My Content List #35 | Thurs 3/10/22

Opening Rant: 2022 Resolutions — Better Late than Never

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

2022 Resolutions — Better Late than Never

You’re probably thinking James it’s March- WAY too late to talk about resolutions… or maybe even yikes- I’ve already dropped the ball on my resolutions…

Trust it’s not too late. The “fresh start effect” — dubbed by my Professor Katy Milkman — indeed reveals higher incidence of habit changes around significant dates (birthdays, New Years, etc.).

But in actuality, every day — hell — every moment is an opportunity to change. Easy to say + harder to do, but true nonetheless.

In past years, I’ve bucketed my resolutions in different ways: MORE vs. LESS (2020), Discrete vs. Continuous (2021). This year I’m again revamping: my goal is to distill and double-down on the foundational tasks/habits/mindsets that create opportunities for enduring “success” and fulfillment. This is a similar theme to what we covered in Picks & Shovels, when I wrote:

“Placing a premium on resilience and enablement — four-wheel drive, some shock absorbers — may render you less aerodynamic, but you will win the race in the end… The best path forward is steady, not flashy; fraught with introspection and empathy, not incessantly measuring up against others; dynamically enduring, not a “burn bright / die young” supernova.”

I suppose this is a James Clear-esque line of logic. We’re talking about the “Atomic Habits” that generate leveraged returns to our time (i.e. generate higher ROI on our most finite resource) and incite sustainable, compounding improvement. There’s something special in the sheer simplicity of such habits.

N.B. It’s not lost on me how self-centered talking about *my* resolutions sounds/reads. In these Rants I try to limit first-person dictums, but this entry would be even weirder if I referred to myself as a third part observer of… myself. I hope each year I write these that I don’t come across as supercilious.

My atomic habit resolutions are as follows:

1. Journal

Takes five freakin’ minutes, tops. Includes light recounting of the day’s noteworthy events, acknowledgments of gratitude, and musings on whatever’s occupying my mindscape (big decisions, upcoming events, etc.). Sometimes I don’t even write — sometimes I’ll just record myself talking into the camera.

As you may now, I’m no stranger to the journaling process; I’ve got a 700+ single-spaced Word doc covering my life in media res from 9th grade thru college. In the Real World, my journaling slipped more than I’d like as job responsibilities took hold; still did the occasional video entries though, and man are they worthwhile(+oft hilarious) to look back on.

As I wrote in Sharing is Caring, I journal partly because it’s incredibly cathartic to unburden the mind in a Dumbledorian Pensieve-like way AND to be able to “look back and ascertain the headspace of today’s James.”

It’s tough to break down the specific mechanisms of catharsis here, but the feeling is incredibly real for me.

2. Meditate

10 minutes daily. I prefer Waking Up with Sam Harris (whose work I admire far beyond this meditation app), though also have nothing bad to say about Headspace, Calm, etc. or even unguided meditation for the most disciplined of ya.

Chalk it up to my Libra-ness… Though I’m striving to flow-state-while-multi-tasking (lol), my brain inevitably needs a moments to equilibrate. A meditation session serves as the essential recovery to my HIIT-like day-to-day — a structure I love but would be unsustainable without those marginal moments to find equanimity.

Libra Zebra !

Slipping into that meditative state is sometimes easy and instant; other times I struggle and fail to reach it, constellations of thought tugging at my attention with some ineffable gravity. Sometimes I doze — I figure I could always use a catnap. The variability there is wild day-to-day.

This one’s the easiest to let slip on busier daze; I’m guilty of that happening already. I’m doing my best to ingrain the routine as deeply as the act of showering — a helpful analogy that arose from a Hugh Jackman/Tim Ferris podcast. Such analogies are powerful IMO; this is akin to the mental health counseling vs. dentistry comparison, i.e. we get our teeth checked by an expert at least once per year — why shouldn’t we do the same with our minds?

Meditation has the effect of clearing cognitive fog, allowing me to feel more present + immersed in whatever situation I’m confronting. The mental benefits of a consistent practice are documentable and awesome; just gotta build in the consistency!

3. Movement

Mental states and physical states are co-dependent — symbiotic. Physical stiffness seems to beget mental rigidity; my attention tends to feel most jumpy/fidgety when my body’s yearning for movement.

Movement, like journaling, is deeply cathartic in its own way. I hit sun salutations (~10 minutes) every morning, and I feel markedly more lucid after doing so. That yoga + a few sets of pull-ups and push-ups every day form the basis of my atomic habits in the movement realm.

Such simple, powerful routines have — over the past few years — fundamentally changed my physicality. I’m excited to see what happens as they become even more engrained + as I continue to push myself.

Simple enough, no? The common theme among these resolutions is that they facilitate introspection, which (for me) is a necessary foundation before turning my attention outwards. I wonder, though, whether these internal goals render me inherently selfish — thanks to the No Stupid Questions podcast for stimulating that question. I chalk it up to the paradigm of focusing on what is within one’s control espoused by Stoics. *My* thoughts/actions are infinitely easier to manage than those of others, thus it is in that sphere of influence that I’m rooting these resolutions. In the words of Epictetus:

The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own…

Further, while I don’t consider myself a particularly “regimented” person, my Conscientiousness score has been markedly high on damn near every assessment I’ve taken. Per a recent Wharton assessment, “Highly conscientious individuals tend to be dependable, organized, persistent, planful, and diligent — particularly about their work.” Their words, not mine 😜🤓

These baseline routines are thus even more impactful for folks like me. They’re the scaffolding upon which I function and thrive. It’s become increasingly clear, with each passing year, how life’s made on the margin.

There are also a smattering of fortune cookie-esque goals I’m bringing into the fold of my Resolutions…

• Distinguishing wants vs. needs, coulds vs. shoulds: I shouldn’t do everything I could do, and I can’t make myself “want to want” something I simply don’t want. I’m doing my best to pay closer attention to my goals, desires, and actions vis a vis these categories. It’s also crazy how quickly we can self-rationalize actions, i.e. tricking myself into thinking I “deserve” leisure after a burst of work / that I had a really hard day so “should” just veg instead of exercising. It can be corrupting, that autopiloted rationalizing. I’ll never be entirely cognizant of it happening, but I’m hoping to be more mindful about its pervasiveness.
• Read more: This will never not be a goal. In just a few months I’ll have completed my “formal” education, so the ideals of lifelong learning (through reading) will ratchet ever upwards in importance. The harder part, IMO, is choosing what to read. I always welcome recs here — please send your favorite books/articles/etc. my way!
• More saying no + “ruthlessly prioritize”: There’s a Warren Buffet-inspired exercise about goal-setting that involves writing down one’s top-20 life/career priorities, then crossing out #’s 6–20 as *detractors* of time+attention from the goals that matter most (i.e. the top 5). That sounds a bit extreme to me but the principle resonates. Attention, like time, is a critical finite resource; if it’s too diluted, no progress is made.
• Oh, and I’d love to get off the phone and laptop and into IRL interactions as much as possible. But since I pride myself on being reachable and responsive, what that goal really that means limiting the timesuck of unproductive tech usage. But MAN is it fun to peep the wave cams on Surfline or have Instagram serve me some hyper-curated guitar/crypto/sports content.

