August 31
🎥 35mm film in Indiana (+ a surprise) by graincheck
It may sound crazy to those maybe not in the same position it can be really hard to make personal work alongside client work and so having a designated fun camera has really helped me I just make sure that my fun camera has no pressure on it that is the one and only rule.
I feel the same with writing. I write professionally but then put absolutely no pressures on my Substack. This practice is SO helpful when practicing the same art form for both work and fun.
🎥 Why I Left the Verge by Becca Farsace
more so than that you can trust that we're taking Tech outside the way we use devices is not in a studio or in this case my bedroom under a giant light it's in the world and so I'm taking Tech out there and I'm trying it where it will be used and I'm going to show my work and just know that every time you tune in we're going on an adventure together
Note: this is what I'm doing. I don't paint indoors so much. I love taking it outside and painting outside. And my YouTube can be that. I don't need a studio. I can just be out. The world is my studio.
August 30
🎧 Cold War II + an Update on Global Conflicts — With Niall Ferguson - Prof G Pod
Neil writes. He's incredibly intense, long, really well-researched books. He loves writing, and then he's used his platform kind of a world-class historian to launch a consulting business called Green Mantle that is really powerful, very similar, kind of Along the same veins as Eurasia Group with Ian Bremmer.
And what I would suggest to any young person is that if you have the ability, especially with remote work, if before you have aging parents or you have kids of your own, by all means, brother, Get on a boat, a plane, a bus, and live in a different city. You don't need to do better. You need to do different.
🎧 Why Stocks Corrected + Second Quarter Tech Earnings — Ft. Mark Mahaney - Prof G Markets
Every day, media companies have to sell advertising. And the way they sell, make money off of advertising is they sell the type of consumer, but more importantly, how many consumers or viewers are watching. So every day, regardless if there's any news at all, they have to pretend there is news and they have to pretend that it's dramatic. The quote unquote plunge here, as of today, has taken the doubt back to where it was exactly a month ago. I mean, this is such a fucking nothing burger.
One of my kind of Yodas that I think is actually underappreciated is John Vogel, the founder of Vanguard. And he has this great quote, the stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing.
August 29
📰 The Enduring Legacy of Kate Spade’s Witty, Misunderstood Life via Wall Street Journal
With her partner, Andy Spade, she started Kate Spade with six boxy handbags in 1993. They weren’t married yet; she was the “Kate” and he was the “Spade.”
After a company changes hands multiple times, and its founder dies, can its original vision endure?
She and Andy also appreciated simplicity. As a design inspiration, the two often cited advice from The Elements of Style, Strunk and White’s manual for writers—“To achieve style, begin by affecting none.”
The Spades were funny. When Kate and Andy hosted their first adult dinner party, the invitation went out with a copy of instructions for the Heimlich maneuver.
Bell, who is a co-founder with Kenneth Cole of the Mental Health Coalition, says that she and Kate had a euphemism for therapists: “the contractor”—as in, someone who can fix you. “I regret that, because I think that we could have just said therapist…. I think we should have talked about it more openly,” she says.
🎧 What to Do When Your Partner Isn't Happy - Staying Up with Cammie and
We went for my dad's 60th birthday and my whole family. So my whole side went, it was just so special. Well remember that for the rest of our lives.
Alaska cruise trip was for Taryn's dad's 60th bday. I want to do this for my parents too.
Travel tip: write down memories
Taryn: My top travel tip is to, every night before you go to bed, write down your memories. This is something, memories from the day.
Cammie: I love that you do this. She also did this right after our wedding. We like sat down and wrote down everything from the weekend.
Taryn: I can't express enough how much this helps you remember a trip.
August 28
🎧 Office Hour’s Best of Business - Prof G Pod
Create a differentiated product
If you constantly are having dinner with strangers, it means you're selling an undifferentiated product. So if you're in the services business and your job is to have these full relationships with people, it means you're all selling the same damn widget and you're dependent upon relationships.
Brand era > supply chain era
Traditional based advertising and brand billing is gonna go away? No, but it's gonna be a shitty place to work or invest. If you're absolutely in love with it, or you're scaling and have senior level sponsorship, or you're rounding third, then by all means stay there. But if you're younger, don't love it. I just think it's gonna get more and more difficult for the traditional advertisers slash brand building complex. And this is from someone who made a really good living preaching about brand. I think things have generally changed. I think we've moved from a brand era, and I don't wanna call it an innovation era, to a supply chain era. Most of the big, big advances in shareholder value, in addition to being asset-like, recurring revenue, lack of advertising, have been supply chain.
