and inventory declined by nearly a third from February 2020 to February 2021, falling to the lowest level relative to demand since the National Association of Realtors began record-keeping almost 40 years ago. At one point in January 2021, the month the Ephraim Road sale broke everyone’s brains, Austin had just 311 homes listed for sale; in a normal month, the number would be 5,000. An estimated 65,000 starter homes were completed nationwide in 2020, less than a fifth of the number built annually in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A typical home listed for sale on Zillow was available for a median of 14 days in December 2020, compared with 33 days the year before. Now it’s nine.”

What’s happening around the future of proptech: Drivers, trends, and opportunities | Lerer Hippeau

• Great work by my classmate Naya Frazier!

Why I closed my startup to work in crypto | Ben Gusberg

• “… we are at a watershed moment as the blockchain industry is on the verge of becoming mainstream. As of May 2021, 46 million Americans — 17% of the adult population — owned bitcoin, and, globally, 221 million people have bought or sold it. Crypto curiosity is even greater in the younger generations, as 75% of millennials want to learn more about crypto.
• From a Career Investment Thesis standpoint, the risk-reward trade-off of pursuing a career in crypto today is more attractive than perhaps it has ever been. Strong progress and adoption have significantly de-risked the industry (although meaningful risks obviously still remain — that’s why there’s opportunity!). Yet, the infancy of the industry provides outsized upside potential as the technology matures over the next decade.”

Consulting firms aren’t just recommending software anymore, they’re building it | Protocol

• “Years ago, no one would have believed it if you told them consulting firms were hiring software engineers and beating out tech companies to win development projects. Instead, consulting firms focused mostly on recommending software vendors, or advising clients on technology implementations.
• But the traditional model of management consulting is being flipped upside down as every company tries to figure out how to become a software company. Gone are the old days of consulting firms selling people, time and resources; now, consulting firms are selling actual software and products.”

Inside the Rise — and Surprising Crackdown — of the Country’s Hottest Weed Market | Politico

• “Oklahoma’s medical marijuana program has seen such staggering growth since it launched three years ago after voters overwhelmingly backed a ballot referendum that it has earned the wry nickname “Tokelahoma.” More than 380,000 Oklahomans — or nearly 10 percent of the state’s population — have enrolled in the program, making it by far the largest in the country on a per capita basis. Thanks to Oklahoma’s free market approach to legalization — there are no limits on marijuana business licenses and the cost of a license is just $2,500 — there are more than 9,000 grow operations in Oklahoma. To put that figure in perspective, Pennsylvania — which has more than three times the population of Oklahoma — has just 13 licensed grow operations to supply its medical program. Even California, the world’s biggest legal cannabis market, has about 3,000 fewer grow operations than the staunchly conservative Sooner State.”

Michael Rubin’s Big Shot | NYTimes

• “Last month, after a three-day stretch in New York, Michael Rubin, was anxious to get back to Philadelphia to attend the home opener of the 76ers, the N.B.A. team of which he is an owner.
• He left his 8,000-square-foot penthouse apartment in Greenwich Village and hopped into a waiting Mercedes-Benz van, which whizzed him a mile uptown to his helicopter, propellers awhirl. Thirty-five minutes later, he landed in a parking lot near the Wells Fargo Center, where the 76ers play, and was chauffeured to the arena in a Lincoln Navigator.
• Mr. Rubin, 49, is the founder and chief executive of Fanatics, a 10-year-old company that manufactures and sells licensed merchandise online to fans of professional sports teams and more than 150 U.S. college athletic programs.

To Beat The Opioid Crisis, We Must Change The Rules Of The Game | Health Affairs

• “When confusing things happen, there is a well-known maxim to help explain what is going on: Follow the money. No one is financially benefiting directly from the death of opioid users. Yet, at the same time, we have entrenched fixed interests, trade guilds, burdensome regulations, entrepreneurial charlatans, and, of greatest concern, historical inertia, which stymie efforts to close the addiction treatment gap. And of course there is also stigma. The confluence of these monied interests has thwarted long overdue regulatory reforms to address the opioid crisis. How do we get out of this?
• Money speaks, but facts still matter. Every day a patient with opioid addiction (“opioid use disorder” per current diagnostic nomenclature) is on a Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved medication such as methadone or buprenorphine, his or her risk of death drops by about 70 percent. This is a larger effect size for reducing opioid-related mortality than any other intervention. Opioid use disorder is one of the deadliest diagnoses a person can receive because not only can annual death rates exceed 2 percent, but mortality occurs at such young ages, often in the 20s and 30s. A basic simulation that I ran suggests that five million people with opioid use disorder on medication treatment for an entire year will experience approximately 70,000 fewer deaths than five million people who go without medication-based treatment. The way to win is therefore to design a functional treatment system that can scale access to medication initiation and successful adherence and retention beyond just a few weeks or months.”