Think that pretty much covers it. Obviously writing all this down doesn’t get me any closer to achieving anything, but it’s helpful to have a yardstick to measure against. As I wrote last year,

… by sharing these resolutions “my goal is not to ‘inspire’; rather, for my friends who read this post, I ask for your help in keeping me honest and focused on these.” In fact, I’ve arrived at this list in large part because I’ve witnessed others excel at these exact goals… it is you all who have inspired me to strive ever higher.

I mean that, sincerely. Keep me accountable, and I’ll do the best I can to do the same for you.

As ever, the best is yet to come!

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 #35 | Thurs 3/10/22

Articles

If AI Is Predicting Your Future, Are You Still Free? | Wired

• “As you read these words, there are likely dozens of algorithms making predictions about you. It was probably an algorithm that determined that you would be exposed to this article because it predicted you would read it. Algorithmic predictions can determine whether you get a loan or a job or an apartment or insurance, and much more.
• These predictive analytics are conquering more and more spheres of life. And yet no one has asked your permission to make such forecasts. No governmental agency is supervising them. No one is informing you about the prophecies that determine your fate. Even worse, a search through academic literature for the ethics of prediction shows it is an underexplored field of knowledge. As a society, we haven’t thought through the ethical implications of making predictions about people — beings who are supposed to be infused with agency and free will.

It’s Time to Embrace Slow Productivity | New Yorker

• “The central goal of Slow Productivity is to keep an individual worker’s volume at a sustainable level. A natural fear is that by reducing the amount of work each employee tackles at any given time, it might reduce the total amount of work an organization is able to complete, making it less competitive. This fear is unfounded. As argued, when an individual’s work volume increases, so does the accompanying overhead and stress, reducing both the time remaining to actually execute the tasks and the quality of the results. If you instead enable the individual to work more sequentially, focussing on a small number of things at a time, waiting until she is done before bringing on new obligations, the rate at which she completes tasks might actually increase.”

How Volodymyr Zelensky Defended Ukraine and United the World | Time

• “In his own address, Zelensky chose to speak directly to the Russian people. He told them he had tried to reach Putin that day in a final effort to avert the invasion, but the Kremlin had ignored him. Then he tried to counteract the propaganda coming from Russian state TV. “You are told that these flames will bring freedom to Ukraine. But the people of Ukraine are already free,” he said. “In attacking us, you will see our faces, not our backs.””
• WHAT A FUCKING LINE!!

James Webb Space Telescope: The engineering behind a ‘first light machine’ that is not allowed to fail | Space

• “The sunshield is by far the most mission-critical thing,” said McCaughrean. “If it doesn’t fully deploy, the telescope doesn’t work. We have obviously folded and unfolded it many times on the ground, but nothing like this has ever been flown in space before, and the lack of gravity simply changes things.”
• The sunshield is James Webb Space Telescope’s main cooling mechanism. Nestled behind it, the mirrors and the four never-before-flown instruments will remain far below freezing at 390 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 217 degrees Celsius). The sun-facing side, on the other hand, will be incredibly hot — up to 230 degrees F (128 degrees C). “The sunshield is like sunscreen with an SPF of at least a million in terms of how much it attenuates the solar energy,” said Kimble, the testing and integration project scientist who rode out Hurricane Harvey with JWST. “That allows us to passively cool down cold enough that for most of the wavelengths, the observations are not limited at all by the glow of the telescope.”
• The sunshield is not a simple parasol; a lot of clever engineering went into its design. The five layers of the ultralight kapton material are precisely spaced so that the heat absorbed by each layer is perfectly radiated away from the spacecraft through the gaps. While superthin and ultralight, the material is also incredibly sturdy, enough to survive bombardment by meteorites.”
• Related: The Past, Present, and Future of Faraway Worlds | The Ringer

Most People Won’t Know Web3 Exists | Rex Woodbury

• “Well-understood concepts can be extended to other parts of Web3. People understand the concept of an investment return, for instance; approaching tokens through this lens may be helpful for some. People also understand access, and tokens that behave as tickets to gated content or events will drive further mainstream adoption.
• DAOs, for their part, are more easily understood as communities or democracies. DAOs behave like democracies. Most DAOs have very low “voter turnout” (as we do in the real world) and are even gravitating to representative democracies. People trust other people — designated authority figures, viewed as more “informed” — to make the call. Most people don’t want to read lengthy proposals and make decisions; that’s human nature. The community for the DeFi protocol Yearn recently proposed a decentralized governance system that lets $YFI holders elect committees for budget control, for the development roadmap, and so on.
• When people approach Web3 not as an inscrutable blackbox with confusing words (“Ethereum”, “blockchain”, “fungibility”) but as a set of easily-understood concepts (“scarcity”, “access”, “community”), they become more open to this new paradigm. Products need to lean into simplicity.”

German Start-Ups Lay the Groundwork for a Marijuana Bonanza | NYTimes

• “Right now, the work at the converted farmhouse is focused on the medical and wellness sectors, but it is set to scale up as soon as the recreational market comes online. Sanity Group said it has received more than 65 million euros, or about $73 million, in funding to date from international and national investors, including Casa Verde, Snoop Dogg’s investment fund; the musician will.i.am; the actress Alyssa Milano; a German soccer star; as well as more conventional investment funds.
• No one knows exactly how much can be made once weed goes fully legitimate. But a recent study estimated that legalized cannabis could generate nearly €5 billion annually in tax revenue and savings in policing. The study, led by Justus Haucap, an economist at the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics, also estimates that legalization could create 27,000 new jobs. According to Professor Haucap’s research, the legal market could generate demand for 400 tons per year.”

What Children Lose When Their Brains Develop Too Fast | NYTimes

• “The great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget used to talk about “the American question.” In the course of his long career, he lectured around the world, explaining how children’s minds develop as they get older. When he visited the U.S., someone in the audience was sure to ask, “But Prof. Piaget, how can we get them to do it faster?”
• Today it’s no longer just impatient Americans who assume that faster brain and cognitive development is better. Across the globe, as middle-class “high investment” parents anxiously track each milestone, it’s easy to conclude that the point of being a parent is to accelerate your child’s development as much as possible. Both parents and policy makers increasingly push preschools to be more like schools.
• A wave of new research shows, however, that this picture is far too simple. A slower, longer, more nurturing childhood may actually be the best way to prepare for adulthood. Developing grown-up skills also matters, of course, but a long childhood is itself one key to a flourishing adult life.”