📰 Control Your Environment by Ali Abdaal’s LifeNotes
Agatha Christie didn’t have a designated desk, despite becoming one of the best-selling authors in history, with her novels selling over 2 billion copies. For reference: only the Bible and Shakespeare have sold more.
📰 Breaking Up Google Is Not Enough by Julia Angwin
the truth of being a monopoly it doesn’t only confer power, but it also makes you into a huge target. Google has been the single target of spammers and search engine optimizers for decades now, and it seems that it is losing the war against them. To build a better ecosystem, we need to decentralize and establish some hybrid vigor. After all, wasn’t decentralization the whole point of the Internet?
August 27
🎧 Is It Time to Remember the Metaverse? — With Matthew Ball - Prof G Pod
On a risk adjusted basis, luxury has performed better than even, yes, you guessed it, tech. And it's produced, I think, the second or third most billionaires. This is an unbelievable business, and it has huge motes by virtue of the fact that it has heritage. You cannot recreate Chanel right now.
Scarcity in branding
Personally, there is the illusion of scarcity that you want to create. You want to have boundaries in my brand. I absolutely say no to 95%. Now granted, I'm in a position of privilege, but creating a sense that your, I don't know, your brand or your person, if you will, has a touch of exclusivity to it once you've established Some domain expertise and some credibility, I think is key to creating margin, if you will.
Let me translate this to B2B. What are you doing B2B? In my opinion, what's the best way to market? You put out thought leadership that gets awareness. With L2, we put out a ranking. And you create a reverse inquiry model if you can. That way, it changes the entire tone of the conversation, right? And you try and create an illusion of scarcity that you're doing them a favor by them signing up as membership. The entire membership model in hospitality right now, whether it's Maison Estelle, Orso House, or Casa Cipriani, that entire thing has just exploded, although I think it's probably Saturated at this point. It's all based on the illusion of scarcity. Gee, can you recommend me so I can pay $7,000 a year to then go buy drinks at what is essentially a nice restaurant? This again is the master of illusion of scarcity. This is what has become of branding.
The first person who spoils you, you just love the rest of your life.
There's their public perception, their investor relations. They've been told, just as every CEO is told to say AI, every other word, the McDonald's investor relations team has said, do not even utter the words GLP-1. And they are in the ultimate jazz hands, weapon of mass distraction, trying to pretend it's anything else. Oh, it's inflation? Why would they say it's inflation? Because inflation is cyclical, meaning the problems will be solved.
Ed: Let's say it [GLP-1] is a problem and they [McD] have recognized that internally. How do you spill the beans?
Scott: You dramatically change your menu. You say that in response to trends, you don't even have to say that [GLP-1], we're offering different types of products.
🎧 Murdoch Succession Drama, Trump's Voting Promises, and Guest Anne Applebaum - Pivot Pod
Anyway, and it's a terrific book. I've read it as fantastic. The book is Autocracy Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum #tbr
August 26
🎧 Will Tesla’s Robotaxi Ever Arrive? + Sin Stocks and Zyn Nicotine Pouches - Prof G Pod
Luxury brands rooted in heritage
They have an incredible mode because the majority of luxury brands have a heritage. You just can't spin up heritage. You can have a brand like Supreme that becomes aspirational for a while. But these brands, Panerai was initially crafted for Italian submariners. I mean, this shit is just Louis Vuitton trekked into Paris on Barefoot and said, okay, it makes no sense that these carriages are suitcases that are rounded at the top and have leather That attracts moisture and mold. So we came up, luxury is really rooted in innovation. I think it was, was it L'Oreal or was it, I forget who initially it was a German chemist who went to the fields of the south of France and found a way to crush these flowers and turn them into A fragrance. I mean, this should, it really is rooted It was innovation before there was innovation as we saw it in terms of technology was in fact luxury.
It's weird to think this, but I would bet within five years, ten years max, a key component of your boards deciding whether to make someone CEO is how strong is their following.
August 25
🎧 Appealing to the Swing States + How to Be a Better Negotiator - Prof G Pod
Scott: Are there any sort of go-tos you'd say, like, this is what young people get wrong a lot and they should remember whenever they're in a situation that involves some type of negotiation?
Chris Voss, the former lead FBI hostage negotiator and bestselling author of, “Never Split The Difference.”: Yeah, you know, if you can show the other person by saying that lie with their perspective, that seems like a tension, inefficient, but just repeating back to them what their perspective Is, is breaks loggings. Here's the thing, you don't even got to get it right. If you just make the attempt, the other side is going to feel you're collaborating and they'll correct you. They'll help you get it right.