Discord: Imagine a Place | Not Boring by Packy McCormick

• “Discord is not just a communication platform, it’s a hidden world.
• While Mark Zuckerberg believes he is best placed to homestead the metaverse, he may be surprised to find a thriving, indigenous species has already taken hold: Discord. More than any other business, the company is truly “metaverse native,” unwittingly built for the future. First designed for gamers — the metaverse’s pioneers — time has allowed it to flourish on adjacent plots. Educational groups, investing communities, and avid fandoms rely on Discord’s service to commune and converse.
• Of course, it has also become the platform of choice for the many new entities, from protocols to NFT projects to DAOs, building in the lustrous, inchoate world of web3.
• Yet the fact that Discord is best described in such rich, intricate metaphor is also an indication that its identity has not settled. Unlike almost any other social business, Discord feels fluid, biotic, an organism that has yet to fully evolve. Though the company has succeeded in securing a $15 billion valuation and earns hundreds of millions in revenue, there’s the sense that its current manifestation is perhaps only halfway to its end state. For Discord to reach its obscene potential, CEO Jason Citron ​ — no stranger to pivots — may have to embrace new technologies, consider different revenue streams, and lean into the novel paradigms of web3.
• Discord has the chance to be the metaverse’s natural social infrastructure. That is a prize potentially so large that attempts to quantify it risk being off base by several orders of magnitude.”

Can lucid dreaming help us understand consciousness? | The Guardian

• “By identifying the brain activity that gives rise to the heightened awareness and sense of agency in lucid dreams, neuroscientists and psychologists hope to answer fundamental questions about the nature of human consciousness, including our apparently unique capacity for self-awareness. “More and more researchers, from many different fields, have started to incorporate lucid dreams in their research,” says Carr.
• You may wonder why we can’t just scan the brains of fully awake subjects to identify the neural processes underlying this sophisticated mental state. But waking consciousness also involves many other phenomena, including sensory inputs from the outside world, that can make it hard to separate the different elements of the experience. When a sleeper enters a lucid dream, nothing has changed apart from the person’s conscious state. As a result, studies of lucid dreams may provide an important point of comparison that could help to isolate the specific regions involved in heightened self-awareness and agency.”

It’s Mostly a Demand Shock, Not a Supply Shock, and It’s Everywhere | Bridgewater Research

Rich Millennials to Financial Advisers: Thanks for the Golf Invite, but You Can’t Invest My Money | WSJ

• “More rich young investors are opting to go without a traditional financial adviser. Instead, they are betting they can get good-enough investment options from do-it-yourself digital platforms that are cheap and easy to use. Many also want to invest in riskier assets, like cryptocurrencies and tech startups, that mainstream advisers often don’t offer.
• About 70% of households with a net worth of $500,000 or more headed by a person under 45 had an investing style that was either strongly or mostly self-directed in 2019, up from 57% in 2010, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by research firm Aite-Novarica Group. Nearly half of those households aimed to take an above-average level of risk in exchange for an above-average rate of return, up from 35% in 2010, the analysis found.”

Feeding Frenzy | Prof Scott Galloway

• “If you’re not buying eyeballs/audiences, you’re buying features/products. Big Tech has been bolting on capabilities this way for decades. The iPhone is a Frankenstein of acquired tech, from the touchscreen (FingerWorks, 2005), to the SoC (P.A. Semi, 2008), to Siri (Siri, 2010). Amazon bought robotics (Kiva, 2012), grocery stores (Whole Foods, 2017), and smart doorbells (Ring, 2018). Microsoft launched its empire on a product acquisition (DOS, which it bought way back in 1981).
• Then there’s the unlikely peanut-butter-and-chocolate idea, somewhat out there, best considered when shareholders are under the influence of an edible or a frothy market. In 2005 the founders of a small mobile startup were pitching VCs for financing when they took a meeting with two guys named Larry and Sergey who owned a search company. They wanted to buy the mobile startup, they said, and give the product away for free. Google’s decision to acquire Android is obvious in hindsight, but was strategic genius at the time.
• The hard truth is that most high-profile acquisitions don’t pay off. But the ones that do pay off bigly. These are some of the largest bets on the table. An exercise I often do when asked to speak to boards of directors: Imagine it’s three years from now and your market cap has trebled. What likely happened to get you there? I find that framing gives board members, who spend a lot of their time being skeptical, worrying about downside, license to think big. And typically, some of the ideas this exercise generates are acquisitions that seem crazy at the time but may prove to be crazy genius.”