A new wave of AI auditing startups wants to prove responsibility can be profitable | Protocol

• ““AI is a volatile thing,” said Krishna Gade, founder and CEO of Fiddler. He alluded to the highly publicized flaws in Zillow’s home-buying algorithms, which led the company to purchase homes for more than they were worth. Not only did the company lose money and lay off staff as a result, but some argue the flawed AI may have exacerbated gentrification by fueling inflated home prices.
• But in a situation like Zillow’s, the potential societal harms of its home-buying algorithm may have seemed less obvious than the immediate business harms. And in general, tech decision-makers might respond more readily to an appeal to traditional business considerations when it comes to AI auditing services, said Gade.
• “Most CEOs don’t really know what is the immediate ROI for implementing ethical AI and responsible AI,” he said. So, he said he starts conversations by trying to convince prospective clients that monitoring their AI could create positive ROI. “Then we say, by the way, there’s also all these other benefits — you can reduce these reputation risks.””

Maybe There’s a Use for Crypto After All | NYTimes

• “The network is made up of devices called Helium hot spots, gadgets with antennas that can send small amounts of data over long distances using radio frequencies. These hot spots, which cost roughly $500 apiece and can reach 200 times farther than conventional Wi-Fi hot spots, share their owners’ bandwidth with nearby internet-connected devices — like parking meters, air-quality sensors or smart kitchen appliances.
• Here’s where the crypto part comes in: In addition to transmitting data, Helium hot spots reward their owners for participating in the network by creating units of a cryptocurrency called $HNT. These tokens can be bought and sold on the open market like any other cryptocurrency, and the more a hot spot is used, the more $HNT tokens it generates.”

The Internet Is Just Investment Banking Now | The Atlantic

• “Forget the hype around all things crypto. Set aside, for a moment, whether it makes sense to spend a fortune on an ape picture. Those matters are distractions. Let’s call things what they are: NFTs represent a first step in the securitization of digital assets. They turn digital data into speculative financial instruments. That shift has enormous implications because computers are in everything, and that makes anything a digital asset — your bank records, your Fitbit data, rings of your smart doorbell, a sentiment analysis of your work email, you name it. First the internet made it easy for people to conduct their lives online. Then it made it possible to monetize the attention generated by that online life. Now the digital exhaust of all that life online is poised to become an asset class for speculative investment, like stocks and commodities and mortgages.”

Ketamine Therapy is Going Mainstream — Are We Ready? | New Yorker

• “[Ketamine] is also, unlike LSD and mushrooms, legal for medical use throughout the U.S., and so provides the only avenue for American medical providers to generate revenue with psychedelic substances. (In 2019, the F.D.A. approved Spravato, from Johnson & Johnson, which contains one of the two molecules in the original ketamine formulation, and which will allow the company to sell a more profitable, if not necessarily more effective, version of the drug.) Today, a self-referring depressive with several hundred dollars on hand who is not in the throes of active mania or psychosis can seek out a wide array of clinical treatments with the drug: a titrated dose given intravenously by an anesthesiologist at a retail clinic, a shot in the arm from a psychiatrist in private practice, an oral lozenge sent in the mail by a startup taking advantage of pandemic-era changes to the regulation of remote prescriptions. If you can get to the right city, and have sufficient funds, you can easily secure a legal, therapist-guided, mind-expanding trip at a clinic that advertises on Facebook and is funded by venture capital.”

Big Tech’s Next Monopoly Game: Building the Car of the Future | Politico

• “The stakes are enormous. Tech companies and the automakers envision a future where riders can seamlessly blend work, play and chores, easily ordering groceries, scheduling work meetings or watching TV from the comfort of their cars. The data coming off those vehicles also could automatically update maps, notify city workers about potholes and tell brick-and-mortar retailers where customers travel from.
• “The ride is no longer the point,” said Jim Heffner, a vice president at Cox Automotive Mobility who specializes in autonomous and connected vehicles. “Data is the cornerstone. … Apple and Google and others want to be at the epicenter of that.””

Go-to-Market in Web3: New Mindsets, Tactics, Metrics | a16z

• “The concept of the customer acquisition funnel is core to go-to-market, and is very familiar to most businesses: going from awareness and lead generation at the top of the funnel to converting and retaining customers at the bottom of the funnel. Traditional web2 go-to-market therefore attacks the cold-start problem through this very linear lens of customer acquisition, encompassing areas such as pricing, marketing, partnerships, sales channel mapping, and sales force optimization. Success metrics include time to close a lead, site click-through rate, and revenue per customer, among others.
• Web3 changes the whole approach to bootstrapping new networks, since tokens offer an alternative to the traditional approach to the cold-start problem. Rather than spending funds on traditional marketing to entice and acquire potential customers, core developer teams can use tokens to bring in early users, who can then be rewarded for their early contributions when network effects weren’t yet obvious or started. Not only are those early users evangelists who bring more people into the network (who would like to similarly be rewarded for their contributions), but this essentially makes early users in web3 more powerful than the traditional business development or salespeople in web2.”

Digital Advertising in 2022 | Stratechery

• “On the Internet, though, that journey is increasingly compressed into a single impression: you see an ad on Instagram, you click on it to find out more, you login with Shop Pay, and then you wonder what you were thinking when it shows up at your door a few days later. The loop for apps is even tighter: you see an ad, click an ‘Install’ button, and are playing a level just seconds later. Sure, there are things like re-targeting or list building, but by-and-large Internet advertising, particularly when it comes to Facebook, is almost all direct response.
• This can make for an exceptionally resilient business model: because the return-on-investment (ROI) of direct response advertising is measurable to a fantastically greater degree than traditional advertising measurement, advertisers can spend right up to the level they place on a particular customer or transaction’s value; Facebook, of course, is willing to help them do that as easily as possible, squeezing out margin in the process. Moreover, because these ads are sold at auction, the company is insulated from events like COVID or boycotts; I explained in 2020’s Apple and Facebook:”

BrainTrust: Fighting Capitalism with Capitalism | Not Boring

• “But at some point, every marketplace wants to turn from attract to extract. Even Amazon. Amazon’s third-party seller marketplace is a bit of a mess and its huge advertising business, while one of the most underrated business stories in the world, makes it harder to find the actual best thing for you.
• In other words, the point of consolidating the market is that at some point, even if it’s very far in the future, it should make it easier to capture the value you’ve spent years creating. If your business is valued on the present value of future cash flows, you need to show investors that there are enormous cash flows sitting out there in the future that you’re buying with a low take rate today.
• But what if you’re not valued in the same way? This is where Braintrust’s tokenomics come in, and why I think that Braintrust token holders will be able to capture the value the network creates. Equity prices are based on the present value of future cash flows because that’s what they confer rights to, ultimately. You can’t use Airbnb shares to get free stays or pay a lower fee as a host. You use Airbnb shares to own a percentage of the business, and to vote.
• But BTRST tokens offer both ownership and utility. And for network participants, that utility has real, measurable financial value.”