August 21
🎧 On LIVE — Chrissy Teigen and John Legend on Entrepreneurship, Politics and Dogs - On with Kara Swisher
John Legend was a BCG consultant
My first job out of school was as a management consultant. I worked at Boston Consulting. That's right, I remember. But my side hustle was trying to get my music career off the ground. And that was always an entrepreneurial venture. I was selling the CDs out of my own trunk and going to ship them myself and building my business and trying to get a record deal and all those things.
Small retailers that are new online are scared to be targeted with hate comments
And then these grocery stores that are not used to getting any kind of negativity really, they feel the tiniest bit, which I get all day. Like anyone in the public eye gets so much all day. So we're so used to it, but all of a sudden, you know, this small, this not small, this grocery store is getting maybe 10 or 15 comments on a post where they typically get one or two that are All negative about the person they're carrying. And it puts a lot of fear in them.
📰 Three Apps That Made Me More Productive This Year by Casey Newton
The app: Capacities.
The key insight: Don’t take notes — make notes.
What I learned: A hilarious and predictable outcome of writing last year that note-taking apps do not make you smarter is that many of you wrote back to say that while you totally agree with me, also I should try this other note-taking app that you had just discovered. As a degenerate productivity nerd, I dutifully gave most of the apps you recommended a spin. And I fell hard for Capacities, a “personal knowledge management” app in the mold of Roam, Obsidian, Mem, and other similar journaling and note-taking tools that I have tried over the years. As with most of the productivity apps I use, much of my preference for Capacities is simply aesthetic: I like its big, blank white canvas; its tagging and linking features, and its integrated AI assistant, which can be useful for exploring new topics and appending what you learn to notes you take there. Instead of a one-size-fits-all note, Capacities lets you create lots of different kinds of objects, each with their own metadata and tab for browsing and organizing. (Daily Notes, People, and Books are some of the objects.) I’ve used it to create pages for important people in my life with various reference data about them, such as their birthdates and family members’ names. I also have dedicated pages for my beat companies, and keep them updated with information about organization charts, key dates, and other information. But the real power in Capacities for me this year came from a refinement in my workflow. I’ve found endless ways over nearly seven years of writing a newsletter to save links, and to dress up those links with various forms of metadata. (In Notion, for example, where I store every link that goes into this newsletter, the app’s AI feature now adds tags and a summary to each link in the database.) My old belief was that storing all these links in a souped-up database would lead me to magically generate new insights about the topics I write about. After several years of banging my head into a wall, I realized that to generate new insights from these links I would need a new approach. That led me to Zettelkasten, a technique for creating webs of thoughts through a more active form of note-taking. Now, instead of only creating standalone notes for individual links or stories, I’m also creating notes that organize my thinking around individual narratives.
Readwise’s Ghostreader function
Readwise has proven to be great at helping me with these and other problems. Nowadays, when a big court decision lands, I download the PDF, toss it into Readwise, and use the app’s AI-powered “Ghostreader” function to ask it questions. Eventually, I will need to read all of the relevant portions myself. But Ghostreader is often useful at suggesting where to start. Or, if I’m looking for something specific in the document, I can ask Ghostreader to find it for me. And months later, if the article or PDF becomes relevant again, I can find it again easily using Readwise’s search features. Readwise is meant to store just about anything you can read or watch: articles, emails, videos, and even full-length books. It has a built-in RSS reader, and I’ve been trying to spend more time browsing those feeds than the more random algorithmic recommendations on Threads. I would add that it’s not that useful to have an app where you are constantly adding stuff you don’t read. (“Collecting material feels more useful than it usually is,” the expert note-taker Andy Matuschak has written.) But if you’ve ever wished you had a guide to help you digest big things quickly, or find things you half-remember, Readwise is a nice solution. And I really do think it has made me more productive.
Free option: Google’s NotebookLM experiment lets you save a bunch of PDFs into virtual notebooks and ask questions of them collectively. You can also upload PDFs directly to Anthropic’s Claude and other chatbots, though they lack Readwise’s robust organization features. “To be a better thinker,” I wrote here last year, “I’ll have to devote more time and attention to wrestling with what I find.” Developers of generative AI have often overpromised in the past year, but the apps above have all served as excellent wrestling coaches. And if they lead to any real breakthroughs for me, I’ll tell you about them here next year.