“We’re Like the Anti-‘Billions’”: How ‘Succession’ Makes Wealth Look Miserable | The Ringer

• “Many of the criticisms leveled at Hudson Yards could also apply to the Roys themselves and the rarefied lives they lead. Their environs aren’t gilded or garish, but they are soulless, so devoid of texture and mess as to seem slightly inhuman. It’s an effect the show’s production team works carefully to create, vetting locations with an eye toward authenticity. “Some of the apartments we looked at, people had lived there for years,” says production designer Stephen Carter. “It was going to be a huge ordeal to strip them of the personality enough to be an appropriate space for Kendall.” Hudson Yards didn’t have that issue.
• Succession does not make extreme wealth look extremely fun; undermining the myth that it is might be the show’s fundamental project. The Roys may be comfortable, but they’re also miserable, a state of affairs made most explicit in the writing and acting. But as superb as the scripts and performances may be, they aren’t the only weapons a TV show has in its arsenal. Succession doesn’t just tell us Logan has spent his 80-plus years on this earth building, in his own brother’s words, an “empire of shit.” It shows us the fruits of that labor, often in the form of the cramped helicopters, fluorescent-lit offices, and generic homes where the characters spend their time. In doing so, every frame subtly advances the master argument: that the trade-offs required to get and keep a spot at the top of the financial food chain are inherently not worth it.”

The Singularity is Here | The Atlantic

• “Something unnatural is afoot. Our affinities are increasingly no longer our own, but rather are selected for us for the purpose of automated economic gain. The automation of our cognition and the predictive power of technology to monetize our behavior, indeed our very thinking, is transforming not only our societies and discourse with one another, but also our very neurochemistry. It is a late chapter of a larger story, about the deepening incursion of mercantile thinking into the groundwater of our philosophical ideals. This technology is no longer just shaping the world around us, but actively remaking us from within.
• That we are subject to the dominion of endless digital surveillance is not news. And yet, the sheer scale of the domination continues to defy our imaginative embrace. Virtually everything we do, everything we are, is transmuted now into digital information. Our movements in space, our breathing at night, our expenditures and viewing habits, our internet searches, our conversations in the kitchen and in the bedroom — all of it observed by no one in particular, all of it reduced to data parsed for the patterns that will predict our purchases

How Y Combinator Changed the World | Wired

• “Under the laws of founderism, the sheer audacity of ambition makes the craziest plans the most valuable — the long shots that can pay off big. The YC company that Graham gushes about the most is Airbnb, whose business plan was actually insane; it hinged on people renting their couches to out-of-towners visiting conferences. It wasn’t the idea but the energy and creativity of the founders that made Graham fall in love with them.
• The opposite holds as well — even an apparently pedestrian concept can be twisted into a plan to take over the world. Stripe, for example, originally sought to help fellow startups streamline payments. That was just an onramp to its current ambition of being the essential toolkit for all businesses on the internet. Back in the time of small batches and in-person demo days, I used to marvel at the mundane tasks young founders promised to disrupt. I imagined their parents glancing at these business plans and saying, “We paid for you to go to Stanford and you’re starting a company to do laundry?” But they’re founders, and attention must be paid! Graham would encourage them to make a slide showing how their idea would scale into something humongous. Sure, our point of sale system for barber shops might not look like the Next Big Thing, but our real plan is to remake how everything is sold, and kill WalMart/Amazon/military supply chains/God.”

The Quiet Scientific Revolution That May Solve Chronic Pain | NYTimes

• “Chronic pain is both one of the world’s most costly medical problems, affecting one in every five people, and one of the most mysterious. In the past two decades, however, discoveries about the crucial role played by glia — a set of nervous system cells once thought to be mere supports for neurons — have rewritten chronic pain science.
• These findings have given patients and doctors a hard-science explanation that chronic pain previously lacked. By doing so, this emerging science of chronic pain is beginning to influence care — not by creating new treatments, but by legitimizing chronic pain so that doctors take it more seriously.
• Although glia are scattered throughout the nervous system and take up almost half its space, they long received far less scientific attention than neurons, which do the majority of signaling in the brain and body. Some types of glia resemble neurons, with roughly starfish-like bodies, while others look like structures built with Erector sets, their long, straight structural parts joined at nodes.”