How Disgust Explains Everything | NYTimes

• “Darwin was the first modern observer to drop a pebble into the scummy pond of disgust studies. In “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” he describes a personal encounter that took place in Tierra del Fuego, where Darwin was dining on a portion of cold preserved meat at a campsite. As he ate, a “naked savage” came over and poked Darwin’s meat with a finger, showing “utter disgust at its softness.” Darwin, in turn, was disgusted at having his snack fingered by a stranger. Darwin inferred that the other man was repelled by the unusual texture of the meat, but he was less confident about the origins of his own response. The hands of the “savage,” after all, did not appear to be dirty. What was it about the poking that rendered Darwin’s food inedible? Was it the man’s nakedness? His foreignness? And why, Darwin wondered — moving on to a remembered scenario — was the sight of soup smeared in a man’s beard disgusting, even though there was “of course nothing disgusting in the soup itself”?”

No Company, no… problem | TechCrunch

• “As TechCrunch noted last week, seed-, Series A- and Series B-stage companies, have been generating far less revenue in recent quarters than in years past. Likely, it’s because startups are raising money at a much faster clip (you can only make so much progress in a few months’ time!). But investors are also playing it looser than ever. No progress? No big deal, goes the apparent thinking. It’s the bet on the founder that matters.
• Still, the strongest indicator that VC could maybe use a reset ties to VCs’ eagerness to fund people who’ve yet to even start a company. “It’s not a new trend,” says Niko Bonatsos, a managing director with General Catalyst. “But it’s becoming more visible now because of the massive rise of pre-seed and seed investing,” he continues. “There are a ton of general partners, bigger funds and more deals, and we’re all getting paid to invest the capital.”
• Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures is doing it. “Let’s say we knew you at Riot Games, we knew you at Snapchat, we knew you at Facebook, we knew you when you were working at Stripe or PayPal,” Suster told us last fall. “We will back you at formation — at day zero.””

Consumerizing the private markets | Talia Goldberg / Bessemer

• “The number of Americans with brokerage accounts surged +60% from 59 million in 2019 to 95 million by mid-2021, with 20 million new accounts opened in the first eight months of 2021. Today one out of five Americans actively invest in stocks or mutual funds and retail investors now account for as much trading volume as mutual funds and hedge funds combined.
• This surge was bolstered by the macro environment, but the trends are unstoppable. Products like Robinhood, Betterment, Coinbase, WeBull, Toss, and AngelList make it easier than ever to invest. Online communities on Discord, CommonStock, Twitter, and Reddit have transformed into investing clubs. Consumers are also banding together to vote with their wallets, investing in opportunities that align with their beliefs and passion. Investing is officially a part of culture.”

What If We Just Stopped Being So Available? | The Atlantic

• “All of these sorries raise the question of whether any harm is actually done when someone commits the sin of unavailability. Granted, there can be real consequences to responding slowly in a culture that considers idleness, or even just the appearance of it, to be a moral shortcoming. This is especially true at work: Even if being responsive at all hours has no bearing on an employee’s actual productivity, many bosses lazily use it as a proxy for gauging workers’ value. And Matthew Heston, a social-media researcher, told me that in an experiment based on a situation “something like trying to coordinate via Slack with someone during work hours when you know they’re online,” people reported slightly less warm feelings toward slow responders.
• Outside work, a delayed response can cause genuine problems too. If your partner texts you “I love you,” responding two days later is not a good idea. In personal communications, a lack of a speedy response risks signaling a lack of care. After all, your phone was right there.”

The Age of Anti-Ambition | NYTimes

• “Now, though, it’s as if our whole society is burned out. The pandemic may have alerted new swaths of people to their distaste for their jobs — or exhausted them past the point where there’s anything to enjoy about jobs they used to like.
• Perhaps that’s why the press is filled with stories about widespread employee dissatisfaction; last month an Insider article declared that companies “are actively driving their white-collar workers away by presuming that employees are still thinking the way they did before the pandemic: that their jobs are the most important things in their lives,” and pointed to a Gallup poll that showed that last year only a third of American workers said they were engaged in their jobs.”

Losses Mount for Startups Racing to Deliver Groceries Fast and Cheap | WSJ

• “A venture capital-backed battle is raging in New York City in the burgeoning field of instant delivery. At least six startups, including Gorillas Technologies Ltd., Jokr SARL, Getir Perakende Lojistik AS and Buyk Corp., are vying to win the chance to ferry groceries to customers within 10 to 20 minutes of their order placement on an app. Prices are similar to grocery stores, discounts are plentiful, and many services don’t have a fee or minimum order, allowing consumers to request a single pint of Ben & Jerry’s delivered to their doorstep. Food-delivery app DoorDash Inc., based in San Francisco, also recently entered the fray in New York City.
• While these consumer-friendly offerings have brought surging sales, losses are heavy given the high cost of prolific advertising and paying couriers to hand-deliver potato chips, soap and eggs in a short time frame, industry investors and executives said. Some of the companies are averaging a loss of over $20 per order when factoring in costs like advertising, those people said.
• “The economics are brutal,” said Damir Becirovic, a principal at venture-capital firm Index Ventures, which hasn’t invested in any of the startups. He added that if any of the companies can build a giant business with efficiencies from scale, that picture could change, but the short-term challenges seem daunting.”

Why Young Adults Are Delaying Parenthood | WSJ

• “Much of the conversation around the drop in birthrate has been to pearl-clutch at “entitled” millennial stereotypes or to pontificate on the joys of child-rearing. But for many of my female friends contemplating future parenthood, the pandemic highlighted longstanding inequalities and challenges faced by women with children: wage stagnation, the high cost of child care, inadequate paid leave for parents — not to mention the ever-increasing stress of an already stressed population.
• “I’ve seen how women got screwed in this,” one female friend said to me, referring to the disproportionate effect of the crisis on women.
• As another friend told me, having a child right now doesn’t feel “financially safe.” She pointed to headlines about the seemingly unending parade of new coronavirus variants and instability in her particular industry as reasons for delaying pregnancy.
• “There’s just so much uncertainty right now,” she said. “That is not going to change in 2022.”