August 19
📰 Where You Are Meant to Be via
May you trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be
📰 Becoming Yourself via
When 26 year old Michaelangelo was asked how he created the Statue of David, he replied, “I simply chipped away all that was not David” - Michaelangelo
August 15
📰 An Honest Snapshot Into My Business by Alice Lemee
Eva Gutierrez was earning ~$10,000 a month as a freelance writer, running her business from Paris, Thailand, and Los Angeles. I drooled at the possibility of having her lifestyle. Eva was offering a program called The Client Acquisition System. It cost $1,500. I’d never spent that much money at once before and to put it towards an internet stranger scared me shitless. But I took the jump. And I’m so, so glad I did.
Milestones
I made $49,000 my 1st year → $65,000 the 2nd → $86,000 the 3rd → (4th year TBD)
I collaborated with dream clients on awesome projects:
Matt D’Avella’s Snail Mail, a 65,000 subscriber newsletter.
Miss Excel’s The Workbook, which just celebrated 100 editions and 314,000 subscribers.
Hanah Williams’ Salary Transparent Street, a newsletter educating people on pay transparency (14,000 subscribers).
I’ve written for On Deck, Every, Zapier, The Daily Beast, and countless more.
I build my business while sauntering across Brazil, Bali, Paris, and Portugal. But the business isn’t working anymore.
August 14
🎧 Biden on the Defensive, Trump's Threats, and Congressional Stock Trading - Pivot Pod
Kara interviewing Rachel Maddow. Recommending Ultra podcast
I interviewed Rachel Maddow yesterday about her - Oh, you're kidding.
Speaker 1
Yes, it was so good. That's huge because I heard she doesn't like anybody.
Speaker 2
She doesn't but she and I got along like peas and carrots. We had never spoken. It's the weirdest lesbian non meeting because you think we would. We have the same haircut and everything and in media.
Speaker 1
Did you guys cry for three hours and hug and watch Riverdale and decide never to meet again? Isn't that what I listen to?
Speaker 2
I have a Riverdale situation with you in a second. Very quickly. Anyways, a great interview. You have to listen to Ultra. It's all about the influence of Germany and propaganda on the U .S. And the first. I'm reading her book, Prequel. Prequel is great, but the two podcasts are, I gotta tell you, I know she's a great broadcaster, but she's an excellent podcaster. This story is so great. You would love it, Scott Galloway. Was thinking of you the whole time. I'm listening to season two and I'm part of season one, but I'm going to go back and re -listen to season one. And it's all about Germans, America first, fascism. It's a lot. It takes place a lot in Germany, which is interesting.
Need you to listen to the podcast because you'll be like blown the fuck. She's such a wonk. She's a history wonk. And... Her book on fascism, prequel, she's talking about 20s and 30s Germany. Not just that. It's insightful. It's insights to today. We talked a lot about that. We talked about a lot of things. She's very funny, actually. You know what I mean? Like, I enjoyed interviewing her because she kind of was a little looser. And she's very funny in a different way from I am. But anyway, it was great. I also interviewed Gretchen Whitmer too, by the way. I got this badass lady week month year.
Why Prof G doesn’t want to be a billionaire. Prof G media’s lines of businesses and revenues.
Okay, so Prof G Media. I sold L2 to Gartner in 2017. And I kind of hit my number and I sat down and I was planning to raise a private equity fund. And I thought I'd really like to be wealthier, maybe even someday aspire to be a billionaire. And then I thought, why the fuck do I want to be or aspire to be a billionaire involves another 20, 30 years of really hard work putting at risk the capital I have, because you have to take Tremendous risk to have to register that kind of wealth appreciation. Because I am far from being a billionaire, but I was about to just ramp up and get off the hamster wheel long enough to take some performing drugs and get back on the hamster wheel. And I made a conscious decision that I was going to slow down. I still have a lot of tread left on my tires, but I thought, I want to spend the rest of my life, at least professionally, having more of a positive influence on issues I'm really passionate About. That's the wrong word. That I think I bring some talent to and that I think are overlooked, specifically struggling young men, teen depression, some of the externalities around big tech. And at the same time, I want to make good money. I want to work with a group of people that I really enjoy. And I wish I had figured out earlier that my core competence is storytelling, so this all sort of bubbled up to a media company. But I didn't want to take outside capital because I didn't want to have the pressure of trying to get a return on other people's capital. So I started ProfG Media.
ProfG Media is a small niche media company. We have several lines of business.