The Coddling of American Children Is a Boon to Beijing | WSJ

• “ It is a core belief in Chinese society that talent can be trained, so schools should be tough on children. Chinese students score at the top of international math and science tests.
• This is not a philosophy shared by American schools. On Friday night my son came home announcing in bewilderment that he didn’t have any homework. In China students tend to receive twice as much homework on the weekend, given the two days to complete it. How will America compete with a China determined to train the best mathematicians, scientists and engineers?”

Why Does Coffee Make Me Poop? | NYTimes

• “That drinking a cup of coffee can stimulate the opposite end of the gastrointestinal tract within minutes means “it’s probably going through the gut-brain axis,” Dr. Martindale said. That is, the arrival of coffee in the stomach sends a message to the brain, which then “stimulates the colon to say, ‘Well, we’d better empty out, because things are coming downstream,’” he explained. The coffee itself would move through the intestines much more slowly, likely taking at least an hour to traverse the long path from the stomach through the small intestine and to the colon.

The Science of Mind Reading | The New Yorker

• “During the past few decades, the state of neuroscientific mind reading has advanced substantially. Cognitive psychologists armed with an fMRI machine can tell whether a person is having depressive thoughts; they can see which concepts a student has mastered by comparing his brain patterns with those of his teacher. By analyzing brain scans, a computer system can edit together crude reconstructions of movie clips you’ve watched. One research group has used similar technology to accurately describe the dreams of sleeping subjects. In another lab, scientists have scanned the brains of people who are reading the J. D. Salinger short story “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” in which it is unclear until the end whether or not a character is having an affair. From brain scans alone, the researchers can tell which interpretation readers are leaning toward, and watch as they change their minds.”

Research: How Long Should a Founder Remain CEO? | HBR

• “Do founder-CEOs have an expiration date? In the wake of Jack Dorsey’s resignation from Twitter, some have begun asking whether the move could herald a new era, in which founders voluntarily step aside rather than sticking around for decades or waiting to be ousted. To explore the value added by a founder-CEO, the authors analyzed stock price and financial performance data from more than 2,000 publicly traded companies. They found that on average, founder-led firms outperform those with non-founder-CEOs — but that the difference dwindles to zero just three years post-IPO, after which founder-CEOs actually start detracting from firm value. Given these findings, they offer three strategies to help investors, boards, and executive teams support founders in transitioning out of the CEO role when the time is right, and ultimately argue that Dorsey’s decision may have been more prescient than many realized.”

NFTs: The Next Killer Financial Asset | Julia Maltby

• “In thinking through consumer-fintech applications for NFTs, I find it helpful to use a real word example of another multifaceted asset — a second home. Ideally, a home is an asset that appreciates in value, while also providing “utility” to its owners (e.g. using it for vacations). However, the home as a financial asset, or tool, goes far beyond straightforward price appreciation. Homes have been used as lending collateral for centuries, and, largely due to companies like Airbnb, the home as a mechanism for supplemental income has been normalized. Companies like Realm also help consumers proactively use their homes to generate passive, or future income, in creative ways.
• In short, homes — and second homes in particular — are highly multi-purpose assets from a financial standpoint, and hundreds of products and services exist to help consumers get the most value out of them.”

Podcasts

Earning to Give | Making Sense with Sam Harris

• “Sam Harris speaks with Sam Bankman-Fried about effective altruism. They discuss how he became the wealthiest self-made billionaire under 30, what might go wrong with cryptocurrency, the Giving What We Can pledge, how SBF thinks about using his resources to do the most good in the world, how not to stigmatize wealth, wealth redistribution, norms of generosity among the ultra-wealthy, pandemic preparedness, impact through lobbying, how ambitious should we be in doing good, and other topics.”

The Limits of Pleasure | Making Sense with Sam Harris

• “Sam Harris speaks with Paul Bloom about the role that pain and suffering play in living a good life. They discuss the limitations of hedonism, the connection between chosen suffering and meaning, the research of Daniel Kahneman on well-being, integrating the experiencing and remembering selves, moral motivations, the effects of parenthood on happiness, unchosen suffering, the asymmetry of loss and gain, Nozick’s “experience machine” thought experiment, effective altruism, valuing the future more than the past, the power of contrast, false ideals of happiness, polyamory, money and status, the role of the imagination, boredom, the power of apology, and other topics.