The Unspoken VC Game of Discovery Checks | David Zhou

• “The reason discovery checks by larger funds don’t make any money is because it’s irregular and inconsistent. There often is no fund strategy behind it. That said, if you make discovery checks your core business, that means a fundamentally different strategy. Is that strategy consistent, predictable, and scalable? For accelerators, they’ve made writing discovery checks part of their fund strategy. Their game, at the end of the day, is “buying options.”
• It’s a call option. Accelerators invest $100K for 5–10% to buy the rights for the next round. The money is being made in the follow-on, not on the initial bet. And if there’s a fund strategy to deploy 100 checks of a $100K, there’s a systematic approach to writing discovery checks. This is why many accelerators include a provision for pro rata of $0.5–1M in a future round. And they’re unwilling to budge on that, even if a founder comes back and wants to seed that allocation to downstream investors.”

Consumer Fintech-Enabled Companies | Cowboy Ventures

• “Convergence of Fintech and Other Sectors — We will continue to see the integration of consumer finance into other industries that provide high value and a better experience for consumers while allowing businesses to access additional revenue streams and use alternative customer acquisition methods
• Verticalized Finance — We are taking a broader view of groups of people, their needs, and the opportunity for more personalization and customization in financial services. These can be traditional demographics such as age and ethnicity but also based on job, income type, or hobbies. This can apply to the financial services needs for consumers and SMBs
• The Consumerization of DeFi — DeFi UX leaves a lot to be desired and creates many barriers for user adoption. As the future of Web3 continues to evolve, we are currently most bullish on areas that connect traditional finance and DeFi
• Addressing Rising Consumer Debt — As more solutions arise giving consumers access to credit, we need solutions that better guide consumers and help navigate growing sources and amounts of consumer debt”

The Wrong Side of Right | Farnam Street

• “One big mistake people repeatedly make is focusing on proving themselves right, instead of focusing on achieving the best outcome. This is the wrong side of right.
• Most people never work as hard as they do when they are trying to prove themselves right. They unconsciously hold on to the ideas and evidence that reinforce their beliefs and dismiss anything that counters. When this happens, it’s not about the best outcome, it’s about protecting your ego. If you’ve made this mistake, you’re not the only one.
• “Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.””

Sometimes Winning Means Knowing When to Quit | WSJ

• “Wine and cloth were the two commercial goods that the British economist David Ricardo offered as examples in 1817 to illustrate his new concept of comparative advantage. Portugal, Ricardo pointed out, was excellent at making wine: They had the right grapes and weather, and a tradition of vintners with the know-how to produce good wine that was exportable at competitive prices. England, meanwhile, was excellent at producing cloth; the country had a storied textile tradition and the right machinery to give it an edge in the global economy. Ricardo’s argument was very straightforward: Do what you’re comparatively best at.
• Succeeding or failing in goals doesn’t have to be a black-and-white proposition; goals can come in shades.”

How Do You Design a Better Hospital? Start With the Light | Wired

• “In the late 1940s and 1950s, hospitals transformed again, this time becoming office-like buildings without frills or many features meant to improve the experience of being there. “It was really designed to be operational and efficient,” says Jessie Reich, director of patient experience and magnet programs for the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Many of these rooms had no windows at all, she points out.
• By the middle of the 20th century, the hospital had become sort of the opposite of what Florence Nightingale had envisioned, and many of those buildings, or ones modeled after them, are still in use today. “The typical hospital is designed as a machine for delivering care, but not as a place for healing,” says Sean Scensor, a principal at Safdie Architects, a firm that recently designed a hospital in Cartagena, Colombia. “I think what’s missing is the empathy for people as human beings.””

On Meditation and the Unconscious: A Buddhist Monk and a Neuroscientist in Conversation | MIT Press

• “I consider the workspace of consciousness as the highest and most integrated level of brain function. Access to this workspace is privileged and controlled by attention. Moreover, the rules governing conscious deliberations such as consciously made decisions most likely differ from those of subconscious processes. The former are based mainly on rational, logical, or syntactic rules, and the search for solutions is essentially a serial process. Arguments and facts are scrutinized one by one and possible outcomes investigated. Hence, conscious processing takes time. Subconscious mechanisms seem to rely more on parallel processing, whereby a large number of neuronal assemblies, each of which represents a particular solution, enter into competition with one another. Then a “winner-takes-all” algorithm leads to the stabilization of the assembly that best fits the actual context of distributed activity patterns. Thus, the conscious mechanism is suited best to circumstances in which no time pressure exists, when not too many variables have to be considered, and when the variables are defined with sufficient precision to be subjected to rational analysis.”

What Is ‘Bigorexia’? | NYTimes

• “A 2019 survey published in the Californian Journal of Health Promotion examined body image in boys. Almost a third of the 149 boys surveyed, aged 11 to 18, were dissatisfied with their body shapes. Athletes were more likely to be dissatisfied than non-athletes and most wanted to “increase muscle,” especially in the chest, arms and abs.
• The quest for perfect pecs is so strong that psychiatrists now sometimes refer to it as “bigorexia,” a form of muscle dysmorphia exhibited mostly by men and characterized by excessive weight lifting, a preoccupation with not feeling muscular enough and a strict adherence to eating foods that lower weight and build muscle. The condition can also lead young men to become obsessed with their appearance, checking themselves in the mirror either constantly or not at all.”

Ownership and the American Dream | Not Boring by Packy McCormick

• “Inequality has gotten completely out of control. We are using tools designed for a linear age in an exponential one. Even tripling wages won’t make a dent in the gap. To win votes, politicians ignore the facts and opt to turn labor against capital, instead of trying to make everyone capital.
• So here’s my slogan: American Owned. (Or Make Americans Owners, or something, we’re working on it.) We need to make America the place where everyone is an owner, and everyone acts like an owner. We need to make it the place where hard work and risk taking are applauded and rewarded.
• The point is this: we need to stop focusing so much time worrying about protecting peoples’ downsides and start spending more time working on getting more people more upside. Put another way, there is more relative downside to not participating in upside than there is to the actual downside. As any equity investor will tell you, you can only lose 1x your money, but your upside is uncapped.
• We’re thinking like a bunch of fixed income investors, worrying about what can go wrong, instead of thinking like venture capitalists, dreaming of what can go right! That needs to change.

Tech Startup Wants To Gamify Suing People Using Crypto Tokens | Vice

• “A new tech startup plans to become “the stock market of litigation financing” by allowing everyday Americans to bet on civil lawsuits through the purchase (and trade) of associated crypto tokens. In doing so, the company hopes to provide funding to individuals who would otherwise not be able to pursue claims.
• “What we do is: tell the story, vet the legal claim, and then allow the public to invest and give you the funds to go and litigate your case,” Roche explained. “And what does the public get in return? The public gets an interest in the outcome of your suit.””