For me, it begins with writing. That's home base for me. I think writing is really, really hard, but I think it creates a certain halo, a certain heft of intellectual rigor and intellectual capital. So for me, it starts with the newsletter we put out every Friday, No Mercy No Mouse, which is free, goes to half a million people. I think of the Fortune 190 of the Fortune 100 have at least 100 subscribers. That is sort of a petri dish for chapters and themes in a narrative arc around the books.
I try and write a book every 18 months. I make money there. I average between one and a one and a half million dollars per book. That is the hardest thing I do writing books. It's also probably the most rewarding. And then that feeds into some very profitable businesses.
Specifically speaking, I do between two and a half and five million dollars a year in speaking fees. So that's an incredibly lucrative business. I enjoy it. It is a perfect example of greatnesses in the agency of others. And that is people think that I just get up there and talk for an hour. I don't. I'm a great team of analysts that will assemble 100, 120, 140 slides. We spend a ton of time thinking about narrative arc and humor and visuals and the pace and the flow. I see it as almost like a one -man, 57 -minute Broadway show and I try to bring that level of production value to it because no one's gonna pay that kind of money just to show up and talk about How fucking awesome you are. Which is what I see the majority of speakers doing this day who just left, you know, an office and or job in Hollywood or in the corporate world, and think they can just get up there and tell War stories about how awesome they are.
And then the core business from a revenue standpoint is the podcast. And I kind of fell into this. I have it faced for podcasting. I had five TV shows that are all canceled. The podcasting just took off. And been doing that about years. These podcasts combined will produce somewhere between three and a half and five million a year. So call this about a $10 million business, or 11 or 12 full -time people, three or four contractors. That's exceptionally high revenue per employee for a media company. I purposely want to keep it small. I love the people that I work with. It's a group of kind of, I've had a misfit choice of people I've worked with in the past. Kind of my rock or my anchor is a woman named Catherine Dillon, who I've worked with for the better part of 15 years and brings real creative depth and really great management skills. So I can just focus on what I'm okay at, which is storytelling.
And these things are all a flywheel, right? You sell more books, you get more speaking gigs, more speaking gigs, more podcast revenue, more podcast revenue, or more people listening to the podcast, more newsletter downloads, And so the wheel spins, if you will.
Now Vox is essentially our content and distribution partner. They're more a distribution partner for me, because we produce everything at ProfG. There are employees at Pivot that produce it, but for the most part, it's pretty much the Prof G show. We do all the production and we throw the podcast over to Vox and we pay them a fee to sell the ads and work on audience development, although I've never quite figured out exactly what That means other than we're supposed to be great at what we do and create word of mouth. But they're a good partner, they have a great ad sales team.
The reason why we didn't go behind the wall, and this is a conversation we have seriously about every 24 months, is that money is meaningful to me, but it's not profound. What's profound for me is I want to have reach and impact specifically on young men. I want people to, especially men, to feel more in touch with their emotions. I want to educate people about business. And to go behind a wall, if you're really successful, you get 4 to 8% of your listener base to go subscription, meaning that I would immediately lose a minimum of 90 to 95% of my reach. Also, I kind of like the ads. I don't mind the host readovers. I meet advertisers. I like them. It doesn't really bother me. And if you want to press skip, you can get through the ads. But this is the most fun I have ever had professionally. But it's a niche media company, the specific crowds out the general, and finally figured out a flywheel. And I'm doing something I absolutely love and making good money at it. So thanks for the opportunity and the excuse to talk about my favorite subject. Me! Thanks for the question.
🎧 Prof G Markets — How the Debate Moved the Market & Wall Street’s Take on Trump - With Josh Brown
When the market reopened after JFK was assassinated, it went up. Most people don't know that. Did not know that. So interesting. No. It only took, I think it only took five months for the market to regain what it had lost after 9 -11. So this idea that geopolitics has this sustained impact on stock and bond prices is just flatly incorrect.