The Psychedelics Industry — with Ronan Levy | Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway

• “Ronan Levy, the co-founder and executive chairman of Field Trip Health, joins Scott to discuss the state of play in the legalized psychedelics space. He also answers listener questions on the possible negative externalities of the industry under capitalism, the long-term growth potential of these companies, and how to hold on to feelings of wonder after a psychedelic experience is over. ”

Legendary Investor John Doerr on Picking Winners — From Google in 1999 to Solving the Climate Crisis Now | Tim Ferriss Show

• “John Doerr is an engineer, venture capitalist, the chair of Kleiner Perkins, and the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Measure What Matters. His new book is Speed and Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now.
• John was an original investor and board member at Google and Amazon, helping to create more than half a million jobs. A pioneer of Silicon Valley’s cleantech movement, John has invested in zero-emission technologies since 2006. He’s passionate about encouraging leaders to reimagine the future, from transforming healthcare to advancing applications of machine learning.
• Outside Kleiner Perkins, John works with social entrepreneurs who are tackling systemic issues across climate, public health, and education.”

Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs | Tim Ferriss Show

• “Chris Dixon is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where for the past six years he has been an active seed and venture-stage investor. Previously, Chris co-founded and served as the CEO of two startups, SiteAdvisor and Hunch. SiteAdvisor was an internet security company that warned web users of security threats. The company was acquired by McAfee in 2006. Hunch was a recommendation technology company that was acquired by eBay in 2011. Chris has been a prolific seed investor, co-founding Founder Collective, a seed venture fund, and making a number of personal angel investments in various technology companies. Chris started programming as a kid and was a professional programmer after college at the high-speed options trading firm Arbitrade. He has a BA and MA in philosophy from Columbia and an MBA from Harvard. He has written about his theories and experiences as an entrepreneur and investor on Medium and before that at cdixon.org.
• Naval Ravikant (@naval) is the co-founder and chairman of AngelList. He is an angel investor and has invested in more than 100 companies, including many mega-successes, such as Twitter, Uber, Notion, Opendoor, Postmates, and Wish.”

Eric Schmidt — The Promises and Perils of AI, the Future of Warfare, Profound Revolutions on the Horizon, and Exploring the Meaning of Life | Tim Ferriss Show

• “Eric Schmidt (@ericschmidt) is a technologist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He joined Google in 2001, helping the company grow from a Silicon Valley startup to a global technological leader. He served as chief executive officer and chairman from 2001 to 2011 and as executive chairman and technical advisor thereafter. Under his leadership, Google dramatically scaled its infrastructure and diversified its product offerings while maintaining a culture of innovation. In 2017, he co-founded Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative that bets early on exceptional people making the world better.
• He serves as chair of the Broad Institute and formerly served as chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. He is the host of Reimagine with Eric Schmidt, a podcast exploring how society can build a brighter future after the COVID-19 pandemic. Eric has a new book out titled The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, which he coauthored with Henry A. Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher.”

The Psychology of Self-Doubt | NPR’s Hidden Brain

• “We all have times when we feel like a fraud. Psychologist Kevin Cokley studies the corrosive effects of self-doubt, and how we can turn that negative voice in our heads into an ally.”

Both Things Can Be True | NPR’s Hidden

• “It’s psychologically simpler to see the world in black and white. But reality often comes in shades of gray. This week, how our minds grapple with contradictions, especially those we see in other people.”

“A Fascinating, Sexy, Intellectually Compelling, Unregulated Global Market.” | Freakonomics

• “The art market is so opaque and illiquid that it barely functions like a market at all. A handful of big names get all the headlines (and most of the dollars). Beneath the surface is a tangled web of dealers, curators, auction houses, speculators — and, of course, artists. In the first episode of a three-part series, we meet the key players and learn how an obscure, long-dead American painter suddenly became a superstar.”

What’s Wrong With Shortcuts? | Freakonomics

• “You know the saying: “There are no shortcuts in life.” What if that saying is just wrong? In his new book “Thinking Better: The Art of the Shortcut in Math and Life,” the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy argues that shortcuts can be applied to practically anything: music, psychotherapy, even politics.”

Is the U.S. Really Less Corrupt Than China? | Freakonomics

• “A new book by an unorthodox political scientist argues that the two rivals have more in common than we’d like to admit. It’s just that most American corruption is essentially legal.”

Does Reverse Psychology Really Work? | No Stupid Questions

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

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