My first impressions of web3 | Moxie Marlinspike

• “The people at the end of the line who are flipping NFTs do not fundamentally care about distributed trust models or payment mechanics, but they care about where the money is. So the money draws people into OpenSea, they improve the experience by building a platform that iterates on the underlying web3 protocols in web2 space, they eventually offer the ability to “mint” NFTs through OpenSea itself instead of through your own smart contract, and eventually this all opens the door for Coinbase to offer access to the validated NFT market with their own platform via your debit card. That opens the door to Coinbase managing the tokens themselves through dark pools that Coinbase holds, which helpfully eliminates the transaction fees and makes it possible to avoid having to interact with smart contracts at all. Eventually, all the web3 parts are gone, and you have a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card. The project can’t start as a web2 platform because of the market dynamics, but the same market dynamics and the fundamental forces of centralization will likely drive it to end up there.”
• Responses from Prof Scott Galloway and response to the response from Packy McCormick’s Not Boring — love when several of my favorite writers debate!!
• Related: Beware the FOMO Bullies of Technology

The Second Coming of Stephen Curry | GQ

• “The place the team finds itself in suits Curry. To have his squad written off, only to bring them roaring back as a newer, potentially better version of their old selves. It all fits the overarching Curry mythology — that of the perpetual underdog. It’s significantly more difficult to sell that narrative now than it was when Curry was a scrawny kid firing away at Davidson, stitching together an upset run to the Elite Eight. More difficult than when he was battling ankle injuries early in his NBA career. Indeed, the idea of the underdog today seems almost an invention, just as Michael Jordan imagined slights and pulled foes out of thin air. Curry smirks a bit when I ask, incredulously, about his commitment to this underdog status. “I’ve failed at explaining what it feels like,” he says. “But I still carry that one thousand percent, because I have a long-term memory of everything that it took and everything I’ve been through to get here.”

The Dirty Work of Cleaning Online Reputations | The Walrus

• “IN THE MID-2000S, Matt Earle was an internet marketer for an offshore bank in Bermuda, helping draw in new customers. Impressed with his skills, corporate clients hired him to boost their profiles online. But Earle soon realized that they would also pay to bury bad news — scandals, lawsuits, or run-ins with financial regulators. He returned to Toronto in 2010 and, the next year, launched Reputation.ca, a company that provides digital makeovers, helping people regain control over how they appear on the internet.
• Earle became what is called a reputation fixer, joining an industry today worth, according to one estimate, $240 million (US) annually. Reputation fixers run the spectrum from high-profile PR firms — such as Toronto-based Navigator, which former CBC host Jian Ghomeshi first turned to in 2014, when he was embroiled in assault accusations — to smaller, scrappier services like Earle’s. Many Reputation.ca clients are businesses worried about the effect of scathing customer reviews or social media rants from disgruntled ex-employees. (One 2020 survey found that negative feedback on public forums like Yelp or Facebook can drive away 92 percent of consumers.) But Earle and his competitors also hear from individuals: students humiliated by an explicit photo on a revenge-porn website, professionals desperate to expunge trash talk from a former client’s blog, or CEOs who can’t shake outdated news stories that keep popping up on Google. The internet has a long memory.”

Coatue: An Agile Colossus | The Generalist

• “Coatue ≠ Tiger. Though they are frequently compared, the two mammoth crossover funds run very different playbooks. Tiger looks to index the private markets and relies on outsourced diligence. Coatue is a more selective picker and leans on its internal research abilities.
• Large organizations can still evolve. Though Coatue is one the biggest funds in the world, it has continued to experiment with its structure. Almost a quarter of a century into its lifecycle, the fund shows no signs of curbing its adventurousness.
• Data science offers an edge in private markets. In 2014, Coatue began investing in data science capabilities. In the years since, it has built a robust platform called “Mosaic” that surfaces credit card data, customer lists, and company comparisons. Though some question its utility, it is favorably received by founders.
• A global outlook can surface new lessons. Coatue was quick to recognize the potential of investing in Chinese tech. It has applied lessons from that geography to Western businesses and visa-versa. Coatue founded a splashy conference to facilitate cross-cultural exchange: “East Meets West.”
• Hedge fund norms are an uneasy fit with VC. Though it has a fully-fledged private market practice, Coatue’s internal culture has been lifted from Wall Street, circa 1985. It is notoriously cutthroat and aggressive. The compensation structure is also non-standard and may partially explain critical departures.”

The Renaissance Man of Venture Capital | Institutional Investor

• ““You can see how almost every one of our companies has its basis in science fiction,” the 43-year-old venture capitalist says from Lux’s downtown New York City office, where he’s dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, seated next to a wall of books that includes a number of well-worn sci-fi paperbacks, along with a handful of Star Wars action figures. With a childlike enthusiasm for the possibilities around him, the only thing that gives away his age is his salt-and-pepper hair.
• These descriptions might sound a bit over the top until you talk to Wolfe at length (or follow his musings on Twitter). “I’m intellectually competitive,” he says, explaining that he would rather spend weekends reading than watching football. In the course of a two-and-a-half-hour interview with Institutional Investor last year, he manages to casually quote theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, political philosopher John Rawls, and British playwright Tom Stoppard, while showing off Lux’s mural of what he calls the “rebels of science.” (Think Charles Darwin, Alan Turing, Rosalind Franklin.) He commissioned the bright red painting from an artist he met at the Santa Fe Institute, where he is a trustee.”

The Cryptofication of SaaS | John Chen

Digital Health Year-in-Review | Greycroft

• “The pandemic accentuated the need for mental health and addiction services in the US. First generation businesses like Ginger, Lyra, and Modern Health have destigmatized and redefined access to therapy. As more Americans seek care while the supply of clinicians remains the same, we expect models targeting verticals within behavioral health to gain traction.
• We’ve invested in Octave, an evidence-based and outcome-driven mental health practice. We’ve also seen businesses like Therify and Violet begin to address underserved populations in a culturally-responsive, personalized way. Meanwhile, others like Brightline, Charlie Health and Mantra have focused on pediatric and young adult populations, where the need for personalized mental health services has too often gone unmet. We also expect entrepreneurs to target various levels of acuity, ranging from preventative, wellness applications like Yoni Circles and Breathwrk to businesses addressing serious mental illness, like Valera Health and NOCD.
• We’d be remiss not to mention the addiction epidemic as well, where several digital health companies have begun to tackle opioid and other addictions via innovative, tech-enabled models. In this space, we are proud to have partnered with Boulder Care, a telehealth addiction clinic grounded in science and empathetic care.”
• Related: The Oscar Puzzle | Not Boring

Love Is Biological Bribery | Nautilus

• “The reason love evolved was to motivate and reward us for taking part in relationships, critical to our survival. That goes for our reproductive partners, children, and extending to our friends. Humans are highly cooperative because we have to be. A species will be solitary unless it absolutely has to cooperate with somebody else. And that’s fine, except it’s incredibly stressful. You have to spend a hell of a lot of time monitoring everybody else’s behavior, making sure you’re spotting those people who are trying to cheat you or steal from you.
• And the way evolution made sure we cooperate was to come up with chemical bribery. At the basis of love are four neurochemicals. Each has a different role but together they motivate us or to give us confidence to go into social relationships. Ultimately, we get addicted to those chemicals. We get this hit of joy, of euphoria, of reward when we interact with the people important to our survival. It’s biological bribery. It’s like if I give my kids a sweet because they’ve done something good, which is bad parenting, but it works.”