August 11
🎥 Our Picks for Value, Mid-Range, and Luxury Pens! - Goulet Pencast
Olympics used to include fine arts
there used to be art as part of the Summer Olympics like painting and sculpting and stuff like that and I was like really that sounds very Greek I was like yeah so I was like let me look into that a little bit more um so I found you know some helpful resources the Wikipedia page about it is pretty good um Smithsonian Magazine did a good article on it so um so from 1912 to
1954 the Olympics awarded medals for essentially Fine Art so alongside events like the gymnastics and swimming an Olympian could compete in painting sculpting architecture literature and music so long as whatever they were submitting was inspired by the concept of sport so it had to be sport Centric so they didn't do it onite
subject no they like submitted this yeah it wasn't like a Bob Ross see how fast you can paint a landscape okay with a basketball in the background you know kind of a picture um so yeah these were submitted like ahead of time or whatever but it was judged you know they had judges and stuff like that um so these competitions were eventually scrapped because they really started to blur the line between amateurism and professionalism since artists inherently rely on selling their work for their livelihood and the then president of the
international Olympic Committee was a staunch supporter of amateurs competing in the Olympics which of course now we think about we're like what do you mean amateurs like everybody competing in the Olympics is like a professional athlete or sponsored or whatever you know with with some rare exception but like pretty much everybody's like been doing it their whole life and might even be you know like whatever think about like the basketball players and stuff like that they're like from the NBA and all that celebrities yeah so I I dove into that a little bit because I was like tell me
more um so um during that time 1912 to 1952 there were 151 medals uh given for the original works and the Fine Arts inspired by these athletic Endeavors um however uh they have actually been stricken from the Olympic record so they are not part of the total um you know towards like the country metal counts anymore so they did it for a while but then they just were like no we're just going to pretend like that never happened wow um so kind sad I know right
and then like nobody knows about it anymore um so American Avery Brundage became the president of the international Olympic Committee after World War II and he was a rigid supporter of amateur Athletics he wanted the Olympics to be completely pure not to be swayed by the weight of money isn't that ironic for today's situation um because artists inherently rely on selling their work for their livelihood and because winning an Olympic medal could theoretically serve as a sort of
advertisement for the quality of an artist's work Brundage took aim at the art competitions insisting that they represented an unwelcome incursion of professionalism so from 1912 to 1954 52 whatever you know it was a thing but then he really was like trying to put an end to it and and eventually did so although ironically Brundage himself had once entered a piece of literature in the 1932 games um and got an honorable mention he uh stringently led
a campaign against the Arts following the 1948 games um the amateur rules so he was really big on the amateur professional like Hardline there um they were in place until he retired from the international Olympic Committee in 1972 um there was already some petitioning for the professional thing to to be a thing and in fact part of what you know was pushing for that too is um you know in the the like the Eastern block this is like Soviet Union and all that there were like some on the
books amateurs who were really state sponsored professional athletes they were kind of blurring the line a little bit and they were just wiping the floor with everybody that's part of where the whole like Miracle like 1984 thing kind of came from was like you had like the whole you know whatever democracy versus communism Clash thing going on and it was a bunch of amateurs you know in the US because they had rules in place about like NHL players couldn't play in the thing anyway so um that was definitely a thing but you know starting in 1972 he
retired they started to relax those rules about you know professionals not being allowed in there U and they eventally abandoned that in the 1990s except for wrestling because professional wrestling is something not thing as the wrestling they have in the Olympics um but one interesting thing you know this isn't fine art necessarily but you know break dancing is new in the Olympics this year you could argue that that is a performing art you know so
that is still artistic and now you could argue like figure skating too is really Performing Arts you know gymnastics and stuff it's like ah there's like some elements of that but I would you know I don't know you know but there's like there's a Performing Arts element to a lot of different things even like skateboarding and stuff like that could be technically I don't know so I just thought that was really interesting but I mean like literally straight up people writing like orchestral compositions and literature like you know novels and whatever architectural drawings so
people do like drawings of stadiums and stuff like that and submit that but apparently it was really really tough to determine like I can see that who won because art is subjective so even as that all that was happening there were some years where they just like didn't award medals to people because they either thought it wasn't good enough or it was you know whatever to objective so it was kind of fraught to begin with much Clear less clear about who wins an art competition versus like run from
here to there in the fastest time yeah so it kind of makes sense yeah I for I forgot about the whole amateur versus professional thing because that's why they took away Jim thorp's medals remember yeah cuz they they found out like oh wait you w you ran professionally one time or he like played baseball or something like that and like so they're like no you you you don't win after all yeah that was that was a thing that was like you know this guy this guy Brundage he was a big push for that okay and then of course now today is like that is a distant you
absolutely make money after winning an Olympic gold medal every single one of them y I was think so Rachel and I when we watched uh we're not like huge on the Olympics but Joseph was born during the Vancouver Olympics in 2010 and so it's like we were home with a newborn up at all hours of the night that's what you watch with yeah and so we watched and we had no cable so we just watched the Olympics like crazy and we like learned all about curling I was like what is curling I was like okay we're going to watch a bunch of curling but the thing that stuck with me the most was you know
you think about like professional athletes and stuff like that literally the curling people they're like yeah you know whatever this american guy he's like over on his laptop like doing work because he couldn't
August 4
📰 Mentally Obese - By Arman Khodadoost
There is more high-quality content created in a day than could be consumed in a lifetime. But there is a greater amount of mental junk food being served up at the same time.
📰 Staying Awake by Justin Beal via Harpers
For most of human history, most people could not read at all. Literacy was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless; it was power itself. Pleasure was not an issue.
I see a high point of reading in the United States from around 1850 to about 1950—call it the century of the book—the high point from which the doomsayers see us declining.
The social quality of literature is still visible in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere P.R. because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them.
If we brought books over from England by ship these days, crowds would have swarmed on the docks of New York to greet the final volume of *Harry Potter,* crying, “Did she kill him? Is he dead?” The *Potter* boom was a genuine social phenomenon, like the worship of rock stars and the whole subculture of popular music, which offer adolescents and young adults both an exclusive in-group and a shared social experience.
Memory: my mom & I going to a bookstore when the final Harry Potter landed and we flipped to the end to see if Harry lived.
Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.
Standardization of the product and its production can take you only so far—because there is some intellectual content to even the most brainless book. People will buy interchangeable bestsellers, formula thrillers, romances, mysteries, pop biographies, and hot-topic books up to a point, but their product loyalty is defective. A book has to be read, it takes time, effort—you have to be awake to do it.
Writers and readers, even as they suffer from it, regard it with amused contempt.
📰 The Death of the Book by Ursula Le Guin
As for books themselves, the changes in book technology are cataclysmic. Yet it seems to me that rather than dying, “the book” is growing — taking on a second form and shape, the ebook.
I’m not sure why anyone, no matter how much they like to think about the End Times, believes that the *Iliad* or *Jane Eyre* or the *Bhagavad Gita* is dead or about to die. They have far more competition than they used to, yes; people may see the movie and think they know what the book is; they can be *dis*placed by the etc; but nothing can *re*place them.
The life span of a book is more like that of the horse, or the human being, sometimes the oak, even the redwood. Which is why it seems a good idea, rather than mourning their death, to rejoice that books now have two ways of staying alive, getting passed on, enduring, instead of only one.
August 2
The Washington Post uses the phrase democracy dies in darkness, it really doesn't in American history. It's more like full glare. It feels like the Salem witch trials, very showy. The whiskey rebellion, which everyone forgets but me. McCarthy and the red scare, none of it was hidden really. Talk a little bit about this darker and very bright DNA of the US. And in lockstep is this ability to forget and move on.
Every generation has Hitlers and Mussolini’s. How do people follow them? A disaffected population. Eric Hoffer’s contemplation
In 1951, a longshoreman in San Francisco named Eric Hoffer contemplated this very question. And he said something that was deeply revelatory to me, and I think it became a really profound base for a lot of what I do. And that's, you know, everybody is running around after World War II going, how do we get a Hitler? How do we get a Mussolini? And what Hoffer said is he said, it doesn't matter. We stop worrying about Hitler and Mussolini, because every generation has Hitlers and Mussolini's and they don't go anywhere. The people to study are the ones who followed him. Why do you get a population? And how do you get a population that is willing to follow a strong man? Which flips the script, if you will. And what he said, I think, and this is not, I'm not, I'm, you know, I have built on him with people like Hannah Arendt and some of my own ideas about earlier American history. So I'm not, I'm not trying to put words in his mouth, but I think he's a very important place to start.
What he said is that the way you get the rise of an authoritarian is you take a population that feels disaffected. It feels disaffected either politically or socially or religiously, and it feels that it has lost ground in society. And after that has been accomplished, then you get the rise of somebody who says, you know, I know you feel like things are really bad. And the that you feel like things are really bad are not anything to do with what's actually happening around you. The reason you feel like things are bad is because of those people. Again, those people. Them that the enemy is the one that is keeping them from having being relevant in in today's society, you start to treat that group badly, either legally at first, and then you look the Other way when there's violence against them, and then you start to pass laws against them that discriminate against them. And then eventually it goes to a very dark place. And the more Hoffer said that you are that somebody has bought into that sort of behavior, the more psychologically committed they are to maintaining their relationship with that Authority figure, because if they don't, they have to admit that that person was wrong and that they are the ones who've been complicit rather than the other way around.
Heather’s approach to writing is to write for someone in 150 years
What I'm really trying to do when I write every night is, you know, explain things to people for sure, but what I'm really trying to do is write the history of this moment for somebody in 150 years.