That Cloud of Smoke Is Not a Mirage | NYTimes

• “Smoking is back,” said Isabel Rower, a 24-year-old sculptor, one of the spirited Americans outside Clearing. “Weirdly, in the last year or two, all my friends who didn’t smoke, now smoke. I don’t know why. No one is really addicted to it. It’s more of a pleasure activity.”
• Across New York City, as the pandemic waxes and wanes, a social activity that had seemed diminished, or replaced (with vapes, cannabis and education), seems to have reappeared. Have cigarettes, those filthy, cancer-causing things — and still the №1 cause of preventable death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — lost their taboo?

Gen Z, Creators, and Our Mental Health Tipping Point | Digital Native

• When it comes to mental health, creators occupy a uniquely precarious place. Creators build their careers on internet platforms, subjected to comparison and rejection and algorithmic whim. Beyond D’Amelio, creators have been candid about their mental health: the TikTok creator Avani Gregg, for instance, wrote a memoir called Backstory that dives into her anxiety and depression.
• I spoke this week with my good friend Chris Olsen, an LA-based TikTok creator with 6.2M followers. Chris, who just turned 24, likened being a creator to being on a treadmill — an endless, nonstop pursuit of ideas and content and likes and brand deals.
• When I asked Chris what aspects of being a creator are most challenging, from a mental health perspective, he pointed to: (1) The need to constantly produce content, (2) The pressure to meet or exceed a high bar, and (3) The lack of infrastructure for creators.
• When Chris isn’t producing content, he isn’t earning income. There’s no concept of “PTO” in the creator economy. A week off means a week with no money. And Chris is only as good as his last few posts — if his metrics start to slip, brands value him less and he earns less money.”

How Game Theory Changed Poker | WSJ

• ““The pros caught wind of what we were doing,” Richard Gibson, a former doctoral student of Prof. Bowling’s, told me. Prof. Gibson’s dissertation was titled “Regret Minimization in Games and the Development of Champion Multiplayer Computer Poker-Playing Agents.” Regret is a formalized mathematical concept when it comes to making decisions in an uncertain environment — it’s the difference between an optimal decision and an actual decision. Minimizing regret is an important ingredient in many modern poker-playing algorithms. “It seemed like it was worth a lot to them,” Prof. Gibson said. “They were paying me pretty good money.”
• Programmers are hired to analyze a player’s game data, finding “leaks” or mistakes in their play, and to perform game-theoretical analyses, calculating what plays are optimal in any of the countless situations a poker player might face. Even an off-the-shelf poker program can be fairly expensive — the pro version of one popular program is $475. But it’s worth it because of how dramatically it can change a player’s game.
• Related: How A.I. Conquered Poker | NYTimes

Game Studios Are Turning Play Into Work | Wired

• “NFTs take this desire for an extrinsic reward to its logical conclusion: a financial incentive. The idea is ostensibly compelling. After all, games have economies, infamously lucrative ones. You play all day, paying for Gabe Newell’s extended vacation in New Zealand, yet, unless you’re a lucky streamer, you get only loot boxes in return. Academics often talk about the unpaid “immaterial labor” of logging in to Facebook and having your preferences mined for advertising dollars. Isn’t gaming similar? You can follow this logic: Developers are unionizing, why shouldn’t gamers? Developers should treat players as corporations treat workers. We ‘play to contribute.’ We’re productive. Just as players demand fairer progression systems, they should demand cold hard cash payments, too.”

Tell Me a Story | No Mercy / No Malice with Prof Galloway

• “Entrepreneur is a synonym for salesperson, and salesperson is the pedestrian term for storyteller. Pro tip: No startup makes sense. We (entrepreneurs) are all impostors who must deploy a fiction (i.e. story) that captures imaginations and capital to pull the future forward and turn rhyme into reason. No business I have started, at the moment of inception, made any sense … until it did. Or didn’t. The only way to predict the future is to make it.
• This is not the same as lying. There’s a real distinction between an entrepreneur and a liar: Entrepreneurs believe their story will come true. This requires confidence … and delusion. It helps to be somewhat detached from reality — to assume that, for whatever reason, you are the one who can see into the future, and that in the new world your product/service will be needed and successful, despite overwhelming evidence (i.e. the current reality) that it’s not. A reality distortion field if you will.”

A Lay of the Meta-land: A Systematic Approach to Dissect the Metaverse | Catrina Wang

Silicon Valley’s New Obsession | The Atlantic

• “Now founders and investors — including tech CEOs, crypto billionaires, bloggers, economists, celebrities, and scientists — are coming together to address stasis with experimentation. They’re building a fleet of new scientific labs to speed progress in understanding complex disease, extending healthy lifespans, and uncovering nature’s secrets in long-ignored organisms. In the process, they’re making research funding one of the hottest spaces in Silicon Valley.”

My Precocious Rap Career, Flow State, and Envy for Gen Z | Derek Shillman

• Defining Flow more deeply, Csikszentmihalyi outlines what I interpret as eight boxes that must be checked in order for the state to take place:
• Achievability 📑: we must have a reasonable chance of completing the task we confront
• Concentration 😗: we must be able to concentrate fully on what we are doing
• Goal-Oriented 🥍 : we must have a clear purpose for undertaking the exercise
• Feedback 🟢🔴: we must be able to receive immediate and precise internal and external feedback
• Effort 💪: we must act with a deep but effortless involvement that removes awareness of other distractions
• Control 🦺: we must be able to exercise a sense of control over our actions
• Mindfulness 🧘‍: we lose concern for the self, external pressure surrenders, and focus is only on the task at hand
• Time ⏱: our sense of duration is altered; hours pass in minutes, and minutes can stretch on for hours