Kara advising Heather to move out of Substack
One of the things that I am grappling with is that if I move elsewhere, if I am able to move elsewhere with the volume I'm doing, am I destroying Substack as the center of resistance it is? It's not just me there's Joyce White Vance there's I mean like there's Kevin you are this you're the main I'm the dog in the fight for sure. You are the Taylor Swift of sub stack. So I think if you can read between the lines you will be able to hear whether or not I'm exploring other options.
Heather: What do you think? Do you think I should stay or go?
Kara: I think you should leave. Go.
Heather: You think I should leave?
Kara: Yes. I think it would send a big signal. Well, yeah, I do. Well, just to play this out a little bit. You've got the power to make changes. You've got the power to make changes.Heather: But again, you know I do my research, but it is going to be imperative that somebody else can pick up the other voices that I would like to preserve. So if I leave, Substack's got itself a major problem. I would guess I'm not part privy to their numbers, but I think they've got a major problem. But if that takes down the site, what happens to Joyce White Vance?
Kara: You bring her with you. You have a big boat, Heather.
Heather: If somebody else can handle that volume. Right.Kara: See what I'm saying?
Heather: Yeah. So that's, so we're in the midst of this, as you can see.
Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson #tbr
There's a scene that comes up again and again in the book, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which happens to be one of my favorite pieces of writing. 272 words. And the piece yourself was not that well received at the time, yet it remains, I think, one of the most enduring speeches in American history. Everyone knows the famous line, four scores and seven years ago, which refers to the Declaration of Independence, but its final line, the kicker, is profound, I'm only reading the Back part of it, that we here, highly resolved, these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and the government of the people by The people for the people shall not perish from the earth.
🎥 What's in a Professional Photographers EDC? Everyday Carry Essentials by Vuhlandes
medium format point and shoot: Fujifilm GA645
I like to carry the GA645 I took it to a show last night um it's not heavy it's definitely bigger than a actual just like regular 35 millimeter point and shoot but I like this camera and I like carrying it and I like shooting my point and shoot photos on a medium format camera I don't know why
August 1
🎧 Future of Travel — How Is Aviation Innovating? - Pivot Pod
Opportunity in innovation: Both my late parents were pilots and I traveled with them around the country and they had aviation businesses for just being able to look at weather, which is something that was so difficult To do, like even in the 90s. It was paper charts and it was, we had an airplane, a little single -engine airplane called a Piper Lance, it had something called a StormScope in it, which showed truly only where lightning Strikes were. That was the only piece of data you could get. And now I get so much data on my phone in real time. I think there is truly an app for that. And I think the advancement when it comes to getting real -time information that allows pilots to make the best decisions and avoid risks, that is probably the biggest thing that will Sort of make flying, especially the private flying, but also aviation in general easier. And so, you know, being able to just pick up, there's this whole thing where pilots will have to radio in to get their clearance to be told, I'm going to go this point to this point to this Point. It's a very cumbersome thing. You have to read it back word for word. It sort of breeds in the ability to create errors. To be able to sort of get that sent to you on your phone would really sort of change the world, I think, for aviation and make things a lot more streamlined.
Scott only hires from references
I'm an entirely a reference hire person. And if it's someone who we don't have a reference on, we will spend a lot of time diligence -ing that person, and maybe even asking them to do the work on a contract basis before we hire them Full time. Because firing people is hard, emotionally taxing and expensive. And also, it's one of the keys to building a strong organization.
Scott gives Prof G Media staff a percentage of the Vox podcast deal
We have a big podcast deal with Vox. I have mutualized that deal and I'm giving everyone in a Prof G Media a percentage of that. Now, were they involved in the initial deal? Do they work on my podcast at Vox? Some do, some don't. But I want them to feel that one, I am very good at what I do. And if that results in economic upside, they will participate in it. So one, people accountable, demonstrating excellence, and also empathy, saying, I'm going to get to know you, I'm going to understand you, and I'm going to try and get you the economic Security, such that at some point, you can have the same type of enjoyment and time with family that I've registered, and that we're in this together. If I'm successful, you're gonna be successful. But the key is finding and retaining the best employees.
🎧 Debate Aftermath, Amazon Takes on Shein, and Guest Kim Scott - Pivot Pod
Shein will be bigger than Amazon & Walmart in apparel retail
In an economy where young people are making less money but still have a desire to express individuality, coming into their mating years, you are seeing Shein, this year will be bigger Than Amazon in apparel and next year will be bigger than Walmart in apparel and be the biggest apparel company in the world. So this makes all sorts of sense to have to get into this category that I think you can loosely call on -demand retail. I call it. It's not fast It's on demand fashion.
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