Nomadland, Banksy, and Our Web3 Future of Work | Digital Native

• “Having entered the work market in the midst of an economic crisis, much of what is now considered ‘Millennial culture’ celebrates a capitalistic, work-focused mindset. It’s all about ‘side hustles’, having a ‘five-year plan’, ‘making your job your LIFE’, and aspiring to be ‘a boss’. To Gen Z, the Millennial attitude towards work has provided much opportunity for mockery. In fact, it’s a key part of the so-called “beef” between the two generations, which started with TikTok videos mocking Millennials for supposedly being overly corporate, among other things. Gen Z are more likely to have the mindset that work is simply labour, rather than a person’s entire identity. So the idea of dreaming to be a cog in a big corporate machine, or working in a job you hate because it’s in the ‘five year plan’, probably seems less aspirational — as does a monologue like the ‘cerulean speech’”

Are VCs Racist? Explaining The Capital Gap | Jeff Bussgang

• “Each year, Flybridge chooses a non-business book to send to our founders as a year-end gift. This year, we chose an influential book in social psychology called Blindspots: Hidden Biases of Good People. The authors, Professors Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington and Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, build on their pioneering work in creating the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to demonstrate that human beings have strong, often unconscious and instinctive, biases. In research study after study, the authors describe these remarkable “mind bugs” that show how our unconscious preferences manifest themselves in strange, surprising and sometimes disturbing ways.
• The implications of this social psychology insight are powerful in the context of racial discrimination. Although the authors indicate that various studies show that we have seen explicit, overt biases decrease in America in recent decades (I should note that the book was published in 2013 — years prior to the Trump era and the recent rise in hate crimes), strong implicit biases remain. Specifically, the IAT has “revealed that approximately 75% of Americans display implicit (automatic) preference for white relative to Black.”
• Towards the end of the book, the authors conclude that these hidden biases “plausibly contribute more to discrimination in America than does the overt prejudice of an ever-decreasing minority of Americans.” In their appendix, they frame that “Black Americans experience disadvantages — meaning inferior outcomes — on almost every economically significant dimension. This includes earnings, education, housing, employment, status in the criminal justice system, and health.” And they acknowledge that there are two theories of Black disadvantage. Again, quoting from the appendix: “One set of theories credits Black Americans themselves with full responsibility for the disadvantages they experience. The other set…place the entire responsibility elsewhere.” The authors conclude that “institutional discrimination as a cause of Black disadvantage is undeniable historical fact.””

Neural Noise Shows the Uncertainty of Our Memories | Quanta

• “The uncertainty in working memory may be linked to a surprising way that the brain monitors and uses ambiguity, according to a recent paper in Neuron from neuroscience researchers at New York University. Using machine learning to analyze brain scans of people engaged in a memory task, they found that signals encoded an estimate of what people thought they saw — and the statistical distribution of the noise in the signals encoded the uncertainty of the memory. The uncertainty of your perceptions may be part of what your brain is representing in its recollections. And this sense of the uncertainties may help the brain make better decisions about how to use its memories.”

Podcasts

Mayer is King | Wong Notes

• “Cory and John Mayer sit down with their guitars to jam and discuss how they approach playing, songwriting, record-making, and the music business.”

Peter Chernin — Betting on Passion | Invest Like the Best

• “ Peter Chernin, who’s had a Hall of Fame career in the entertainment business. Peter ran News Corp and Fox for fifteen years between 1996 and 2009 before co-founding The Chernin Group, which has become one of the leading investment firms in the consumer space. Along the way, he has also produced a number of blockbuster films, including Titanic, Avatar, The Greatest Showman, and The Planet of the Apes Trilogy.”

Sam Englebardt and Richard Kim — Investing in Immersive Worlds | Invest Like the Best

• “Sam Englebardt and Richard Kim, general partners at venture fund, Galaxy Interactive. Having come from the media and finance sectors, respectively, Sam and Richard joined forces in 2018 to invest in their shared thesis that immersive digital experiences would become the dominant way people engage with each other in the future. Our conversation centers around the evolution of art, finance, and gaming as they proliferate in Web3.”

How Valuable Is Enthusiasm? | No Stupid Questions

What’s So Great About Retirement? | No Stupid Questions

Why Do Most Ideas Fail to Scale? | Freakonomics

• “In a new book called “The Voltage Effect,” the economist John List — who has already revolutionized how his profession does research — is trying to start a scaling revolution. In this installment of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, List teaches us how to avoid false positives, how to know whether a given success is due to the chef or the ingredients, and how to practice “optimal quitting.””
• Related: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities | Tim Ferris Show

Why Are There So Many Bad Bosses? | Freakonomics

• “People who are good at their jobs routinely get promoted into bigger jobs they’re bad at. We explain why firms keep producing incompetent managers — and why that’s unlikely to change.”

A Clean Slate: With Guests John Beshears, Richard Thaler & Ray Zahab | Choiceology with Katy Milkman

• “For many people, the start of a new year is an occasion to re-examine their lives, to set new goals and to give up old habits. Making New Year’s resolutions is something of a social ritual, but we see similar behaviors around other significant dates, as well — such as birthdays and anniversaries and the changing of seasons. And while it can be argued that all of these dates are arbitrary, studies show that they can still give you a head start in achieving your goals.”

Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More | Tim Ferriss Show

• “Margaret Atwood (@margaretatwood) is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. Dearly, her first collection of poetry in over a decade, was published November 2020. Her latest novel, The Testaments, is a co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. It is the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series. Her other works of fiction include Cat’s Eye, finalist for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; the MaddAddam Trilogy; and Hag-Seed: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest Retold.
• Margaret’s work has been published in more than 45 countries, and she is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Innovator’s Award.”

Dr. Michio Kaku — Exploring Time Travel, the Beauty of Physics, Parallel Universes, the Mind of God, String Theory, Lessons from Einstein, and More | Tim Ferriss Show

• “Dr. Michio Kaku (@michiokaku) is a professor of theoretical physics at The City College of New York, co-founder of string field theory, and the author of several widely acclaimed science books, including Beyond Einstein, The Future of Humanity, The Future of the Mind, Hyperspace, Physics of the Future, Physics of the Impossible, and his latest, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything.”

Putting Our Assumptions to the Test | Hidden Brain

• “Do you ever stop to wonder if the way you see the world is how the world really is? Economist Abhijit Banerjee has spent a lifetime asking himself this question. His answer: Our world views often don’t reflect reality. The only way to get more accurate is to think like a scientist — even when you’re not looking through a microscope.”

Mind Reading 2.0: Why Conversations Go Wrong | Hidden Brain

• “Do you ever struggle to communicate with your mom? Or feel like you and your spouse sometimes speak different languages? In the final episode of our “Mind Reading 2.0” series, we bring back a favorite conversation with linguist Deborah Tannen. She shows how our conversational styles can cause unintended conflicts, and what we can do to communicate more effectively with the people in our lives.”

Musique